Subject: Whether or not you'll graduate...
Hi Jose (or should I call you "Jimmy"? faculty members are using both, but mostly "Jimmy"?).
As your major advisor, it appears from the mid-term deficiency report that you're on your way to failing Kant. And Mitch reports that there are serious problems with your seminar rewrite for your Portfolio.
The question becomes: Will you graduate?
Based on my experience with you, Jose, the issue is not whether you are smart but how you try to be smart. So, for example, with Kant, my guess is that you want to use whatever impresses you in Kant to be smart on your terms, rather than learning how smart the text is on its terms. If that's right, I have no idea how you're going to pass Kant. Julia will fail you if you fail to meet the requirements of the course. It's really that simple, Jose.
And I suspect there's a version of the same problem of how you try to be smart going on with your seminar paper rewrite. Learning philosophy is like learning a foreign language, only the way it is foreign is that it is a conceptual language, a situation made more complicated by the multiplicity of conceptual languages (early then late Wittgenstein, Hume then Kant, etc. etc.).
Are you going to do what's necessary to learn Wittgenstein's conceptual language well enough to not indulge in impressively-Jose-gibberish? Or are you going to accept the fact that you are not going to graduate?
Your choice, Jose.
Tom
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