Hello all, I'm Michael. I'm currently an undergraduate at the University of Chicago finishing up a degree in English Literature. I went to Deep Springs college for a couple of years (26 guys in the desert studying the classics, doing farm and ranch work, and tasked with college governance and administration) where I learned how to read and got a pretty good foundation in the history of philosophy and some classics of literature. I now study a lot of poetry and literature but have kept up dabbling in philosophy by chatting up first and second years regarding their sosc papers (they're a lot more tolerable than most philosophy undergrads who think they know it all or who regurgitate the same old cud) . Other than that I do a bit of work with magazines and publishing, and most recently have been doing administrative works for coops. More generally I'm interested in education, and my thesis work has been on the problems of humanism--how can we learn how to live from fiction or philosophy?
I've only read a little bit of William James for a class I took on his brother, Henry James--a few of his essays refuting traditional conceptions of consciousness in favor of radical or pure experience. I found it compelling but felt he didn't sufficiently account for memory, at least in the stuff I read, as well as his brother or their friend Henri Bergson. I'm interested in delving further, especially now that I've gotten a firmer grasp on the turn-of-the-century phenomenology scene by way of a class on Levinas. In general I like seeing how different smart thinkers depict our our experience of the world, and find it helpful to figure our the stakes of their claims or depictions. Once I understand what an author is worried about, I find it easier to situate and comprehend the thrust of what they're saying. In particular, I've noticed that psychologists and philosophers in the wake of the "discovery of the unconscious" have a lot to try to explain, and a lot at stake in how they do so.
Thanks!
Michael
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