Approaching the end of a study week

Emma has been away in Croatia and Slovenia for the last week on an outward bounds holiday and so I have had a week where I could focus almost completely on study - eight or ten hours a day for the past five days. It is still a few weeks before my course starts but the uncertainty about my work situation is driving me on to do as much study now as possible. On the one hand, that has lead to me being able to do about 200 hours of study over the past month or so. But on the other hand, is it being directed well?

I have recently switched my focus off History of Science and onto Philosophy of Science due to the timetable for the next year. My main focus has been getting back up to date with an outline of the main issues from the LSE syllabus. So I now have a better outline of the main themes and am beginning to look at some of the detail.

But I have also ended up with some doubts. I am clearly able to organise and work through large amounts of material in a reasonably quick and efficient manner. But my memory is definitely not what it was. I will read something, then a week later I will see a similar point made elsewhere and will really struggle to connect it back to the previous week's work. I have even had cases where I will read a reference to other material without realising that this was the actual thing I was reading a few week's earlier - this happened with a reference to Feyerabend's paper Realism and Instrumentalism.

I am also not really developing my own thoughts much - I am still at the stage of digesting material. What I perhaps need to do is to start focusing on some essay or seminar paper topics and to start organising and marshalling material into these structures. All this is extremely relevant to the dissertation part of my MSc - though this is far in the future, it seems like a good idea to be thinking about it now.

Much to think about on these issues!

The last few days have been a bit brighter and I went for a walk around the village this afternoon, taking the photo below of our village church, lit up by the sun, in a nice contrast to the cloud that was building up.