I blame Frank Kirkland (Hunter College). Yes, I’m naming names! We’re talking some serious corruption of the youth here. Well, maybe –maybe– I was already semi-corrupted and primed by the time I got to Hunter. Like many visual artists, I got into Nietzsche in art-school, and had what I thought were “deep conversations,” peppered with “profound realizations”with my peers, well into the night about the nature of all things, etc. etc. All that hot a brick wall once I walked into Kirkland’s course to study The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Nothing pleased this professor! Nothing! Nothing was clear enough, concise enough. Nothing! I didn’t know enough philosophy to support the points I was trying to make. Well, I had to show him, now didn’t I?

For the money.

I was majoring in International Relations focusing on peace and conflict resolution in the Middle East. I soon decided that much more interesting than the diplomatic back-and-forth were the underlying normative questions that the diplomatic stuff, to my mind, either ignored or smuggled in or distorted.

I was an English major but found myself liking the philosophical questions raised in literature. Then I minored in philosophy, had a great class on human nature, where we read Aristotle and Hume but also EO Wilson, and I started reading Dawkins and then Dennett, and next thing you know I wanted to figure out how to answer questions about the human mind and free will.

24 years ago I was an undergraduate in a first year introduction to philosophy class. The course textbook described philosophy as the pursuit of “intellectual freedom”. This meant subjecting even our most basic and fundamental assumptions and beliefs to critical analysis and reflection. 24 years later and the goal of intellectual freedom is still the prime motivation behind my teaching, reading and writing.

I had some philosophy classes in high school, but the subject didn’t really grab me at the time. What did grab me then was literature. So I decided I wanted to go and do literary studies. As it turned out, at my university of choice one had to do a first year in some other humanities discipline before you could more into literary studies; I considered a few things and then picked philosophy. I think the generality of it appealed to me: you could do philosophy with regard to pretty much any topic. Anyway, after a few months of philosophy I abandoned any thought of literary studies – philosophy seemed much more the real deal to me. Pretty happy with that outcome. Nevertheless, I can easily imagine myself having ended up in some entirely different field and being perfectly happy there as well.

My first year in college I declared a chemistry major with a Russian minor. I had studied at a high school with a heavy emphasis on science and technology, so as far as I was concerned, the scientific fields were the only fields with any value. The humanities were fields of meaningless pablum. I had, however, always found Russia fascinating, so I began a study of Russian language during my high school education, which I viewed as a tool to understanding the Soviet Union.

My first semester in college I read Sartre’s Existentialism is a Humanism, and it blew my mind. I didn’t process what was happening then, but I definitely thought that I should take another philosophy class. Gradually, over semesters, the philosophy classes I took whittled away at everything I thought I knew. I didn’t feel confident enough to major in philosophy by my sophomore year, so I dropped the chemistry and migrated to an art major (?) and kept the Russian minor. Somehow that seemed a safer bet, as I could always go into advertising. Again, majors were just tools. I then moved to NY to work in the advertising industry, which sucked, and by junior year moved to St. Petersburg, Russia to study Russian there.

Only then, during this Russia experience, did I realize that the questions that interested me were the philosophical ones. It wasn’t Russia that interested me per se, but rather political theory. So too with the other stuff I liked: the philosophy of science laid bare some of the concerns that I’d had percolating since high school. Ethics raised questions that I’d always troubled over but never had a language to address. I wanted to debate about these issues, not to become a chemist or an artist.

Long story short, I was terrified to tell my mother that I wanted to major in philosophy. I planned out my strategy carefully and approached her at 2:00 in the morning, while she was sleeping. She took it well. The rest is history.

I wanted to join my school’s track team when I was in sixth grade, but my dad would only allow me to join if I listened to a series of lectures on metaphysics and epistemology and then passed a quiz. I still can’t believe I accepted his conditions.

I had doubts about Christianity late in high school, but not yet to the point of abandoning it. Someone suggested Kierkegaard to me.

When I was in 9th grade, my school had a particularly baffling way of scheduling classes – different subjects at different times on different days in different rooms. It seemed to be an experiment developed by a team of psychologists. Or possibly the Stasi. Running late one day, I burst into what I thought was the room for my next class, only to find it empty. The board was full of terminology for a senior English class, and had ‘existentialism’ ‘Sartre’ and ‘Kierkegaard’ among the words there. (And honestly, the story so far sounds a bit like Kafka, doesn’t it?) I just wondered what all those words meant, went home, looked them up, and found myself arguing out loud with books. My mom later got me a copy of _The Stranger_. So I guess it’s all my mom’s fault.

Existentialism didn’t end up being my AOS, as a chain of similar exposures to other material kept sparking my interest. Philosophy was the one thing that I did and did well that captured my imagination outside of an institutional setting, though. I probably could have done a lot of other things, but there was never really a point past the age of 19 or so that I thought about devoting my time to anything else.

I always wanted to go into some sort of scientific research for the sake of advancing human knowledge itself. I wanted to be a physicist and loved the cutting edge, deep questions. I burned out my first year of college, and when I returned to school, I wanted a fun class. I took intro to philosophy, and then took more philosophy classes. And I never stopped, because I found philosophers asking the foundational questions that drew me to science.

It was, quite honestly, Monty Python’s “Bruce’s Philosophers Song.” I was a high school senior, a Python obsessive, and couldn’t figure out what one of the names mentioned in the song was. It sounded like “Nature,” but clearly wasn’t. I looked up the lyrics online (via dial-up modem) and found that it was Nietzsche. A bit of further digging turned up that this Nietzsche character was just the sort of person a budding atheist should read. I thus read BGE and The Antichrist over the summer before I started college. (Who didn’t during the heady days of the late 90’s?!) I had no idea what this guy was saying, but I wanted to figure it out. So, I took some philosophy courses my first year in college, which didn’t really help. I then took Philosophy of Art my sophomore year and that’s what hooked me and eventually led to my becoming a professional philosopher. Nietzsche’s status as an idol for me was eclipsed long ago, I’m happy to report. But I think it’s fitting that it was Eric Idle who instigated that idolization in the first place.

