Part Deux

Autumn has officially begun (for me). Classes start next week, as we spend the rest of this one in orientation programs. But, I've registered for this term, which brings it all back home to me that yet another school year is on its way. I'm taking "Perspectives on the Social Sciences," a class that is required for all MAPSS (masters of the arts program in the social sciences) students, regardless of their more specific disciplinary interest, be it anthropology, economics, political science, sociology etc. I'm really looking forward to taking such a class with students of very diverse intellectual backgrounds and training. My second course is another required one, for my sub-field political science/philosophy, called "Interpretive Methods in Political Theory" which is to be taught by my "preceptor" (already I find that Chicago's advising is far superior to Columbia's) and covers the Straussians, the Cambridge School, Critical Theorists, Deliberative Democrats, Foucault, Rawlsian Liberalism, Feminism, Social Interpretivists (Michael Waltzer), and Postmodernists. My last course is called "Reason and its Histories," in the Social Thought department, for which I was able to find an online course description: "Historicism allegedly corrodes all it touches: moral values are relativized to this time or that place; truth shrinks to a time-bound set of beliefs. Yet science, the strongest modern candidate for rationality, is dizzyingly historical. New theories and empirical finds replace old ones at breakneck speed. This course explores the implications of the history of science for ideas of reason, history, and their interaction, from the seventeenth through twentieth centuries. Readings include works by Bacon, Descartes, Condorcet, Kant, Comte, Nietzsche, Poincare, and Husserl." So I'm really excited to be getting to work once again. In the meanwhile though, I'm trying to finish my last fun-book, the Essays of George Orwell, which I highly recommend, both for its enjoyable readability as well as for its actual political content, before work kicks into high gear. Until next time, all, when my dispatch will most likely be from the library.