Really?

The pain of reading turgid, academic, bullet-proof prose continues:

"Thus, the view taken by List and Pettit is non-mysterious – it does not postulate any sui generis collective ‘forces’ – while also being anti-eliminativist in holding that propositions referring to group agents need not be metaphorical and are not readily reducible to propositions referring only to individuals.

...

"In an analogy to Arrow’s impossibility theorem with respect to the aggregation of preferences, List and Pettit argue that there is no aggregation function that meets four plausible general criteria, what they refer to as ‘universal domain, collective rationality, anonymity, and systematicity.’"

I'm sometimes struck by the gap between how interesting this degree sounded when I signed up for it and how completely devoid of interesting content many of the readings are. I think that is somewhat the nature of pursuing a higher degree. If you are to become expert in a field, or at least well versed, you need to learn the very unsexy underpinnings that form the foundation of your topic. I imagine a lot of students who signed up for interesting degrees are questioning their sanity, just like me.

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