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Nick and Frege
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Scholar's Journal
I spent three weeks of June in Pittsburgh at Carnegie Mellon University participating in their “Summer School in Logic and Formal Epistemology”. Not only did I learn a lot— from the history of recursion theory to Bayesianism and epistemic logic—I met dozens of other philosophy students from around the world. It was great to see so many intelligent and motivated students of philosophy in one place. I’m keeping in touch with a handful of them. Maybe we will even end up in graduate school together! Also, Pittsburgh surprised me. It is a city full of life. There’s great art, music, and thousands of students.
After CMU, I did a lot of reading. I read books and articles about meaning, language, mind, concepts, and logic. In general, my favorite philosophy to read artfully combines historical research with a treatment of related contemporary philosophical issues. As the description above indicates, I originally conceived of my own project as having these two parts. However, as my studies deepened, and as I became more familiar with contemporary discussions of "concepts" and with Frege's works and relevant secondary sources, I saw my goal slip away. My project was like a car that is driving down the road and instead of picking one side of the approaching fork, it simply divides into two and keeps trucking (or car-ing) along.
This is not a bad thing at all, as the "keeps on trucking" part should indicate. In fact, both horns of my project are very healthy. After the discovery of a recent book on Frege that, in a couple of chapters, says many of the things that I had hoped to say, my Frege work took a back seat. I'm letting it cool off while I finish the book ("Frege: Making Sense", by Michael Beaney). A short while after the discovery of this book, I found very recent work (mostly "in progress") that addresses, at length, the contemporary issues I've been thinking about. This was all very exciting, as it affirmed the value and interest of the philosophical questions I had been asking and exploring. I was also happy to discover that I was (and still am) engrossed in some of the most contemporary areas of thought. I had suspected that my interests were either out of fashion or generally uninteresting. I poured the excited energy that these discoveries gave me into my reading and note taking, in preparation for the impending task of writing.
Currently, I am writing about “defective concepts”. I’m on page 26, which means that I have 26 pages of evidence that I spent my summer writing, thinking, writing, arguing, and, well, doing philosophy. During the semester, those 26 pages will expand, morph, dis- and re-organize, and eventually turn into a partial plea for “honors” in philosophy. By then, my Frege work will have cooled off sufficiently. Then I will let the mighty pen rest, while I do my best to catch up to the original “horn” of my project.
