I was the first to finish both of my philosophy finals. Language took roughly an hour. Science took a bit over an hour. On both of them, I had reached the point where I had answered everything as best I was going to. I could have sat there and fiddled with wording for a while, but there didn't seem to be much point. I thought of one thing on the Science final that might have made a slight difference, but that's it, and there's no guarantee I would have thought of that if I had just stayed sitting there. I think I did decently on both of them.
As for papers, I did not care for my Philosophy of Science paper at all. I thought it was shallow and poorly conceived. It got an A. I thought my Philosophy of Language paper was much better and stronger, and I had a lot of fun with it. It got an A-. Whether that means anything beyond "different people have different reactions to things," I don't really know.
Since I got done early anyway, I stopped over at Galaxy to check on my laptop. I may not need a new one after all. It was a problem with the cable to the monitor that was causing the flickering. The cable will cost $30, which isn't bad at all. As for the random dying, they defragged the hard disc and fixed something else that I can't remember, but it was all basic maintenance. I'm still happy to have almost every file on it backed up, now. And I may spend the money I'd been expecting to spend on a new laptop on getting this blasted desktop running decently. It is ridiculously slow and the sound has never worked right. At the very least it needs more RAM. A faster processor would be nice. That might be enough to straighten out the sound if the only problem is low memory.
Anyway, I have two sets of tests to grade, and I'll do those tomorrow morning, then submit grades and be done. I've got one mystery no-show on a final, though. A student who had been doing very well did not show up to take the final. This dropped her from an A to a D. I haven't submitted her grade yet, in the hopes that she'll contact me and we can work out an alternate time. I've also got an extra final that someone took with my 025 students. I presume he was in someone's 025 class, but no one has claimed him yet. Oh well.
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This looks to be an entertaining class. I started to type that "The professor is somewhat eccentric," but then realized that, thusfar, that applies to all of the philosophy faculty. He's got a touch of arrogance, which might be annoying, except that he realizes he has a touch of arrogance, and often seems to laugh at himself for it.
A random yet entertaining tidbit:
We're focusing on the politics of the nation-state, the concept of which, arguably, did not exist before the Hundred-Years-War. There was a sense of unity and loyalty within a single town or city, but not so much a sense of unity with all towns in the same area. In fact, Dr. Pelletti explained, most historians will wrongly tell you that the Hundred-Years-War was between England and France, when no such united country existed at the beginning of the war. In fact, it was between two warring families: the Plantagenets and the Valois. The Valois were French-speaking and the Plantagenets were English-speaking, but many of the people in so-called France supported the Plantagenets. Dr. Pelletti actually suggested that Joan of Arc was the first person in recorded history to voice an idea of something approaching a nation-state. She objected to these English-speakers (not-us) ruling over native French-speakers (us), and hence had some idea of something uniting all the French-speaking-people. He acknowledged that this was an uncommon thesis, but still managed to sound fairly sure of himself.
I think I had another tidbit in mind when I started this, but I seem to be too tired to remember it. Perhaps an addendum will follow in the morning.
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States clearly possess, or at least claim to possess,political power. The sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) made a similar point, if in more startling language: states possess a monopoly of legitimate violence. Within any state, violence or coercion is seen as primarily the state's business, either directly, through its agents—the police and law courts—or indirectly, through the permissions it gives citizens to be violent to each other on occasion: in self defence, for example. All legitimate violence or coercion is undertaken or supervised by the state.
~Jonathan Wolff
An Introduction to Political Philosophy, pg. 36
I'm taking Political and Social Philosophy this semester, and this is from one of the textbooks we'll be using. So far, it's quite interesting. Hopefully, the class itself will be at least as interesting.
ADDENDUM:
This article at Positive Liberty goes well with this quote.
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