24.March: 11:20 PM
Over the next two weeks, I’ll be traveling to Toronto and New York to visit U of T and CUNY, who have both accepted me into their PhD programs. I won’t have my camera, as I left it with Deanna, who is working on a photography-based project for one of her classes. So instead of making a series of posts, I will leave this one at the top and add to it as I have things to share.

At the moment, I am sitting on the floor of the Vancouver airport. General boarding for my flight to Toronto has begun, and so I have to go. Tomorrow is a busy day, so I’m hoping to sleep on the plane!

25.March: 9:00 AM
I am sitting in the living room of the U of T student who’s been generous enough to put me up for the next three nights. The place is on College Street, close to campus. The plan for today is as follows: Jessica Wilson’s Natural Modality class at noon. Meeting with Peter Ludlow at 4:00. Imogen Dickie and Phil Kremer’s Truth class at 6:00. Hopefully this will be exciting enough to keep me awake.

26.March: 12:26 AM
Still haven’t slept, but my heavens what a day. A couple of the most fast-paced classes I have ever been a part of; meetings with a variety of professors and students; very flattering attention from several philosophical idols; capped off by a calculus lesson over pizza from a mathematical logician. And just when I think it’s over, an invitation from Peter Ludlow to a Karaoke Bar on Ossington St. where David Chalmers buys me a rum and coke.

Even though I haven’t slept in two days, I am feeling a little hyper right now.

26.March: 8 PM
Sitting in a restaurant in Kensington Market. Today I met with Gurpreet Rattan (a fellow SFU alumnus), and attended David Chalmers’ talk on epistemological reduction. The talk was very well-attended, and there were lots of great questions. In general, people are being very good to me here. The community centered around Language, Logic, Mind and Metaphysics at Toronto has been steadily growing for the past few years, and it seems likely that its reputation will soon follow. It could be a great time to be here.

Tomorrow I’ll be attending a class on Frege taught by Bernard Katz, and going to Chalmers’ second talk of the week, this time on “Terminological Disputes and Philosophical Progress”.

27.March: 9 PM
Another philosophy-packed day! The Frege class was great, and Chalmer’s talk was packed. It took place in one of the oldest buildings of the university, built in the mid-19th century. Quite beautiful inside and out, and a far cry from SFU.

After that I planned out next week. Turns out I’ll be stopping by NYU for at least an afternoon in addition to my CUNY visit. This is pretty exciting, as there are some people I really admire working there. I’ll also be able to fly back to Toronto next saturday instead of taking the 12-hour bus ride, as I’ve discovered $100 Porter Air flights which go back and forth. I wish I’d known about them soon enough to book the other direction too! Instead, I’ll be spending the next couple of days with my Aunt and Uncle in Hamilton, and traveling to NYC by bus on Saturday night.

Toronto is a cool city. Weather and geography aside, it has some advantages over Vancouver. Things stay open later, and the centrality of the university leads to much more of a student-ey type of atmosphere throughout much of the city. The architecture is also older and nicer, and things are generally a bit cheaper here it seems. I can see living here for sure.

Tonight: off to see Horses (Glen Barrington’s band) play at some African restaurant in Kensington Market. Might run into a few familiar faces there!

29.March: 11 PM
Alas, my last post never managed to get uploaded because of internet problems for the last day or so. I’m now in the Toronto bus terminal, waiting to board the NYC-bound coach, arriving at the Port Authority in about twelve hours. I’ve just come from Hamilton, where I visited my aunt, uncle, and cousins. It was very nice to see them, and my uncle (a prof at McMaster) had good advice about choosing schools.

The lost post contained a list of Toronto pros and cons, but I don’t have time to reproduce it right now. The pros outnumbered the cons, of which there were just two. But basically, I like Toronto, but fear its weather. More importantly, the LEMMing section of the philosophy department is young, vibrant, and seemingly about to do great things. But most importantly, I am worried that its lack of roots and establishment makes its apparent upward trajectory somewhat unstable. I will continue to investigate these issues as April 15th draws closer, but I suspect that financial concerns could push me in this direction in the end either way.

I have a fairly busy schedule planned out in NYC. Plenty of CUNY appointments already made, several pending, and the possibility of a brief drop-in to NYU on Tuesday afternoon.

They are announcing my bus now, so I must be off.

30.March: 1PM
Safe and sound in NYC. For tonight, I am staying at a hostel in the East Village, on East 14th Street at Second Avenue, right next to a large center for ear and eye medicine. I haven’t had a chance to go out and do anything yet, but I am about to!

Maybe the best $20 I have ever spent: a horseshoe-shaped beanbag neck pillow from a store in the Toronto bus station. Combined with the empty seat next to mine, it allowed for more sleep than I could possibly have hoped for last night. And all the more energy to paint the town red with…

31.March: 12:15 AM
I have just arrived back at my hostel to discover with great pleasure that I have my entire six-bed room all to myself tonight.

