So the semester is starting up at the Graduate Center again (though not at LaGuardia, which though a CUNY school, is on a different schedule. Our semester starts March 1st…don’t ask). If everything goes according to plan this will technically be my last semester of graduate school! That is a very exciting prospect…though I am just begining to see how difficult it is to coordinate all of the people involved…I hope to defend in the first two weeks of September and I can see already that though it is nine months away it will br a challenge to get everyone that needs to be there there…not to mention finishing the actual dissertation and defending it!!!

The Colloquium series looks very interesting. I may go and check out Brandom’s talk talk tomorrow…though I am not sure…if anyone is interested the paper that the talk is based on is posted at the GC site I linked to above. These talks are open to the public and anyone who is the NYC area should come down, there is usually quite a turn out!

 Also interesting is Kripke’s class on philosophy of mathematics. It lookslike he will be talking about Quine’s indispensability argument which claims that mathematics is only interesting because it is useful (indispensable) to science and so its justification is ultimately empirical. There is a lot of support for that thesis at the GC (Rosenthal and Devitt spring to mind) and so it would be interesting to hear Kripke’s arguments on it. I may sit in on it here and there and if I do I will post some stuff about it. Sadly I will not be able to sit in on all of the other really interesting classes they are offering (like Devitt’s animal cognition one, or Armstrong’s ’empiricists metaphysics’ one…)

 Finally I want to also remind you of the CUNY CogSci symposium. The first talk is as follows

February 1: Michela Tacca
Philosophy and Social Sciences, Università di Siena
“The Structure of Vision: Systematicity of Visual Feature Binding”

All talks are Fridays 1-3 at the Graduate Center…drinks afterwards!!