Who lectures in the hall of arts today?

I decided I really ought to write at least a little bit more about the conference.

There were six invited grad student presenters, including me. Two from MIT, one from Princeton, one from UNC, one from UVA, and one from Brown. I am thoroughly impressed by the quality of MIT grad students. We had two of them at our conference, too — and all four that I’ve seen have been really excellent.

The Virginia Tech philosophy department has a terminal M.A. program, unlike the Ph.D. programs that I’m used to. The students were fun and enthusiastic, and not quite as experienced with philosophy as the students I encounter at Brown, MIT, Harvard, etc. But they were also nicer and more outgoing. I was a little disappointed with the audience sizes — we had on average maybe 15 grad students and no faculty. I’d been looking forward to having a lot of interesting and widespread opinions on my paper. Ah, well.

There were two papers Friday. Colin from Princeton started with an interesting suggestion about Frank Jackson’s “Knowledge Argument” against physicalism (the question to which his talk was relevant was, roughly, are mental events reducible to physical events?). Then Jason from MIT had a complex and intense paper about two-dimensionalism in modal metaphysics (Is there a sense of analytic necessity in which we can, after all, maintain the connection between the analytic and a priori?), having to do with “playground conditionals” and lots of other cool stuff. Both Colin and Jason read their papers with interest and enthusiasm. Neither of them got a lot of really great discussion, though — comments dried up before the questioning period ended. (I asked a pretty good question of Colin, and a rather good question of Jason, I think.)

Then dinner, wine, lots of talking and drinking, etc. At dinner, people started asking me about my paper, which I hadn’t presented yet. I told them a little about what I’d say, and they gave me arguments, and wanted me to respond, which forced me to mention other parts of my paper, etc. I ended up presenting most of the material in my paper to some of them. I also started talking to this girl Karen, who seemed really fun and cool. Flirty, but in a way that made it obvious that she’s just like that. Fun. Eventually a bunch of us went to a local bar and drank and talked for a while. Then, since I’d been up since 4:00 in the morning and was giving a talk the next day, I went to bed.

The first talk of the morning was Daniel. Daniel presented an argument demonstrating that Platonism leads to causal necessetarianism. (Are causal laws necessary or merely contingent?) Daniel is smart and nice and interesting, but I think a lot of us failed to be gripped by his paper. For one thing, it was assuming Platonism. For another, it was 9:00 in the morning. For a third, he read in something closer to a monotone than we’d look for in a good presentation. Again, not a lot of great discussion. Some.

The next talk was mine. I’d been getting a sort of odd slow-developing hangover through the morning — I woke up feeling just fine, and my symptoms gradually started appearing over the next few hours. By my 10:30 time slot, I had a moderate headache and a mildy upset stomach. But that’s ok — it was time to talk about philosophy!

My talk was different from the others. One obvious difference was that I didn’t *read* my paper. I just went off of the outline that I’d made as a handout. I also called forward all my best entertaining, dramatic, acting/storytelling/etc. presentational skills. People were almost asleep by this point, and I wasn’t going to let them stay that way. My paper was a defense of what I call the “imagination model of dreaming”, and deals with the nature of dreaming (When we dream, do we form false beliefs and have non-veridical sensations, or is something else going on?)

I felt good, if not fantastic, about my presentation. I spoke clearly and was interesting, I think, but I also had a little more nervous energy than I’d’ve liked. This manifests itself in my by causing me to do things like move back and forth too often between parts of the presentation area, and to make silly little hops in place occasionally, etc. It might’ve been endreaing, but odds are good it was distracting. I know what I need to change in order to improve.

I finished my talk, and we jumped into an enthusiastic questioning period. Near the beginning of it, I was fielding a question about schizophrenic delusions, when a fully-uniformed military officer stormed into the lecture hall. He interrupted me mid-response to express shock at our presense in the room and demand that we leave immediately. It turns out, VT had double-booked the room, and some army recruiting presentation or something was scheduled to occur in fifteen minutes. Coordinator John took him outside to work out what’s to be done (“There’s no question,” the man informed us confidently, “you have to leave now.”) Eventually, we moved to another room and continued the questioning. Excitement.

Questioning continued past the allotted time, and there was some really good stuff. I’m recharged about this topic, and excited about some of my work for the first time in a while. Everybody said it was a really interesting topic, and that I’d done a great job, and it felt great.

Two more papers after mine — Samantha from UNC gave a very timid, very quiet, very dull reading of a boring paper on moral luck (Are we morally blameworthy for things beyond our own control?), which I apparently didn’t like at all. And finally, Clare from MIT gave an interesting paper on color (What are colors?). I liked both Jason and Clare from MIT, and hung out with them some. Clare and I have been corresponding about a point in her paper since the conference. MIT people are cool.

The keynote address was given by Christine Korsgaard from Harvard, and it was actually really good. Then dinner, more drinking, bed, airport, etc.

Ok, now I feel like I’ve done justice to my first philosophy conference.