I began my afternoon by walking up to the CUNY graduate center, which is located at 365 Fifth Ave., across the street from the Empire State Building. I ate some pizza and listened to Herbie Hancock on the way. I was then driven back to the hostel by cold and sleepiness. I took a nap, got my coat, and wandered back out, this time into Greenwich Village. My evening consisted of a variety of wanderings along various axes of NYU’s Washington Square campus, fantasizing about becoming a student there with Coltrane in my ears. I had a bagel with apple-flavored cream cheese for dinner, and then went to see Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt at the same theatre where Rob and I watched Goldfinger last year. It was quite sad.

31.March: 12:30 PM
I spoke too soon last night: five Italian backpackers showed up at my room at around 2am and shattered my dream of a good sleep. I got out of there pretty fast this morning.

Where I went was the Harlem apartment of a friend named Myrto with whom I used to take some classes at SFU. She is now a PhD student at CUNY, and she’ll be putting me up for the next three nights. I had my first CUNY experience this morning, when I visited Rohit Parikh, a Philosophy/Math/Computer Science Professor there. I’ll be sitting in on his Logic and Game theory class tonight.

Right now I am in the New York Public Library’s huge Humanities and Social Sciences research building on Fifth Avenue, just a few blocks from CUNY. I’ve weaseled myself an access card and I am going to stay out of today’s rain by reading Kit FIne’s newest book, which I’m about to place an order for from the depths below.

1.April: 10:30 AM
I got mugged on the way home last night. A guy with a knife got my wallet and my passport too. Luckily he left me with my computer. He cut my arm a little because I wouldn’t give it to him at first. This sucks.

But what can you do? I have now come to the Graduate Center, where I am waiting for Richard Mendelsohn and Melvin Fitting’s modal logic class to begin. Everything I have seen of CUNY so far suggests that it has more depth in my interests than Toronto, but that I would be under a lot of pressure in terms of teaching duties and my financial situation as a student here. To add to things, I got a phone call from Phil Kremer at Toronto yesterday offering me even more money to go there… So it’s looking like I may have to choose between financial security and a very comfortable lifestyle on one hand, and a much larger variety of philosophical resources on the other hand. An unfortunate situation to say the least.

Later today, I will be checking out Paul Boghossain’s talk at NYU. I got an email from him this morning confirming that I am invited to go. I’m quite excited: I suspect that it will be a who’s who of NYC philosophers in the audience.

By the way: April fools. My wallet is in my pocket and my arm is fine. (someone can defibrillate my mother now).

2.April: 9:30 AM
Yesterday was a pretty great day. Mendelsohn and Fitting’s class was excellent. They describe themselves as a play-by-play and color commentary team, with Fitting doing the formal logic and Mendelsohn tying everything in with semantics and the philosophy of language. Yesterday’s topic was the existence predicate in possibilist and actualist modal semantics.

After that, I walked down to Greenwich Village to infiltrate NYU. I was worried about being an unwelcome guest, but that did not turn out to be the case. NYU is completely amazing. I have no trouble saying that if I were made an offer by them, I would take it immediately. They have a whole building in the Village all to themselves, and it is bright, well-decorated, and comfortable inside. The place is buzzing with philosophical activity and everyone seems like they’re in the middle of discovering important truths. (maybe this is a bit romanticized) I managed to corner Kit Fine for ten minutes so that he could tell me that they probably won’t go to the wait list this year. So then I we just talked about philosophy a bit, which was actually really cool. Then I went down to the Mind and Language seminar, which was a fairly star-studded event. David Velleman and Paul Boghossain gave a talk about the rule-following problem while Hartry Field, Ned Block, Jim Pryor, and Thomas Nagel butted in with questions. Definitely a little surreal.

Today is another exciting day. I have to rush off to Michael Devitt’s class on animal cognition right now. Then it is Stephen Neale’s class on Law and Language, and Saul Kripke’s (!) class on the philosophy of math. I’ll update again later.

3.April: 12:30 PM
Yesterday was hectic and exciting. Many hours of great classes with only short breaks in between. Michael Devitt’s class involved a discussion of some disanaolgies between frogs who eat beebees which they mistake for flies and birds which avoid viceroy butterflies, mistaking them for monarch butterflies. Stephen Neale’s class, during which I had to sit on the floor for lack of chairs, revolved around a fantastic application of issues in the semantics/pragmatics distinction to Judge Anthonin Scalia’s theory of legal interpretation. Saul Kripke’s class reminded me of going to a Bob Dylan concert: I wasn’t always following the new stuff, but the second-order awareness of sitting in Saul Kripke’s seminar was certainly worth it. And really, I think that amazing things could be learned from those seminars with more preparation and practice. Afterward, I went to a department colloquium and then out to dinner, ending up having a couple of drinks with another student in Brooklyn. A full day.