During my school years I got curious, sometimes passionate, about different subjects but eventually got bored/tired with them. Except for philosophy, which I could not even imagine making me bored. I’m still living up to the limits of my imagination.

I took an ethics course my first semester in college, but it didn’t grab me. It was, in fact, the only course I took from the Philosophy Department during college. But I took some political theory courses that mildly interested me. In one such course on Plato and Aristotle, I ran across Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony with the Continual Reference to Socrates. Whoa! My professor (George Klosko) said I really should read Nietzsche. Yep. Then I took a course from the Religious Studies course on existentialism. This seemed to matter more than what I was mostly studying (economics). I then started perusing the philosophy areas of reputable bookstores. I read Russell’s Problems of Philosophy after I graduated college. I then wanted to study philosophy full time.

Pull quote: “Like many other middle-class kids from suburban Philadelphia, I went to Penn State. I ended up doing a few majors before spending a few years in the late 70s studying Physical Education. I love sports, so the part about learning how to be a coach or gym teacher wasn’t painful, but I was aiming at a PhD in what they were just beginning to call “Kinesiology,” so what really turned me on was Anatomy, Physiology, Exercise Physiology, Biomechanics and so on. So when the PSU Phys Ed department wouldn’t let me arrange an internship in Cardiac Rehabilitation, but instead wanted to force me into an internship as a high school gym teacher, I took a leave of absence to think things over. And during that time, I picked up Plato’s Republic, which I remembered from an Intro to Philosophy course. I was hooked, especially by the treatment of the body: the erotic component of philosophical training; the training of the guardians; the discussion of desire, appetite, spirit, all of it. ”

Long version: http://proteviblog.typepad.com/protevi/2007/05/analytic_and_co.html

I majored in philosophy, loved my classes, always assumed I would become a public interest lawyer. My senior year, I became pretty depressed, realizing that law school meant I would likely never study philosophy again. So, I applied to grad school, in addition to law school, thinking I wouldn’t get in, and then went to grad school, because someone paying me to study philosophy seemed more immediately enticing than paying to go to law school. I went thinking I would drop out and go to law school after a bit. Here I am, philosophy professor and a weak-willed, public interest law failure.

I started off as an economics major in college, interested in big questions about the organization of economic life. I found that systematic conceptual and normative questions I had about economic theory were largely neglected by economists but taken seriously by philosophy. This made my move to philosophy compelling. I retained my interests in many other subjects, and found philosophy to be a great place to pursue those diverse intellectual interests, because for nearly any x, where x is some discipline or mode of inquiry, there is a philosophy of x.

I really liked physics in high school and I read some thoughts by Stephen Hawking in the Brief History of Time that I took to be a call for those interested in physics to do more philosophy. I looked for undergraduate programs that would let me do both, and the University of St Andrews had a program called The Logic and Philosophy of Science with Physics, so I signed up. After my first class on quantum I asked a lot of questions in tutorial and found the answers frustrating (e.g. “no one knows what that variable represents”). When my philosophy and physics classes conflicted and I could only attend half of my physics labs my grade started to suffer, so I made the full switch. The other person in my cohort, another woman, dropped philosophy for physics. I think that no one completed this program, in the end, due to the schedule conflicts.

I intended to go up to Cambridge to read a humanities subject, and had more or less settled on English Literature. But the rather gruff admissions tutor (himself a historian) took one look at me and my background as a natural scientist, and just said “You can’t read English, sloppy subject, you won’t like it, moral sciences is the thing for you” I said “fine, what’s that?” and he said they would send me a reading list, which they did. The rest was just an ordinary love affair, but it has lasted fifty-three years now, and is still going strong.

I grew up in Pretoria in the 1980s. At school, we were taught a very particular conception of South African society. I liked reading about history a lot and began to discover various inconvenient facts that were not talked about much in class. I eventually won a national history competition in 1989; when I received the gold medal at my matric valedictory/graduation, I was much too intimidated by the occasion to remark how curious it was that those who studied South African history were rewarded with medals, whilst those who sought to transform it were rewarded with imprisonment, exile, or assassination. When I arrived at university in 1990, I joined the student movement and spent most of my time thinking/eating/sleeping/talking about politics. There was a very strong emphasis in the student movement on exploring the theory of the national democratic revolution, and this required thinking in a way that did not rely on the conventional opinions of white middle class society. So we already had to adopt something like the method of philosophical scepticism on a daily basis; the thought that we had been massively deceived by an evil demon was not all that strange a supposition. I was also very impressed by the courage of other activists who had experienced detention and torture, and did not hesitate to speak truth to power. They knew they were on the right side of the issue, and so could not be daunted by bullying from the administration or the police, etc. That became something of a lesson in the importance of taking great care to get things right. Since it was the people in the Philosophy Department who were asking the hardest questions about how to articulate and defend my political positions correctly, I ended up doing postgraduate work in philosophy rather than history. In a nutshell, then, I got hooked on philosophy because I was a political activist who was angry about ever being so naive and diffident.

The hook was an undergraduate professor who clearly had the best job in the world. On my first day of college, I went to my Intro Ethics course, where I listened to a 50 year old hippy who kicked his feet onto his desk in class, swore a lot, and made me think hard about important questions. I simply had to do what he did for a living. Turns out, I’m a bit more into research than he was, and I don’t actually teach the same way he did; but I was right — this is a pretty amazing job.

