I was determined to get my MA dissertation off this week. At 7:00 on Tuesday morning, I became conscious of a genuine, sincere hatred towards my reference list. At 7:50, I submitted the dissertation. It’s a week early. At 8:00, I told my family never to mention the word ‘MA’ in conjunction with the word ‘dissertation’ in my presence ever again. At 8:30, I went back to my computer and started playing with PhD-related things.
Now it’s Sunday and the MA dissertation already feels a million years away. I have started gathering literature for the PhD. Organised as a network graph, it looks like this:
Pretty, huh? So far, I have only read a few things that are strictly historiographical or are expositions of basic concepts. I have already thought of tweaking my PhD title in a certain direction, although I’m not quite ready to commit to anything even on a hypothetical level yet.
I did unfortunately read some really dumb stuff this week, and there’s something about reading dumb stuff that tends to put me off reading altogether. Fortunately, I had also thought of reading the entire corpus of Lorraine Daston’s work. She is a brilliant writer, so now I’m rationing her work, just to be able to give myself a little reading morale boost. I’ve come to suspect that even as an editor, Daston functions as a fairly reliable quality check on academic writing. That doesn’t necessarily mean I agree with it all, even, it just means it’s readable.
By the second half of the week, I was veering off into random pastures, mostly on a theoretical basis. By the weekend, I was trying to figure out the relationship between phenomenology and artisanal epistemology. Let’s just say that at this stage, I’m not sure Husserl would have been altogether happy to hear that direct, physical experience of the natural and material world could be seen as the basis of science, as suggested by Smith (2018). I gather he was rather into the idea of proving that the laws on which science was based transcended nature. However, I’m disinclined to agree with him.
References:
Smith, Pamela H. “Epistemology, Artisanal.” In Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy, edited by Marco Sgarbi, 1-9. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2018.
Thorsby, Mark. Introduction to Phenomenology Part I. YouTube, 2016. (Mark Thorsby’s series of YouTube videos on the subject of phenomenology is an excellent introduction, IMO)