Today is a bit more relaxed. I have just met with Stephen Neale, who seems like an ideal person for me to learn from; and I will be going to a class on rigidity (no homo) with Alan Berger later this afternoon. Although I had originally planned to devote tomorrow to shameless tourist activities, it turns out that Rohit Parikh is teaching a seminar on Hilbert’s view of infinity which he has encouraged me to attend. So I won’t be done philosophizing yet!

Overall, a whirlwind week, and I am looking forward to getting back to the real world, and sleeping in for once (not to mention in my own bed).

3.April: 8:00 PM
I’m sitting in a Dunkin Donuts at the corner of Columbus and 95th, ganking a wireless signal called “Apple Network 66dd0f”. I have just walked from the graduate center, about sixty blocks, and the shoulder on which my bag hangs is feeling pretty sore. Tonight and tomorrow night I’ll be staying at the Jazz on the Park hostel where my brother lived while he was in NYC last year, and I’ve about ten more blocks to go.

Some things I’ve done this week and forgot to mention on here:

Walked through Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus and the surrounding neighborhood. What a beautiful place. Just gorgeous. Really tall brick residence buildings, ancient-looking libraries, all surrounding a vast open space in the middle. And rich-looking undergraduates everywhere (which for some reason I find aesthetically pleasing?). It made me even more bitter that they rejected me.

Ate about ten slices of pizza. It’s more expensive than in Vancouver. But it’s better too. My favorite kind is “white pizza” which just has ricotta and mozarella cheese and no tomato sauce. Goes well with lemon-lime soda.

A little shopping. I suppose the prices are so much lower here because of the recent leveling out of the two currencies. Banana Republic has a huge sale. I also checked out the Macbook Air at the subterranean Apple Store on 5th Ave. The skinny little tart put the moves on me. If I get a chance tomorrow, I might look into some thrift stores in the Lower East Side. Part of me also wants to do something to overcompensate for my lack of touristical activities this week, like go to the statue of liberty or solemnly buy a T-shirt at ground zero. I walked by a line of horse-and-carriage teams along the bottom of central park this evening, and all I could think of was Kremer’s farting horse on Seinfeld.

Listening to tons of music. The things that have stuck out to me as worth listening to are context-dependent. During the very long subway ride home from Brooklyn last night, I properly appreciated the Black Star album by Mos Def and Talib Kweli for the first time. Today Paul Simon guided me through central park. As I mentioned above, Herbie Hancock and John Coltrane have made frequent appearances, especially at night. The bar I was at in Brooklyn last night was playing a great mix of music, inclduing Mos Def and Tom Waits.

Anyway, I’m going to get to reading about the epsilon calculus and Hilbert’s paper on infinity in preparation for tomorrow morning’s class.

5.April: 1:00 AM
I’ll be leaving NYC in about 8 hours. What a week! Not so much a vacation as a business trip. My non-philosophy-filled time has been filled mostly by wandering around the city, and I can feel the residue of the one in my head and the other in my legs.

I don’t know if I am closer to making a decision about schools than I was before my trip began, although I feel enormously better informed about the whole thing, and the me of two weeks ago has been revealed to be somewhat naïve. Some sinking in and further rumination (not to mention some possible wait-list action) will precede my decision.

New York is amazing in its own way, although I think I glamorize it less than I did before this visit. My last day here was spent mostly around philosophers after all. After Rohit Parikh’s very interesting talk on Hilbert’s view of infinity and the epsilon calculus, I had lunch with Myrto and allowed her to take me along to the cognitive science group, where a student in the dissertation phase of his degree gave a talk about moral psychology (addressing such fascinating questions as, could there be a person fast enough to stop a trolley if we were to throw him in front of it?, and, if so, do most people think that this would be morally worse than aiming the trolley at the man instead? Apparently, some philosophers have christened this the “throwing a bomb on a man versus throwing a man on a bomb problem”. Philosophy is silly sometimes—including sometimes while it is also being profound.

This was followed by beer, and a long walk, from midtown down to the east village and through it, through the lower east side, past little italy and through chinatown, under the brooklyn bridge, and into the financial district. I even passed by ground zero, although I did not solemnly buy anything while I was there. I must say, it was kind of disturbing to look at.

Right now is one of those times when I wish someone would invent a teleporter so I could be in my bed without all the airports and shit in between now and tomorrow night. But then I think about Bernard Williams…

6.April: 1:00PM
I am back now, and got my first good sleep and relaxing morning in two weeks. I will be spending the next few days letting all the stuff from the last couple of weeks sink in, and waiting for Stanford to tell me what’s up. One interesting piece of information: my blog has never gotten as many hits as it has in the last couple of weeks, and I’m glad to know that so many people are interested in what I’m up to! Thanks for dropping by!

Of course, I’ll throw any updates up on the blog, along with whatever decision I finally make. In the mean time, I am back with my camera, so maybe I’ll take some photos.