Every once in a while, someone emails me to remind me that I promised way back in April to post my senior thesis for those interested in reading it. I’ve since decided that I’m not actually going to post it on the web after all. It’s not that I’m shy about the paper, it’s just that the only other time I have posted a paper on the web, someone tried to turn it in as their own for a similar class less than a year later. This isn’t so surprising - I think people are probably much more likely to pass off another undergraduate’s work as their own than they are to try and pass off, say, something from Phil Studies. The paper itself is obviously a lot more plausible as student work because it is student work, and it’s also harder to track down because it isn’t really published anywhere and wasn’t bought from one of those paper sites.

But I’d still like to give friends and philosophers the chance to read my thesis, so the solution I’ve settled on is that interested folks should just email me and I’ll send out a PDF. I understand that interested slackers will probably find this post on Google and ask me for a copy at some point in the future, and that can’t really be helped. But it would be nice to have at least a general idea of who’s got the paper for the next time I get an email from a professor letting me know that someone else has turned it in. (It looks like obscurity of authentic undergrad work didn’t save the student in question this time - when it was still up, the post in which I linked to my paper was in fact the only result produced when Googling its first sentence.)