Dissertation and Short Story

A post with a bit more substance than this one should be coming up on Wednesday. Meanwhile, two quick notes:

(1) My alternate history short story Dark Coffee, Bright Light and the Paradoxes of Omnipotence came out in Atomjack Magazine yesterday. It's worth mentioning here only because it contains a classroom scene with an extended discussion of modal logic and possible worlds semantics, and an argument about omnipotence paradoxes. The latter is loosely adapted from a real life incident that happened to my friend David, who's a very hard-working lawyer and family man. When I wrote the first draft of the story, I e-mailed it to David and asked if he minded having part of his life story re-contextualized as part of the life story of a character who as (a) gay, and (b) a terrorist, David wrote back saying no, don't worry about it, it's fine, and hey, how can I be sure that he's neither of those things?

(2) I finally finished my dissertation last night. Or, rather, a complete rough draft of it, which I realize makes me about halfway done with the process in real terms. Still, it's good to be at that point. Weighing in at 221 pages, it's tentatively entitled "Truth Is A One-Player Game: A Defense Of Monaletheism And Classical Logic."

Here's the table of contents:

Introduction: Dialetheism and Monaletheism
Chapter One: But How Can You Use Logic To Argue About Logic
-(I) What The Explosion Proof Isn't
-(II) Dialetheism And Negation
-(III) Negation And Complementation
Chapter Two: Motivations For Dialetheism
-(I) The Paradoxes Of Motion And Change
-(II) Inconsistent Obligations
-(III) Naïve Set Theory
Chapter Three: Liars And Gluts
Chapter Four: Liars And Gaps
Chapter Five: Liars And Meaninglessness
Chapter Six: Meaninglessness and Revenge
Chapter Seven: The Epistemic Consequences Of Dialetheism
-(I) Failures Of Truth?
-(II) Curry
-(III) Epistemic Consequences
Chapter Eight: Monaletheism And Negation
-(I) Folk Dialetheism?
-(II) Semantic Dialetheism
-(III) Keeping Score
-(IV) A Final Thought About Truth