I started in journalism but then decided I needed to know more about politics before I wrote about it. Took some political science classes at a university where there weren’t any political theorists and they kept telling me I belonged in philosophy, that the questions I kept raising in class and in my papers were philosophical questions. So off I went! Loved it from Day 1 and haven’t looked back.

First semester in college, Intro to Philosophy, Fear and Trembling. Still haven’t gotten over the shock. This semester, teaching Intro to Ethics, last book: Fear and Trembling.

I was a mathematician in the sixth form. My school had just hired (to teach English) a young man who had lately completed the Moral Sciences (alias Philosophy) Tripos at Cambridge, where his main supervisor had been Timothy Smiley. He insisted that I should read a book called *The Foundations of Arithmetic*, by someone whose name I was not then sure how to pronounce. I was captivated.

About ten years later, while visiting MIT, I told this story to the still much-missed George Boolos. He smiled wryly and said ‘Nothing like starting at the top’.

Most generally, I was enchanted by the way in which studying philosophy taught me to view the world constantly anew.

More specifically, it was probably some combination of (i) being the youngest of three in a jewish family in which there were constant arguments/discussions about politics, news, and ethics at the dinner table, (ii) my step-father’s copy of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which captivated me, (iii) an admired high school English teacher (Mr. Holmes) telling me to philosophy classes in college, (iv) enjoying physics but discovering that it did not come naturally to me, (v) absolutely loving my classes with Jaegwon Kim, Victor Caston, and Martha Nussbaum in college, and finally, and perhaps the genuine efficient cause, (vi) Jaegwon Kim telling me in college, “Matt, yeah. Uh, I think a few years of graduate study could be a good thing. It, uh, at least can’t hurt.” I think I missed the implicature but oh well.

It was a temporary solution. At least that’s how it started.
When the war in Croatia started in the late summer of 1991. I just turned 18 and was a graduate student at local informatics high school. My wish was to study mathematics in Zagreb, but due to circumstances, I enrolled to sociology and philosophy at Zadar, my hometown. It was to be a temporary solution, untill the next year when shooting will surely stop; so I thought. Conflicts lasted until summer 1995. and in meantime I discovered to my pleasure there was a lot of math in philosophy. As well as psychology. So I enrolled it as my second major. Now I’m assistant professor in philosophy spreading a good word of logic.
You never know how is philosophy going to find you 😉

I discovered Hegel and became fascinated by his work. After degrees in music and political science, I left the US for Ireland where I spent a transformational year studying for a MA in Philosophy at UCD – and it was while I was there I decided this (philosophy) was what I wanted to do. An amazing department that inspires me still.

Great story Kris. I really get your attitude about the debt I also owe to so many who helped get me here both as an undergrad and in graduate school in Knoxville. Every time I’ve seen Rich Aquila at APAs the beers are on me, for example. Despite a lot of bad going down in the discipline, we should celebrate the helping hands of genuine good will that explain why some of us are here rather than a probably worse elsewhere.

I didn’t really do much work at school – and didn’t read much, for school or pleasure. Mostly played football (soccer). Left school and drove a van for a few years. For some reason, I read William Burroughs Naked Lunch and decided I liked reading after all. I read Herman Hesse, Sartre’s Nausea and Existentialism and Humanism, Brave New World, and Oscar Wilde, and then started writing myself. I went to university in my mid 20s, to study English Literature – wanting to learn to write. In the first year I had to study 3 subjects. I wanted going to do history of art and economics, but economics clashed with English. So I did philosophy instead. I wasn’t very good at English Literature or History of Art, but seemed to be quite good at philosophy. I think I decided I wanted to carry on with it from the 2nd year. (Even before I did philosophy though, people would tell me that none of my stories really had plots. Just people arguing about stuff most the time.)

I realized I wanted to know more about philosophy one day in high school (around 1975) when the music teacher, Jim Machan (whom I recently had a chance to thank), triggered an hour of Socratic discussion among the 6 of us about aesthetics. At the end, I woke up as from a trance (having been actively participating), and filed away the word “philosophy,” the name for this thing I recognized from my own private wonderings about whether I could be sure I wasn’t dreaming, or whether there were any standards except people’s preference. The first course I signed up for in college was Intro to Philosophy (Andy Levine) and it gradually overtook my art major. In grad school I started with…aesthetics.

I read a fair bit of existentialist fiction, in part thanks to 10th grade French. By 12th grade, I had moved from Camus and Sartre to Walker Percy and John Barth. Also, that year, a friend introduced me to the word ‘causal’, which I initially read as ‘casual’, and we also saw a production of a Tom Stoppard play, ‘Enter a Free Man’, which I did not much understand. In college, while I majored in physics, I still took a philosophy course here and there. It was in Chris Gauker’s Philosophy of Language course that somehow a switch flipped, and I started to understand a bit better what philosophy involved. I realized that I was more interested in how physics afforded us knowledge of the world than in learning the physics, so I added philosophy as a second major. I learned even more about what philosophy involved from Joe Rouse, and got really interested in general philosophy of science. In grad school, to my continuing amazement, I found myself gravitating to the history of philosophy, but I think that’s because Descartes’s right, that reading these works is like having conversations with some of the most amazing minds. I would only add that those conversations are satisfyingly wide ranging and not so narrow.

We once discussed the nature of art in my high school English class. What was art? What makes art good or bad? Although I didn’t really know what aesthetics was (or even philosophy for that matter), I remember being fascinated by the discussion. Those questions were in the forefront of my mind for weeks. I was intrigued by how much work could be done from the armchair and drawn to the difficulty of providing justified and correct answers to those questions.

I was actually exposed to very little philosophy in high school. We read some Locke and Hobbes in our government course and some friends introduced me to Peter Singer’s work on animal welfare. Singer’s work had a profound effect on me, but not immediately.

