I’ve spent the past couple hours grading a heaping stack of logic quizzes, which has made me aware of a couple of things, including the fact that almost everyone has really awful handwriting (at least when they’ve got ten minutes to explain the correspondence theory of truth and the relationship between sentences, propositions, and facts). A few of you - because I’m aware that there are at least a couple Caoine readers in this class - have freakishly neat handwriting and don’t seem to ever cross anything out. My only real complaint about the non-freakish handwriters is that it’s awfully difficult to record your grades when I can’t read your name.

On an only slightly related note, I spent the couple of hours before the past couple of hours reading Plato for the first time in years. I bitch and moan about having to do the Greeks again, but I’d forgotten that as it happens I actually like this stuff. I might have read the dialogues half a dozen times in the past, but the Apology is still pretty hot shit. And it’s better than reading Descartes again - which, incidentally, I’m also doing. I don’t quite understand why nearly all the required classes for philosophy majors at NYU include Descartes, and specifically the Meditations - I had drinks on Friday with Al, who suggested it has to do with the whole Cartesian notion of clear and distinct perception and the transparency of mental states, which is a popular one. I suppose that’s all well and good, but I think we’d get the gist of it from one course - I wish we didn’t have to repeat it year after year (there are, after all, other people who have written on the subject).