The New York Times Magazine has an article that attempts to explain, in layman’s terms, David Foster Wallace’s philosophy thesis from his senior year at Amherst.

A highly specialized, 76-page work of semantics and metaphysics, it is not for the philosophically faint of heart. Brace yourself for a sample sentence: “Let Φ (a physical possibility structure) be a set of distinct but intersecting paths ji–jn, each of which is a set of functions, L’s, on ordered pairs (), such that for any Ln, Lm in some ji, Ln R Lm, where R is a primitive accessibility relation corresponding to physical possibility understood in terms of diachronic physical compatibility.” There are reasons that he’s better known for an essay about a boat.

Until his recent death (but not because of it), the thesis was generally unavailable to the public until this past September.