I just poured myself an Oban. Since you're not having any, I will have a second on your behalf.
I always find moments of accomplishment like that to be very Zen. There is a fleeting emptiness to life after feeling a major task. An emptiness pregnant with potential - so many possible doors open, so many choices. And all of them open becuase you, through hard work and force of will, have just finished this major task. At which point the zen becomes a flurry af air-punching "woohoo!"s because, let's face it, you rock. Obviously, because you've just finished this thing.
It's a good feeling. I hope that's where you'll be mentally for the next few days.
Do you know when the viva is? Do you get much say in your external? Asking around, it seems there's a lot of variability in that between countries and between subject areas. In my research group we get a lot of input into the process, but I hear stories of others who basically just get told who they're getting.
Nice one toro. I hope you don't experience what I'm getting now, which is a massive rush of things that fucking should be in my MA plan (to be presented tomorrow) but I've somehow missed out. It's a really fucking bad week to be talking about a paper on NATO written 3 weeks ago.
So, just got it back from the binders and handed up.
Wow.
Thank you all.
Er, it's about "The Role of the Fact/Value Distinction in Modern Moral Life". What values are, and how we should talk about them.
There's nothing about sausages, I'm afraid, but plenty on dolphin gang-rape, the collected works of Flann O'Brien, Peter Sellars doing spoken-word beatles covers, the correct name of Derry, child abuse, why I never (yet) played for Liverpool, and learning to change gears when driving.
thom - my viva is on May 5th, which causes some difficulty as it's a bank holiday and the university will be shut. I had a fair bit of say on the external, yeah, but not everyone does. It's going to be Simon Blackburn - nerve-wracking, since he's a bit of a superstar and has very high standards, but good since he'll broadly agree (I *think*) with most of what I have to say, and will be a superb referee to have if I get passed.
Well, I have little doubt that the absence of sausage-related conjecture will be noted in the viva, and that I'll have to add it in as a correction. So fret not.
What are you saying about Flann O'Brien? (I'm not saying that in a pejorative "what you sayin' about him ya cunt?" way - just interested, being a bit of a fan). He'd have appreciated a random diversion about sausages too. Still, can't have everything.
Simon Blackburn eh? Big name indeed, as he's probably the only person in your field that I've heard of. I do hear the logic behind getting someone like that as a referee though - I'm currently in discussion with my supervisor about my external, and that sort of thing is a consideration.
boris - a "viva voce" is an oral exam - you have an internal and an external examiner (i.e., someone from your university, and someone from somewhere else) who quiz you in detail on the thesis, and you have to defend it. They can pass it, or have you do more work on it, or fail it, on the basis of that oral defence.
E10 - he comes up twice. Firstly, I say that just because facts and values always come packaged together, they don't turn into one another, and contrast it with O'Brien's thing about policemen and their bicycles becoming more like each other through the exchange of atoms in The Third Policeman.
Then, discussing Alasdair MacIntyre's idea that the proper ends of a life are given by the narrative of that life, I point out that free choice of ends puts any putative "narrator" in the situation of the writer in At Swim-Two-Birds, whose characters do pretty much what they like, regardless of what he thinks about it.
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