It wasn’t until college that I realized I wanted to major in philosophy and then pursue it as a career. I had originally planned to become a lawyer. My academic advisor suggested that I take a logic course to hone my analytical reasoning skills for the LSAT, which I did. I enjoyed the course and found it easy. Remembering that I enjoyed the work of the philosophers I read in high school, I decided to take another philosophy course and then another and then I eventually added philosophy as a second major. I enjoyed all of my courses quite a bit, but I still saw them as a means to becoming a lawyer. Then, in my junior year, I took an upper level ethics course with Doug Portmore and was hooked. I came to the conclusion that the work I would do in philosophy was going to be more important, and significantly more enjoyable, than the work I would have done as a lawyer. (I don’t know if it is actually true that I do more important work than I would have done as a lawyer since I don’t know what type of law I would have ended up practicing. However, I do know that I enjoy being a philosopher significantly more than I would have enjoyed being a lawyer.)

When I was 15 I knew nothing at all about philosophy, but was reading Malcolm X’s autobiography. I read there that, at the beginning of his eight-year prison sentence, he of course read lots of philosophers. He mentioned Socrates, but also that he didn’t respect Schopenhauer, Kant, Nietzsche. But I thought something like: If this is what you ought to read at the start of eight years of isolation, I should read it. So I read the Meno, wishing it would never end, and very soon I had gone through most of the dialogues. When I realized this was something I could actually do for a living there was no turning back.

It was the 80s and I was taking mostly ‘theory’ in the French department. While I was taking Intermediate Semiotics (or something like that), my girlfriend was taking Theory of Meaning in the philosophy department (Frege, Russell, Davidson, Dummett). It didn’t take long for me to realize that she was making sense and I wasn’t.

Unlike most philosophers, my undergrad degree is not even in the humanities, but the natural sciences (physics). I’m Jamaican, and old enough that at the time I went to high school it was still modeled on the British system, where (at the time anyway) you specialized in three or four subjects in your last two years in school (“sixth form”) for “A-levels.” My favorite subjects were the humanities, but unfortunately the humanities teachers had left. So I did maths, physics, and chemistry at A-levels, which, given the lesser degree of flexibility of the University of the West Indies (British-modeled, again), meant that I then had to do a science degree. I was pretty alienated from the course material, but felt that having started the degree, I might as well finish it, which I did. But it had no relevance to the exciting things that were happening in the country at the time–the radical social justice movement of the 1970s (anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, anti-racist) for which the 1972 election of the social-democratic government of Michael Manley’s People’s National Party was a key factor. So I decided to go back to school (I was then teaching science in a polytechnic) and do a different graduate degree that would connect intellectually with the exciting cultural and political ferment of the time. I considered a range of options–English, history, political science–but eventually chose philosophy (despite having done only a single course in it) because of my naive young person’s conception of it as the subject that gave you the “Big Picture.” Through a Commonwealth Fellowship, I was able to do an MA at the University of Toronto, and then go on to do a PhD. There were no black professors in the department at the time (nor are there any now, decades later), but Marxism seemed to provide a suitably radical framework to conceptualize these issues (imperialism, exploitation, Third World underdevelopment, etc.). So I did a dissertation on Marxist theory, which would eventually lead me to other varieties of radical political theory. And so here I am, decades later, trying to contribute to the development of a black radical perspective in the discipline, and thus its eventual “unwhitening,” both demographic and conceptual/theoretical.

I went to college planning to be a journalist. I realized quickly in my first term that the lower level journalism classes were dreadfully dull. Meanwhile my large state university’s honors college required all freshman to take a year long great books class. I can’t say I was hooked that first term by this class as most of my thinking about it consisted in worrying about whether I’d get a decent grade (let’s just say my high school didn’t prepare me well to write in college). It did pique my interest enough to motivate me to sign up for two classes given by the philosophy department. One of these classes intrigued me (history of modern with Stephen Reynolds); the other class completely bowled me over and forever hooked me. This was the late, great, Greg Fitch’s metaphysics survey class. Greg was completely brilliant and a captivating teacher. Within two weeks of the start of the spring term I had switched to philosophy. Unfortunately I never got to thank Greg properly. Thanks, Greg. You’re missed.

I started my undergrad as a math/biology double major, but got frustrated with the imprecision of the statistics used in biology. Since the computer science lab I was supposed to take my first semester wouldn’t fit into my schedule, I was placed by complete chance into an intro to moral philosophy class. I enjoyed the class, so signed up for symbolic logic the next semester since it counted towards the math major. I was completely hooked by a field that offers entire classes on how to argue well, so now I’m in grad school.

Sometime in middle school I got really interested in radical political philosophy (anti-capitalist anarchism, in particular). Also, I always had a talent for public speaking, had been winning school contests doing that since elementary school, and so in high school I naturally joined the debate team. At the time there were some new-fangled arguments called “kritiks” (yes, spelled like they were German), and because of my interest in radical political philosophy, I was interested in these philosophical arguments in debate, as opposed to merely policy and political arguments. Because of kritiks I started reading Michel Foucault, bell hooks, Judith Butler, Bakunin, Richard Delgado, etc. in my time in high school. But I knew that philosophy departments were dominated by analytic philosophy, so I assumed going to college I would try to study political theory, or if that didn’t work out maybe cultural anthropology or communication theory. Weirdly, the college I ended up going to didn’t have much comm theory, no cultural anthropology, only conservative political theory. What it did have was a continental and non-Eurocentric philosophy department.

