Fractionals

I've finally been able to kick my own ass hard enough to spend some serious time engaging with David Davies' Art as Performance, the other major book I am using for my thesis. I'm contrasting it against Ingarden's The Work of Music and the Problem of its Identity and I'll be arguing for Ingarden against Davies; but so far, about half way in, it's looking more and more like they agree in some very important and surprising ways. More importantly, I think I was reluctant to get down to cases for so long partially because it seemed at first like Ingarden and Davies weren't going to have much to fight about, the subjects were so different; but once I got to the end of chapter 3 I started finding stuff - real, exciting stuff - to grapple with on almost every page. Even better, I've had a response to all of Davies' claims I disagree with so far, and these claims seem to be coming together in a fairly coherent argument for why Davies' (a) isn't arguing against Ingarden and (b) gets the ontology of the work of art wrong.

I am ridiculously excited about this, in a way that I'm not sure anyone but my fellow philosophy grad students would understand. I just wish there was some way for the notes I was taking in my head (well, the paper I was writing in my head, really) to be in a .doc file already - I know what I want to do, it's the scut-work of making it accessible to other people that always gets me. But writing this paper should be a joy - Frankensteining a thesis from it and the two papers I've already got under my belt should be less fun, but still interesting.