Life: post-Hegel

They say that post-9/11 we live in a different world, or that post-Katrina we live in a new America. What will they say about post-Hegel?

For one, this marks the first semester in three years that I do not have an ‘incomplete’ grade looming over me. That means it’s the first time I’ve actually finished a semester within the semester, the first time that I don’t have unfinished work to do, with no definite deadline. The worst of it for me was the last semester of undergraduate work, when I managed to take FOUR incompletes (out of five classes). I was still handing in papers and begging for quick grades as I finalized my passport and travel arrangements to go off to Bristol, England for my MA. Then even in Bristol I needed extensions, one paper for each of the two terms. And of course the dissertation…

But all of that is behind me. As I joked with my mother yesterday, I’m turning over a new leaf; the new me gets things in on time. That reminds me, more grad school apps are due soon 🙁

I received this link in an email today (Nacho, you’ll like this I think) – War on Winter Solstice. It is a parody of the current Christian-pundit outcry about the so-called war on Christmas.

I also received the tentative schedule for the conference in Hawaii that I’m attending (and presenting at!). It turns out I’m in the ‘philosophy’ category (it could have gone that way or ‘religion’) and I’ll be in a panel with presentations on the following topics:

• The Usefulness of Falsehoods: Maintaining the Image of a True Philosopher
• Intention in the Definition of Art
• The Call Of The Other: Immanent Ethics in Speech
• Buddhist Ethics: A Kantian Analysis (me)

Notice that the second one is missing the obligatory colon and subtitle. Weird. Must be an art thing. In any case I feel like the odd duck, but it will be fun. All their topics look interesting (the second one reminds me of a conversation I had with the artist girlfriend. She had bought a piece or art which, if memory serves me, consisted of a homeless man’s having scribbled blue pen ink onto notebook paper in the shape of an 8″ square. Now, obviously the artistic value of the piece cannot be in the product, nor likely in what it says about the world we live in. The value lies instead in its expression of a certain intention, by a certain man, in a certain situation in the world that we are given some intimate access to).