horsekeeping

Cleaning, organizing, gutting out my room to make room for arson.

We reviewed our short stories in Fiction class today. No one spit and cawed about grammatical errors and verbation of nounage. No one broke down and wept when his work was criticized. No one leaped across their desk with a blade in his teeth.

Religion got raked over the coals today in Methods class when a student claimed that evidence of the resurrection of Jesus was basis enough to justify one’s faith in Christianity. David Hume won this round, with the argument that it is far, far more likely that the witnesses of the resurrection were mistaken than the laws of the universe were violated for that brief instant. Causality is a strong beast, and it takes something equally strong to bring it down.

Afterwards my professor loaded me down with a metric ton of criticism of Pinker. I’ve got Dupre’s book review of “How the Mind Works”, two papers on animal minds, an essay that hasn’t been published yet about how consciousness could have evolved, and a piece about biological adaptations and evolutionary epistemology. I’m trying to track down Jerry Fodor’s “The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way”, a piece that got published in a number of philosophical journals, but UMD hasn’t paid enough to access the full texts of pieces in WebSPIRS’s Philosopher’s Index.

Huh. Three seconds with Google and I’ve got whole dang thing, with hyperlinks to Fodor’s criticisms of evolutionary psychology. I love the internet. Both Pinker and I will be lucky if we come out of this one alive.