My spring semester has ended and the spring semester is about to end as I finish up the spring semester and prepare for my summer teaching. No, that is not a typo!
That is three different spring semesters! NYU’s spring semester ended in the second week of May, the Graduate Center’s spring semester ended at the end of May, and LaGuardia’s spring semester ends the second week of June. So far I have taught 11 classes at LaGuardia (Fall, Winter, and Spring), 1 at the Graduate Center (Spring) and 2 at NYU ( Spring). For a total of 14 classes (9 different “preps”). I am scheduled to teach three more in the summer session which would bring my total up to 17 for the year.
I started writing that just before I fell and broke my ankle skateboarding on May 26th. It was a compound trimalleolar fracture and required emergency surgery. I was only in the hospital for 2 days (May 26th and 27th) and have been at home on post-op bed rest since being released onThursday May 28th. Needless to say that really puts a damper on one’s plans!
I have to finish up the semester at LaGuardia and then immediately start the summer session, where I am teaching three classes as I said before. There is a lot I was planning on writing about my semester toiling in the philosophy and cognitive science mines so that those above me may be freed to…, uh, I mean…filling in for Dave so that he could run the AI reading group and various other things related to this grant they received (I didn’t get to be involved in any of that, sadly). I was also planning on podcasting the audio from the Consciousness Live! 100th episode Brownapalooza Extravaganza Spectacular and writing some things about some of the points I wished I had made better, etc. I was also hoping to possibly look into having a book symposium based on those sessions published as a special issue of a journal. I also gave a couple of talks, at Yale and Marist in the fall and I have been meaning to write something up about that as well! Then, finally, I had my paper responding to Block’s argument that infant color vision refutes higher-order theories accepted in the special issue of Philosophy and the Mind Sciences issue on Infant Consciousness and I was going to write something about that debate as well. There has also been super exciting developments in the Templeton experiments I am involved with which I really want to be able to write about (so much has changed since I wrote about this in my book 2 years go!). In non-academic news I came into possession of some recordings of my old death metal band Mortalis and I wanted to write something about that as well but all of that will have to wait until probably after this summer (hopefully sooner)!
I am well aware that no one really cares about these victory lap-style postings but they are useful for my aging mind to keep track of these kinds of things so I still find them useful and they also help me work out my thoughts. In the age of AI I am more firmly committed to the idea that writing is a way to find out one thinks about an issue. Writing-for-self-understanding, along with being-in-the-room-discussing are still central components of higher-education as I see it and cannot be replaced by AI.
Richard Brown 