Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Conference Weekend

Hello, everyone. This is officially my first post on ‘our’ blog (by process of elimination, I hope everyone has deduced that this is Sam).
This past weekend I had to give two papers at two different conferences. The first was on Friday; it was a regional Evangelical Theological Society/Evangelical Philosophical Society conference. I read a paper critiquing a naturalist theory of intentional states (in English, I said that a certain way to explain things like beliefs, desires, thoughts, etc… in terms of ‘natural phenomenon’ had serious problems). The conference was very small, and they almost had more papers than participants. That is a hyperbole, but most every session had only four people attending on average. On Saturday was our Talbot conference, and since there were only four papers given, we had a good audience for all the papers. I had to follow the keynote address, which was given by Prof. Tom Crisp. It was brilliant and technical, and the way I was scheduled it was as if my function was to make the paper after me look good! In my paper, I argued against a certain modal axiom (that whatever is the case is necessarily possibly the case) and took heavy fire. I got some good feedback and definitely some points to think about. It was a good weekend (although work that night ruined it!).
Both Carrie and I are swamped and exhausted (I really should be reading right now!). I had half a pot of coffee yesterday and four shots of espresso and I was still nodding off. That isn’t healthy! But the Lord is blessing me; he let me read two papers this weekend, has allowed me to do what I do best to serve the church, I have a great family, and is giving us a break Friday and Saturday from parenting (THANK YOU SO MUCH, JEN!). We initially had big plans to get up early, go hiking overnight to a natural hot-spring. Now, we are just going to go to Disneyland and chillax and sleep in.
Well, I have a paper to write and reading to finish.

1 comment:

Lee Jones said...

Took heavy fire, eh? Did you try flashing your gangster look at them? :-)