I use this blog as a clearing house. All in all, it serves this function
well. Things that would sit moldering, at least
get perched on the lip of being read by others. I
also get to bring back works from literal death; I take a moribund text and pump it with air.
So, here is my master’s thesis, submitted in 1995. It was written on a word processing
machine. The letters embossed in real
print. It was unfair, nearly immoral,
for the Boston University Philosophy Department to have a PhD program. Even in 1995, teaching jobs were hard to come
by (about 50% of philosophy PhDs never got a job in their field) and today it
is far worse. The Humanities are an
employment graveyard. Program which accept more student than can possibly get employment resemble little more than a pyramid scheme.
This, coupled with the haughty, denigrating attitudes of some
professors toward graduate students (a common enough phenomenon, I now realize,
which still does not make it right) made jumping ship with a masters one of my
wisest life choices. I went my way, they
went theirs; they puttered about about Scottish philosophy; I did my work. In the end, it was a productive divoice.
The title of the thesis is taken from Joyce’s Ulysses, where Stephen is
warned that Bloom is “Greeker than the Greeks,” here a reference, probably, to
sodomy. In my thesis, it fits with the
Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria’s project to interpret Judaism as a far
purer example of Hellenic philosophy than Greek philosophy itself.
So here it is:
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