When I was in high school I was able to take a Symbolic Logic course at the local university (with Prof. Charles Sayward) and it was like getting free credit for doing fun puzzles! I also had a positive experience in Lincoln-Douglas debate much like David mentions above, which introduced me to Locke and Mill. I knew I might want to take philosophy courses in college but when I began we first had to read Plato’s Republic. It was the worst and stupidest book I had ever encountered; I was outraged by every part of it and particularly the proposed anonymous herd-rearing of children. Now I’m a Plato scholar. I can’t believe how lucky I am to actually be paid for this work! Unfortunately, to be entirely honest I still regret being a doctor. The more I study philosophy the more I love it, but the more I realize my time in the world might have been better spent being a doctor.

Philosophy deals with many things, and so there are many routes into it. Mine was through mathematics. I was trained as a mathematician, and during this I came across logic and the foundations of mathematics, which I found the most interesting part. It raised all sorts of issues, both technical and philosophical, in the philosophy of mathematics; and I found the interaction fascinating. When I obtained by first academic position (in a philosophy department), my eyes were opened to the rest of philosophy. I discovered that I had always been a philosopher at heart – though I had no idea that that was what it was. When I was a kid, I was brought up as a Christian (a view that I rejected when I was an undergraduate). I was puzzled by various theological issues – especially the problem of evil. Also, a central Christian moral teaching is that one should “love one’s neighbour as oneself”. I was puzzled as to how this related to many of the social mores of the time, such as the death penalty, gay rights (not called that in those days), the necessity of marriage.

So that’s how I got into philosophy. What keeps me there? Philosophy deals with so many issues. Nearly every domain of thought has philosophical aspects. So there has never ceased to be a fascinating array of things to think about. Some of these are technical, and can seem arcane. I still enjoy such issues. But many philosophical issues are ones where everyone has a view (not always held very thoughtfully): about religion, morality, politics. These are really important questions. And I love the fact that one can talk to anyone about them, even—perhaps especially—if they are not professional philosophers. So it’s not just the abstract problem-solving side of philosophy that appeals to me. It is the fact that it engages in a fundamental way with everyone’s life.

When I was a freshman in high school, I started reading philosophical novels with a guy who was in my Spanish class. We would even read them during class, because it was so easy and boring. We read 1984, Brave New World, Neuromancer, A Clockwork Orange, Crime and Punishment, and The Stranger. I found the ideas in these books very exciting, and I was eager to talk about them. I found a few people at my high school like me. One friend lent me her copies of The Fountainhead and The Handmaid’s Tale; another pointed me to Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, and Bach and The Mind’s Eye (co-written with Dennett). I soon ran across a popularization of Darwinian theory. These books opened up a whole new world of intellectual excitement, one that was far-removed from the conservative, mindless Midwestern city where I grew up. By this point, I was aware that there was a subject, philosophy, that dealt more directly with ideas, but the books that I tried to read about it were too difficult for me and seemed very dull. But in my senior government class, we read about the ideas of Hobbes, Locke, and the “Classical Republicans” of Ancient Rome, and their influence on the Founders. I looked at the original texts, and I was able to make some sense of them. I thought, “Maybe I can understand real philosophy, after all.” At that point, I thought I might be a journalist or lawyer, but after three years of studying philosophy as an undergraduate, I decided that being a philosophy professor would be better. One day, I thought, I’d really be able to understand some of the issues that fascinated me. Plus, I’d have more free time. Not sure I was right about either of these things, but it’s worked out okay.

After my father died and my mother was diagnosed with dementia, I took time off from undergraduate studies to take care of business. I eventually went back to undergraduate studies while working full-time. During the final phase of my undergraduate work, I read my first piece of philosophy, Plato’s Apology. I remember thinking that Socrates was courageous and admiring his clever argumentation. My mother died shortly after I finished my undergraduate degree. At that time I decided that I was going to study what I was interested in, not what I thought I should be interested in. I enrolled in a graduate level ancient philosophy survey course as a part-time non-degree seeking student, and then after that a graduate level philosophy of biology course in which we read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. In both courses, I was in awe of the power of argumentation. Aristotle and Darwin were my hooks into a Masters program, which eventually lead to a PhD with AOSs in epistemology, logic, and philosophy of science.

I dropped out of high school to be a professional skater, which involved a lot of traveling for demos, X-Games, advertising shoots, etc. In the downtime (waiting for airplanes and trains, driving through various countries), I discovered that I had a lot of intellectual energy. A combination of seeing different parts of the world, early career success, and being left to my own devices resulted in a need to find answers to questions I didn’t yet recognize as ethical, existential, philosophical. I began reading and studying a lot—way more than I ever did in high school. I read novels, studied music theory and the world’s religions. Before long I realized I loved philosophy. I was 20-21 when I felt like doing something other than professional skating with my life. It was obvious to me at that point that I should try to study philosophy in college. In California, where I grew up, there is a great community college system. I spent a couple years going to community college, and eventually I was able to transfer to UC Berkeley as a Junior. I was there only five semesters, and it wasn’t enough. So, I applied to graduate school. I was in graduate school for six years, and it wasn’t enough. Not sure it will ever be enough.

I have yet to get into undergrad philosophy at University of Delaware because I thought they required calculus for it (they don’t). I should get in there sometime during the summer semester. I probably won’t have to continue going to this community college after this semester!

Anyway, my answer is pretty simple. Philosophy is pretty much the only thing I’m interested in that would allow me to earn a living wage. I could go into dance, as an alternative–I’m naturally good at dancing (unlike philosophy, hehe), but it doesn’t carry the appeal that philosophy does.

Before I had decided on philosophy, I thought of being a social studies teacher; today, I realize I wouldn’t have the tolerance for high schoolers.

I’ve also thought of being a sociologist. But no, I’m going with philosophy!

