Most of these were written starting around midnight before the weekly morning deadline, but apparently they turned out great. Most include some quite embarrassing slip-ups, though. I really liked my tutor, Daniel Kodsi (weād exchanged something like 2000 words via email before term started), and I think I learned a lot.
The best epistemology essay (arguing that evidence = knowledge) was from Week 4, and the best metaphysics essay (arguing that there are a lot of objects) was from Week 6. Hereās how Iād rank the rest of them:
Week 4 > Week 6 > Week 8 > Week 5 > Week 3 > Week 2 > Week 7 > Week 1 (original)
Week 1: Knowledge
The version that Iāve included here is reworked from the original, which just tried to do way too much.
Week 2: Contextualism
Linguistic judgments differ a lot, but I was surprised to find that mine were so contextualist. Daniel said that he was quite annoyed that he couldnāt come up with an example context where āthey ate the snacks. Well, they didnāt eat them, but they ate themā worked (but finally did come up with the snacks being soup).
Week 3: Williamson I
Unfortunately, as Jeremy Goodman notes, āWilliamson is his own best expositorā. The compositeness of true belief is a weird result, which suggests that primeness might be too high a bar.
Week 4: Williamson II
Canonically two Substack posts.
Week 5: Causation
This neglects the austere sufficiency view on which āA causes Bā just means that A counterfactually implies B, which is actually pretty interesting.
Week 6: Coincidence
Really should have found Bounds of Possibility (which I think I should read during Spring vacation).
Week 7: Modality
This one is bad; Daniel concluded that he should change this weekās reading list. I wish Iād found some discussion of Atomicity as a logical principle. Also not sure whether āthe way X isā is unique. Danielās unthinking example: āOne of the ways that she annoys me is that she always second-guesses meā.
Week 8: Social Kinds
I donāt say it explicitly, but the structure is effectively: āOur notion of sex is the one most useful for evolutionary biology. Our notion of gender is the one most useful for feminism. Surprisingly, they coincide.ā (Although Daniel remarks that there tends to be a unity between the true and the good, so perhaps this isnāt so surprising.)