Blog 1

I had never really heard of philosophy until the summer before college. I had gone through a bit of a spiritual crisis after graduating from high school and so started to read a lot that summer. I came across a new book called The Closing of the American Mind. It captured much of how I felt, and it opened me up to a possible way of dealing with my crisis: philosophy. The author was a professor and he described the classes in which he introduced students to the famous philosophers. I had heard of some – Socrates and Nietzsche, for instance – but it was otherwise all new to me. (Sadly, I think that one of my first exposures to Socrates was in the film Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.) What most appealed to me was the way in which these thinkers tackled the deep problems that affect all people. I felt that there was something I was missing and that thinking through these problems more carefully could help.

 

I signed up for a philosophy course in college right away. Prior to that, I had never thought very carefully about anything. I felt that I had, but while I thought a lot and thought about ‘deep things,’ I had trouble reasoning through important issues with great care. Philosophy helped changed that. Much of it was initially over my head, but I liked that idea that there was a deeper reality out there, one that was right before my eyes but that I was too impatient and impulsive to see. Much of what I had to do was simply slow my thinking down and attend more closely to what was right before me. I came to realize that there so much I didn’t see and so much I jumped over in my thinking. However, as I began to think better I also began to see more, and as I began to see more of what was all around me, I found that the world was much more interesting than I had previously realized. All of this also helped to think through problems better, insofar as I was able to get in touch with what is truly important and then apply it more carefully to the issues I faced each day.