Outstanding topics

I have, I must confess, started a number of projects here that I haven't finished. Teaching is getting the better of me (and no, I'm not going to put my lectures down on cognitive science, as I do them "freeform",, so I'd have to do a lot of work to get them down in written form).

Some of the things I intend to one day finish:

  1. The World According to Genesis. Reader Michael Gardner put in a lot of work doing the Abraham story outline for me, but to my shame I haven't had time to add my bits. Sorry Michael - you haven't been forgotten. I aim to cover the patriarchal stories pretty quickly, and then move on to the Moses story and the Exodus story. That will about do it as far as the biblical worldview goes. Maybe I'll finish up looking that the 8th century BCE prophets' worldview. Ezekiel is pretty weird.
  2. The national view of eugenics and selection. This is the missing fourth part of my Darwin and the Holocaust series. The problem is that I have to go refind a bunch of material I haven't read for ten years or more, on the ways various nations cast themselves as being in a Darwinian struggle.
  3. The current series on what life is. I'm working from lecture notes from a couple of years back, so it should be easy to continue.
  4. The theoretical role of "species" - as it occurs to me I will add new material. This is the first rough cut of a paper.
  5. Darwin on species. Initially this was a rebuttal to Peter Dear's book, but there's a lot more to say. Now that I have organised my sourcebook and commentary on species definitions, I really should finalise this.
  6. Basic concepts. I haven't updated these for a bit. Soon, I promise. There have been new entries on other sites, and hell, I may even write one or two of my own. If that doesn't trigger guilt feelings in other bloggers, well, there's always the comfy chair.

Anything else I have left undone? I already checked my fly.

On a different note, I was interviewed by (= "had a long rant with) Carl Zimmer last night for an article he is doing on species concepts. It was great fun, and of course I advanced my own special heresies ike the myth of essentialism at great length. Nice chatting with you Carl.

More like this

At last, my grant application is in. I reckon there's about the same amount of work in a grant application as in a good size novel paper, which is to say a paper on a topic you haven't published before. To add to that, I finalised a paper for final submission - which I hope meets the exacting…
I haven't done much philosophical blogging lately. There are Reasons. I'm preparing to move to Sydney over the next few months (and there may be a period in which I have no laptop too), and trying to catch up on a bunch of projects I have in play and which deserve my attention. Also, there's a…
In an interview defending himself against justified charges of homophobia, Rick Warren insisted: For 5,000 years, every single culture and every single religion has defined marriage as a man and a woman. Not quite. As the polygamous founder of the polygamy-espousing Church of Jesus Christ of…
As I sat down on the couch in front of the TV last night to do my nightly blogging ritual, trying to tickle the gray matter to come up with the pearls of wisdom or insolence that my readers have come to know and love, I had a fantastic idea for a serious consideration of a question that comes up in…

Not to mention that a search of your blog for the word "species" uncovered about 20 posts worthy of inclusion in the anthology....just saying.

I am assuming that a lot of that stuff WILL be in your book. Correct?

Not more of that blasted Bible stuff! Reading that made me go to that big building where they have all those "books" and you have to show your card to the woman who lets you take the books home for a few weeks, but then you have to bring them back. So I read some books about stuff that previously I chose to remain "ignorant" about, but now I am somewhat less "stupid", but only a little.

By Susan Silberstein (not verified) on 06 Sep 2007 #permalink