We talked about Octave and Peter’s drafts of their literature reviews.
Most of our discussion was about organizational questions.
For example, we talked about where Octave should put a couple authors who were critical of theological (aka transcendental) answers to the problem of absurdity but who did not really have positive subjective naturalistic answers of their own.
In Peter’s case, the tricky questions were about the authors who write about the epistemology of race (aka the epistemology of ignorance). After listening to Peter talk about it a bit, it seemed to us that we had another case of authors who all share a label (epistemology of race/ignorance) and some common material (the ignorance that necessarily goes along with prejudging people based on their race) but who were nonetheless pursuing rather different questions. We found that something similar is true of social epistemology way back in September.
This is normal in a new area. People are working out exactly what the questions are, after all. But it can be confusing to someone coming to the area afresh. The solution is obvious: organize the section by author and show how each one is doing something different than the others. Ta da!