I went into philosophy because I didn’t find my other classes challenging. I had planned to major in History or English, but both were incredibly disappointing. My philosophy classes, by contrast, were kicking my butt. Plus, I thought my first philosophy professor, Paul Franks, was clearly the smartest person I had ever encountered (I don’t think I’ve ever been shaken of this impression).

I started in the paralegal program at Mercer County Community College because, I don’t know, that seemed like a reasonable thing to do at the time. In the first semester we learned about the duties and salaries of paralegals relative to those of lawyers, and that just did not seem like a fair deal to me all. So I decided to become a lawyer instead. But I needed a BA for that, so I transferred to State U- which in my case, happened to be Rutgers. I majored in philosophy because my overachieving lawyer cousin told me that it was a good major for law school. My first semester at Rutgers was terrible. I took a giant religion oriented lecture course, which made absolutely zero sense to me. But my second semester was different story -mostly because of Theory of Knowledge with Peter Klein. I remember that He would start a lot of the classes with a puzzle or a paradox, and I guess I was pretty okay at those, and wrote pretty okay papers because he just assumed that I was applying to grad school for some reason… But once that bug was in my ear, it just started to sound better and better. The next semester I took Philosophy of Mind and Philosophy of Language. Naming and Necessity is what locked it down for me…. Growing up in Princeton, I never for one second assumed that academia would be anything but wack- and so far, it has been *pretty* silly. But honestly, I could do 100 hours of writing, reading, and talking philosophy for $350/week for the foreseeable future and not get remotely disgruntled. It’s that much fun.

What’s odd is that even though my mom is a philosopher, I really didn’t have any idea what philosophy was before I got to college. (Our minds work in different ways, and I think I felt: oh, thats her thing. Once I decided it was also mine, our phone bills skyrocketed.) In any case: I took an ethics course (taught by Tim Scanlon; thanks!) in my sophomore year, because it sounded more interesting than any of the other courses that met at 11am or later. By the second week, I realized that this was a course in which I got to think about the very questions that I was arguing with my friends about until late at night, which was why I needed courses that met late in the morning. And if I made decent arguments, I could get credit for them! Who knew? I had no idea that this was possible!

It took a while before I move from total love of ethics to the idea of grad school, but it was during that ethics course in my sophomore year that I fell down the rabbit hole. Thanks also to Stephanie Lewis, my TA.

I was studying psychology in college and was ok with it in general, thought it bothered me that so many fundamental questions went unasked. Then a kid in my class asked me to check out a book from the library for him and come registration time for the ext semester I found out he had left for Canada without returning the book. By the time I tracked down the book I had to register late and all the classes I was planning to take were closed. All I could take was an intro to philosophy course. I wasn’t particularly excited about it because, having grown up in Greece I had no idea what philosophy was- I thought it was just reciting what the ancients had said- a sort glorified classics, if you like. But when classes started a whole new world was opened up to me- not only I could ask the questions I wanted and was not dismissed, but I actually felt I was getting educated. What ultimately sealed the matter for me though was reading Hume on Induction. I was sold from that moment on.

I studied literature in college and even now I read more literature than philosophy. I found myself drawn to the writers (Swift, Johnson, Shelley, Ruskin, Eliot, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Huxley, Orwell, Styron…) who discussed issues that I thought really matter: how best to live, whether there is a god, whether we have free will, how to respond to evil and injustice, and so on. While I relished the beautiful and powerful language in which these writers expressed their ideas, I resisted being convinced by rhetoric and needed to see the arguments. I also had a friend who was clever and skeptical and seemed to win all the arguments we had. I was the analogue in philosophical argument of the 90-pound weakling in the old comic book ads for body-building. To avoid having sand kicked in my face by the philosophical bully, I needed some training. Graduate work in philosophy seemed to answer both needs.

I am not sure yet that I “went into philosophy” and tell different stories about becoming an academic practitioner in a philosophy department. For one version of the story see my 2002 “An Apprentice’s Anecdotal Field Notes.” In Philosophy and Biography: At the Intersections. Ed. George Yancy. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. This version centers philosophy itself as a pull factor. But, there are two push factors hes well. One is that I was impatient about data collection (I would have probably “go into” sociology and more likely history, otherwise). The other, and in a way the more important one is that I was too poor to rationally choose to be an artist.

A course on Adorno in the Music Department piqued my interest in philosophy, and I started to take some classes in the Philosophy Department. The sort of philosophy I then got on to studying was very different, but I found the questions intriguing and found I had a knack for the way of thinking and writing the subject involved. But music, art, and literature were really more at the center of my intellectual concerns, and I wanted to think about questions in aesthetics and about the sort of existential questions that the works of art I cared about most were raising. When I was studying abroad my junior year, I had as a supervisor a retired Cambridge don, and he and I would spend hour after after, well beyond the appointed period for the supervision, talking about many things, but virtually nothing from the syllabus (I don’t think we even had one, really)—instead talking about Wagner, Mann, Rilke, Nietzsche, among others, about heady questions and ideas that seemed to me to matter so deeply, but most of which didn’t fit neatly into the academic discipline of philosophy, or to admit of anything like an argument that could be set out in a rigorous fashion. It was on one of these long afternoons—one, I distinctly remember, when we were listening to the transcendent Act III of Knappertsbusch’s 1962 Parsifal—that I decided I wanted to think about these kinds of things as a career, if I possibly could. For various reasons, I thought at the time that graduate work in Music or German or Comparative Literature wouldn’t be feasible or fitting. I decided, to some degree faute de mieux as academic disciplines went, that I would study philosophy. So although I had some facility with and deep interest in philosophy, I didn’t feel an overwhelming initial pull toward the *discipline* of philosophy specifically. Though my interests have shifted and broadened, it’s taken a while to feel fully at home in the world of academic philosophy, and, if I am honest, I still don’t feel *entirely* at home here, even when I find so much of my subject very intellectually stimulating to think about, to write about, and to teach. I think it’s because the form of thinking I still love reading most of all is the kind my younger self was captivated by too, the sort in various ways at the academic margins, because it is less about neat arguments that could be published in a respectable journal and more about glimpses of edifying essayistic insight—the kind that we can also get from the great art, literature, film, and music that is trying to say something profound and illuminating about the human condition, without being able to mount an argument to back up what it says.

