About

This blog is a tool — or maybe an exercise — intended to further my personal investigation into two broad categories of questions:
  • Why do people disagree so sharply about what's true? Is there any way to reliably resolve such disputes?
  • What should we do in life? Also, what does it mean to say that we 'should' do one thing rather than another?
I find that writing forces me to organize and think through these ideas much more clearly than only reading what others have written. It's the teaching-to-learn principle. Posts will range from introductions to philosophical topics to discussions about very niche papers. I might feel bad about subjecting people to the latter, except reading Internet blog posts is purely voluntary.

What sparked my own interest in these things? In short: politics and religion. These two aspects of human life feature seemingly unresolvable disagreements about what's true and what we should do. My own religious and political positions have changed dramatically since high school and early college. This drew my attention to the process of comparing claims about the world. I hope we can do better than defending whichever views our parents or our corner of society takes for granted. That's not a reliable method of converging toward truth.

Credentials: B.A. in Linguistics. Work experience in administering small business networks. Current student in the Library Science graduate program of the University of Missouri (taking classes in Omaha).

Philosophy credentials: Nothing formal. I make heavy use of the university library and the Internet, but haven't taken any Philosophy courses.