Organizational anxiety

A great change has been worked in my room: where once there were several foot-high stacks of papers on the floor and on the shelves—a system with little to recommend it, since it's hard to get at the papers on the bottom, you inevitably forget about the existence of some, and it's unsightly to boot—there are sheaves of papers hanging in folders in some black plastic thingies. Cabinets, I guess. Since the thought of organizing them according to subject, in general, caused me to die (literally—I am now dead) (and of course some papers would belong in multiple places anyway), they are, for the most part, just hanging in folders according to the first initial of the last name of the author, with a few people having been broken out according to importance or volume (one important and voluminous exception to this is Velleman, who resides in the "V" folder, with everyone else in a little non-hanging folder insert marked "not velleman": there are currently only two such papers). Of course, this is also a silly system, since I will inevitably forget about papers that are unfortunately sandwiched somewhere in the middle of "B" (for example), and the ones at the back are hard to get at. This problem would be lessened somewhat were I more assiduous about entering all papers I have copies of into my bibtex bibliography, where I could, I suppose, add "tags" or even "annotations" to them to aid in their relocation. But, well, I haven't been, and the thought of going through all of them to add them would, if I weren't already dead, cause me to die. So here I am.

I also made gestures towards adding some of the papers I've been carting around since I was an undergrad (these already in folders according to the class whence they originated) to the system, which led to many remarkable and amazing discoveries: for instance, apparently, I once read a paper called '"I have changed his way of seeing" - Goethe, Lichtenberg, and Wittgenstein'. (It is collected here[1], evidently, which also houses Eldridge's "Romantic Subjectivity in Goethe and Wittgenstein", which I thought was interesting when I read it—here—perhaps a reasonable companion to Conant's "On Going the Bloody Hard Way in Philosophy".) Doesn't that sound just right up my alley? It does; it's probably a more direct route to my alley than is my stomach, and yet I can't remember the first thing about it. I only say I read it because it would also have been up my alley, which hasn't changed much, when I printed it out way back when, and surely I read it then. This would have been in winter quarter 03-04, I believe, for the first run of Conant and Snyder's "Resemblance and Family Resemblance" class. Fun fact: I gave Joel Snyder my copy of the wizard book because it has a composite photograph of the authors on the back, and they were interested in examples of such things, and I think he still has it. Anyway I don't have it. Perhaps it is permissible, after five years, to have forgotten the content of a paper.

[1] Interesting Denglishism in the synopsis: "cannot be overseen". Obviously they mean "cannot be overlooked". Well, really, should not be overlooked. But also it can übersehen werden, so, hey.