I became a moral philosopher because my mother was a communist. I grew up in Manhattan as a “red-diaper” baby. This is a term for people whose parents were members of the Communist Party. In my case it was one parent. My father was a-political but my mother was a dedicated member of the party and remained so until her death.
One consequence of this was that at an early age I began reading Marxist classics on dialectical and historical materialism. As a high school student I attended classes in these subjects at the Jefferson School of Social Sciences which was a Marxist adult education institute in New York City associated with the Communist Party, USA. Among the faculty were a number of leftist academics dismissed from the City University of New York, including the school’s director, Howard Selsam. It had as many as 5000 students enrolled per term, but the Subversive Activities Control Board forced its closing in 1956.
Selsam was a serious philosopher who had his Ph.D from Columbia.
Although I abandoned belief in the philosophical system, as well as its political consequences, soon after I entered the City College of New York in 1955 the interest in philosophical ideas, and in particular normative notions,was the lasting legacy of mychildhood upbringing.
Although I was greatly interested in philosophy I decided not to major in it as it seemed very unlikely that one could make a living as a philosopher. Instead—after a one disastrous semester as an engineering student—I became a mathematics major. I did, however, take an honors minor in philosophy writing a thesis on the role of theory in science.
Still hedging my bets I decided to enroll in the fledgling logic and the methodology of science program at Berkeley rather than the philosophy program. But after two years I realized my heart was in ethics not mathematics and transferred into the philosophy department. I did get a masters degree in mathematics as a consolation prize with an oral exam by a committee including Addison and Chang. Its most amusing feature was after answering a number of answers correctly being asked what the fundamental theorem of the calculus was—to which my answer was “I have no idea.” Since this answer was true, I passed!
I was fortunate at Berkeley to be there for the three years that Tom Nagel was an Assistant Professor. He supervised my thesis—mostly long distance – since I spent one year as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in London and then finished the thesis while I was an instructor at Harvard. The thesis was on the nature and justification of coercion and it contained the first draft of my article on paternalism— the most frequently reprinted article of mine. The general topic of coercion, particularly the question of what conduct may be legitimately criminalized, has remained a constant theme in my work.

I tried not to go into philosophy. Luckily, my undergraduate tutor wasn’t in her room when I called to say that Locke’s *Essay* had made me want to give up the subject. So I persevered, got a little further with Locke, and then next term studied Mill’s *Liberty*. Since then, I’ve seen no overriding reason to give up.

In high-school I had an AP European History class that had a lot of philosophical content, though I didn’t really know it at the time. We started out reading Machiavelli, and used his thought to think about various historical developments. We also used a fairly simplistic Hegelian approach to history to provide structure to our thought – in what ways were latter events a repetition of Henri IV’s “grand design” and things like that. That got me thinking philosophically with any rigor at all for the first time, though I mostly approached it via history. When I went to college, I at first thought I’d be a chemical engineer (I had several AP Chem credits, among other things) but got bored with the idea quickly. In my sophomore year, two important things happened: I was interested in relativity, and more or less by accident I bought Hans Reichenbach’s _The Philosophy of Space and Time_ at a book store, having no idea who he was or what logical positivism was, and became a sort of tiny logical positivist, spouting out about operative definitions and the like. I also took, at the advice of a friend of mine, a philosophy of religion class. It was taught by a professor from near-by Northwest Nazarene University who was teaching the class on the side. (A shout-out to Alan White above for this.) I’m ashamed to say I can’t remember the professor’s name now, as it was a sort of life-changing thing for me. I was in the process of growing increasingly skeptical of the religious views I’d been brought up in, and this class let me know that there were rational ways to think about the issues. For a while more I wasn’t sure if I should be a historian or a philosopher, but I eventually decided that while I really liked to read history, I didn’t think I’d like being a historian, while I would like to be a philosopher. The philosophy faculty at Boise State University at the time wasn’t the most advanced or up to date (though they had produced Hud Hudson, mentioned by Kris McDaniel above, a few years before me) but they supported me, taught me a lot about the history of philosophy, and gave me a good start. (I should also mention the support and influence of Joe Keim-Campbell, now at Washington State, who spend a lot of un-compensated time doing independent studies on all sorts of topics with me and other philosophy students, and Randell Holmes, a set theorist in the math department at Boise State who spent a lot of time teaching me about logic and talking with me about Spinoza and also the philosophy of mathematics, despite my having no special skill in it.)

Matt–thanks so much for this. Your post was a sort of Baconish (Francis empirically as well as Kevin) six-degrees of separation from my own obscure teacher Jones to Hudson to Campbell to McDaniel–all of whom I’ve had some truck with. And all to whom I owe some debt of becoming a better (I hope) philosopher.

I started studying philosophy because I hated working as a programmer. I continued studying philosophy because it frustrated the hell out of me (it still does, of course). I ended up in graduate school because my coworkers at the Newton Department of Public Works weren`t interested in talking about the idiotic history of the Catholic doctrine of clerical celibacy.

I didn’t think long enough about it.

Only think I like to do.

My path into philosophy turns out to have been a cross between Frank Jackson’s and Michael Smith’s, which seems fitting given how much they’ve influenced me.

