Turning the page

After three days and three written exams, I have now surfaced on the other side. Leaving behind ethics, metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of mind, I am now finally ready to do what I want. If the results of the essays and exams are according to the plan (and they better be, Patrick!), this autumn will signal the start of my three-year long, research-only , PhD (who wants to be in America, Aidan ;) ). How exactly will I exploit my new freedom? I will be working with proof-theoretical semantics for logical consequence together with Stephen Read. During the summer I'll be working with the same topic in my M.Litt dissertation, so there's bound to be some posts on this in the coming weeks.

Of course, after a long year in St. Andrews there are plenty of people who deserve thanks for making all this worth while. However, in true von Trier spirit, first things first: There are some people I need to forgive. I forgive my room mates Richard and John for waking me up in the middle of the night with their reckless partying, I forgive my friend Tord for beating me in a winning position, I forgive Prof. Sullivan for frowning at my Quine project, I forgive James for not inviting me to his party (you break my heart), I forgive the American students in my class for taking up all the time with useless questions, I forgive the girl behind the counter in the gym (whose name I do not know) for complaining about my shoes, I forgive Dan for kissing me, I forgive the people at Tesco (their mistakes are too numerous to mention), I forgive Marcus for doing what I should have been doing, Yin for constantly understating his potential, and Raffles for leaving us, I forgive the Norwegians in St. Andrews for their event, I forgive the University for its greed, the department for its many administrational shortcuts, and myself for forgetting the only thing that matters. I forgive you all.

Then, to the thanking. First of all I want to thank the Department and especially Patrick Greenough for putting up the Philosophy of Logic course on the student's request. Patrick turned this into the best philosophy course I've ever done. I also need to thank Dr. Clark for all his kind help with applications, and for his wonderful course in meta-theory - only Dr. Clark can embed an advanced logic course in excellent narration. Moreover, I want to thank Prof. Shapiro for teaching us that "this is connected, for everything is" - the origins of analytic philosophy course was a great success. Then, of course, I want to thank some of my future room mates: thanks to Andri for his Turing machine abilities, thanks to Ralf for his unsurpassable fighting spirit and valuable English lessons, and thanks to Andreas for his lovable intellectual elitism, and teaching us that "they can keep their filthy money". Finally, thanks to a great philosophy department and its faculty, and thanks to the ORS and the University of St. Andrews for funding for my PhD.