So, I’m 16.5 pages into a 20 page paper, which is due tomorrow.

I just wanted to point out that picking out quotes from and quickly scanning the text of a >700 page book (Robert Brandom’s Making it Explicit) where this:

Third, it is denied that the notion of truth conditions can be appealed to in explaining (as opposed to expressing) the sort of propositional contents expressed by declarative sentences – and similarly that the notion of association with a referent can be appealed to in explaining the sort of semantic contribution the occurrence of a singular term makes to the contents of sentences in which it appears

or this

All our concepts are what they are in part because of their inferential links to others that have noninferential circumstances or consequences of application – concepts, that is, whose proper use is not specifiable apart from consideration of the facts and objects that responsively bring about or are brought about by their application.

represent some of the more clear passages is not easy. I mean Christ, who writes like that? It’s goddamn awful. I’ve read significant chunks of the book like 5 times and discussed it extensively in class and I still have no idea about what 90% of it means. It’s just so poorly written.

Luckily, when I’m done I will be officially 1/6 of the way done in my quest to become a master of religious studies. So that makes me pretty bad ass.

My latent film maker has been stirring around in my brain lately. So I might try to do this weird photo-thing that I’ve been thinking about lately on Saturday. We’ll see how tomorrow and the rest of this paper goes.

Also, I’m still not sold on Twitter. It’s a little too close (identical?) to facebook statuses for my taste.

Edit

So I read this in Jeff’s away message and I can’t not share it.  It basically sums up all of my academic life:

What I don’t understand is how a man who thought the sentence “Spirit is that which is for spirit” was a sufficiently clear definition of the subject of a 400 page book could be taken so seriously, and become so important, that even 200 years later unfortunate students are asked to write essays explaining, in clear, lucid language, the concepts he apparently thought were best expressed in complete gibberish. Thank you, Hegel.

On the other hand, I now only have a page and a half left to write.