I went to Monash intended to do maths and (the Australian equivalent of) pre-law. I took philosophy almost on a whim because I needed a fourth subject in first year. But I soon decided that I’d learn much more about the formal stuff I was interested in by studying logic with Lloyd Humberstone than I would doing yet another turgid integration by parts in intermediate calculus. And this was right; I learned a ton from Lloyd.

I had ridiculously good philosophy professors. I got to hear Frank Jackson lecture on philosophy of mind in my first year, took philosophy of science with John Bigelow, and should have (if I hadn’t been so fussy about scheduling) taken Indian philosophy with Rae Langton. But the undergrad course that probably influenced me most of all wasn’t even in the Philosophy department. It was Michael Janover’s year long history of political theory course in the Politics department. Michael Janover didn’t have the scholarly reputation of the superstars in the philosophy department, but he might have been the best undergrad teacher I’ve ever encountered. I was fascinated by Euclid’s influence on Hobbes, and soon I was citing Rousseau in my law school papers. This turned out not to actually improve one’s law school grades as much as learning the file details of how to file complaints, and so I decided to go somewhere I could do theory-related work all the time. Twenty years later, I’m still doing it.

I was a psychology major and then I read the Meno.

I did it for the lulz.

My college required that I have two areas of concentration outside of my major (biology). For me, that meant I had to minor in some area in the humanities. But nothing on the list of possibilities appealed to me. Yet there was one subject listed that I didn’t know anything about: philosophy. So I asked my mom what philosophy was. She said that you get to argue a lot, and so I would like it. Having no better ideas, I declared a minor in philosophy. My first two course in philosophy were an intro course taught by Dick Arneson in which we read Plato’s _Republic_, Ayer’s _Language, Truth, and Logic_, and Kuhn’s _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_ and a practical ethics course taught by some graduate student in which we read Singer’s _Practical Ethics_. Between the fact that I couldn’t put Singer’s book down and the fact that Kuhn’s book convinced me that if I was really interested in getting to the most fundamental truths that science wasn’t the place to look, I switched to philosophy as a major.

People here seem to take the question for the “why” mainly as a question for the “how”. Isn’t the former more interesting, though?

I study philosophy because it gives me the freedom to engage with a wide range of subjects – problems that don’t fit neatly into any one discipline, or tie several of them together: the biggest and ‘strangest’ questions.

Moreover, I found that when study philosophy, if done the right way, being smart is not enough. Understanding complex arguments and patterns is only one aspect. Really great philosophy forces you to face question of the highest importance – and in taking that challenge we begin a great journey on a personal level, too.

That, to me, has always been one of the most rewarding aspects of studying philosophy.

I am not a philosophy major but taking this ethics class has been really interesting because you get to learn a lot of what certain people can think and also why they have that point of view. The one thing that attracts me to philosophy is that it doesn’t leave any reasoning to a certain situation out of the picture. As far as ethics goes, I’ve always been one to think deeply about beliefs of certain topics, at least when they come to my mind through a discussion for example. One topic that I can think of where everyone’s viewpoints can be taken into account is a popular topic about Abortion. I have heard the two stand points of pro-life and pro-choice but there are some people that think somewhere in between that tend to have some interesting thoughts. This is simply an example of how philosophy attracted me is because all viewpoints are taken into consideration. The endless amount of possibilities for viewpoints on topics is fascinating because it’s almost a guarantee you can find out new standpoints on topics you’re interested in.
By taking this ethics class, I have only skimmed the surface of philosophy and the knowledge it brings to the world. If I was able to take more philosophy classes I probably would because of the reasons I listed above. To think that there are more standpoints on topics or events as well as a different perspective that I can look through interests me. Getting into ethical discussions (sometimes arguments) is something I tend to learn a lot from about people and their standpoints. Philosophy is a very interesting topic and I am glad I was able to take this ethics class to see some things that philosophy is about.

The crazy-yet-somehow-undermining thought experiments. Frankfurt-style cases anyone?

I began my educational career as a musician, but I didn’t want to teach a room full of cranky primary school kids how to play rhythm instruments and sing. So I quit school, became a performer and conductor, wife and mother, and had a semi-successful career in liturgical and folk music. But lacking a college degree, I was always underpaid and on the brink (or over the cliff) of financial disaster.
Fast forward 20 years – I re-entered school, this time as an English major, to learn to write better. My second semester, I encountered philosophy as a GE requirement. I had absolutely no plan to get involved with philosophy which was as unfamiliar and dangerous to me as alchemy. But that first class was taught by a very gifted teacher who walked us through a survey of Plato (Republic), Descartes (Method of Reason), Rousseau (First and Second Discourses) and Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil). Eventually, I was struck by all the intersections of philosophy with my Literature and Theology studies, as well as my musical background. I fought the draw hard. Philosophy is not a field of stud for those who wish to escape poverty. Then I saw how it informed politics, mathematics, and science. It became clear to me that Philosophy was the root of all other learning. Besides that, it was fascinating. I was hooked. I would wake in the middle of the night with huge questions on my mind. I felt like I was thinking for the very first time and really living my life. That first semester made me take a good hard look at who I was and what I was doing with my life. I experienced what could only be called a conversion. I will never be the same.

I was an English Honours student. We were spoon fed a lot of highly dubious French-influenced theory. I took philosophy courses, thinking to myself: “philosophy can’t all be as poorly argued, tendentious and fashion-dominated.” It wasn’t and isn’t.

By chance, I read Hume’s argument on necessary connection early freshman year. I wanted to know if it could be refuted. Majored in philosophy in college and history in graduate school. Then gave up the whole scholarly project and had a 36 year career in a large corporation becoming a vice-president. Now I have switched to collecting first editions of Hume’s works (have almost all of them). No regrets – I am comfortable as an optimistic skeptic.