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Australian philosopher, literary critic, legal scholar, and professional writer. Based in Newcastle, NSW. My latest books are THE TYRANNY OF OPINION: CONFORMITY AND THE FUTURE OF LIBERALISM (2019) and AT THE DAWN OF A GREAT TRANSITION: THE QUESTION OF RADICAL ENHANCEMENT (2021).

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Submitted!

Yup, four nice bound copies of PhD Mark II submitted this afternoon. I'm now celebrating. Okay, now it's in the lap of the gods, or the examiners, but it's done!!

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Congratulations! What's the title of the thesis?

Do philosophy people put their PhDs on something similar to the maths/physics arXiv?

Anonymous said...

When do you hear back from the examiners?

Looks like I might have to add one more thing to my 'To-Read' list for the summer holidays :)

Blake Stacey said...

If you can still type a blog post, you're not celebrating hard enough! :-)

Russell Blackford said...

Blake, I don't really feel like celebrating very much until such a time as it's approved. Even if all goes well, that's going to be two or three months away.

Ronny - you may have to wait for the book. I said "two or three months", because examiners these days are supposed to take a couple of months. Of course, they can take longer. And there's always the possibility of delays if they want corrections or revisions or whatever.

Greg: It ended up being called "Human Enhancement: The Challenge to Liberal Tolerance" ... and it turned more and more into a philosophy of law sort of thing as I moved to make it less ambitious (my plans this time last year were over-ambitious, and I can thank Rob Sparrow for making that clear to me). There's no equivalent to arXiv that I know of (but what do I know, eh?).

I'm not sure I'd want to be in such an archive because I'm seriously going to look for a publisher of some version of this - perhaps written in a slightly more popular style - and I don't know what attitude a publisher considering a book manuscript would take to prior publication in such an archive. This is actually quite a controversial issue within universities at the moment, as they move to publishing their students' theses on-line. Of course, the other side of it is that if the material isn't published somewhere it doesn't have much utility for other scholars.

The dust will be settling here for the next few days. I'm not really celebrating so much as just trying to (at least work out how to) catch up with the rest of my life.

Anonymous said...

Hey Russell, congrats on becoming, soon, Dr Dr Blackford. Hope moving house isn't too stressful - I hate it but have done it least once a year since 2000.

Robin said...

Congrats!! I'm so jealous you're done. I haven't even glanced at my chapters in 3 months.

Need to hire you to ghost write the rest!

Your process is different than ours - our phds don't get bound until they're already approved and defended. If I had to get mine bound before revisions I think that'd be asking for trouble!