Schedule paradise

The earliest any of my courses start this quarter is at 12 noon. I definitely have Wednesdays off, and might have Mondays off, too.

Courses I'm shopping (the list will be cut):

Analytic Philosophy
Hegel's Phenomenology
Philosophy of Language Seminar
Wittgenstein Seminar
Psychoanalysis and Political Authority

Some trivia.

1. The prof for the Analytic Philosophy course is going to take attendance, and factor it into the calculation of final grades. Wow.

2. Hegel courses are like rock stars at this university or something. For the first meeting, in a lecture theatre with a 60-student capacity, there were so many students packed into the room that they were sitting up and down the aisles and nearly spilling out the doors. A similar phenomenon was witnessed for the first few meetings of a seminar on Hegel last quarter (I had to sit on the floor, which made my bum hurt). How can so many people be so keen on studying a guy who's so impossible to read?

3. I think maybe half a dozen profs at this university do work with Wittgenstein in some form or another. It's kind of A Thing here. But this seminar appears to be the first course dealing exclusively with Wittgenstein since at least 2002. (Though he does pop up frequently in courses, and there have been reading groups and whatnot.)

4. The Psychoanalysis and Political Authority course is not actually in philosophy, and, at the moment, looks to be the one I'm most likely to drop. (If nothing else, it would free up my Mondays.) But the idea of the course is fascinating: to explore whether psychoanalytic ideas of transference can apply in the political sphere. For example, do people relate to their political leaders in ways which are systematically deformed by the unconscious persistence of infantile attitudes to authority? Upon first entertaining that question, I meditated briefly on the quality of political debate and reflection, and found the tempting answer to be: "Duh".