Young man, go to (extracurricular) events!
If I were to give one piece of advice to young students on how to make best use of their University years, I’d say (or, more likely, I’d text them from one of the conferences, seminars or talks I go to): “Go to events!”
Apart from many other advantages (of which more later), events are a extremely valuable source of gripping anecdotes and off-off-Broadway visualization and exemplification.
To be fair, most lecturers and tutors try hard to grab our intellect with eccentric illustrations of what they’re on about in the course of doing their run-of the mill stuff, but at those one-off events - they simply try harder.
So yesterday, for instance, prof. Nicholas P. Zangwill told those present at the second edition of the Durham-Warsaw Philosophy Lectures at the Institute of Philsophy how the superman flew into the room to prevent the breaking of the egg that prof. Zangwill had dropped a moment before; how the host of the event, prof. Mariusz Gryganiec chopped someone up and then hid them somewhere at his place; and how one woman from the audience stole sausages from a supermarket, because her kids were starving (prof. Gryganiec, in another illustration, also pinched some sausages, but just because he liked that particular kind).
And finally, in one of the most stunning ontological props that had ever been tried on me, we were asked to imagine that the speaker himself is shooting Socrates, while Xanthippe is away on the Moon, her ontological status changing without her even realising it.
How painful, educational and precious.
(But it seems that prof. Zangwill did not shoot the deputy. At least during that lecture).
