Today’s class was devoted to moving forward on the reading lists. At this point, you should be able to roughly describe a project and have an unstructured list of readings.
By next week, you will have the plan for your literature review going forward.
Peter is zeroing in on reparations as a topic; I was able to hand off a long list of things that I looked at when I was trying to add that to my syllabus for Philosophy 33.
Will met with his reader and got a similar list.
Both Peter and Will have done their own research too. But their main task in the upcoming week is to put what they have in order.
Octave and Lucas have been more on their own. Octave’s list includes several quite large books that discuss his topic among others. One problem he faces is to extract the relevant parts of these books. This is not always easy. For example, one of his authors is Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche did not write in structured essays or chapters. So it is a challenge to figure out what, exactly, to read. The closest we came to a solution was to find an introduction to one of Nietzsche’s books (Bernard Williams’s introduction to The Gay Science) that laid out some of the themes of his thinking with decent looking pointers to his writing.
Lucas was sick, so we did not discuss his project in class. He has books on his list so, like Octave, he will have to decide how to cut them up for the weekly précis.