Introduction: the why and how of this blog
The aim of this blog is to document and further my studies in philosophy. I'm planning on applying to a PhD program--most likely in the fall of 2025, and most likely in Poland--and I have a lot of work to do before I can confidently approach a dissertation topic and make myself a desirable PhD candidate.
Until very recently, I hadn't engaged with philosophy at all for about ten years. I'm a bit daunted by my decision to return to the discipline after such a break. The thing is, I don't simply want to catch up on what's been going on in the past ten years; I also need to fill in a lot of gaps in my education.
See, I never earned a philosophy degree. Though Philosophy was one of my dual majors (the other was Mathematics) when I began my undergraduate studies at Carnegie Mellon University in 1992, I graduated with a degree in Literary & Cultural Studies and only a minor in Philosophy. I went on to work towards an MA in Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in 1998, but left after one year without any degree at all.
There are reasons for this haphazard relationship to academic philosophy. My experience at CMU was disappointing, because I didn't understand what their Philosophy Department (under Teddy Seidenfeld) was about. The focus was on computational linguistics and such, and I was more interested in the "big questions." I would no doubt appreciate what they were doing now, but at the time I was a bit lost. The Literary and Cultural Studies professors were teaching Saussure, Barthes, and Stuart Hall, and even roping in Freud, Lacan, Heidegger, Deleuze and Derrida. That was far more enticing than what my Philosophy professors were doing. On top of that, Mathematics got boring very quickly, so I dropped both of my original majors and switched to the English department.
When I returned to philosophy at the New School (headed by Richard Bernstein), I became even more lost. I was finally focusing on what I had thought I wanted. I enjoyed some classes a bit: Bernstein on pragmatism. Agnes Heller on Nietzsche. I liked reading Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. But overall, the experience was a bit numbing. Derrida even showed up during my second semester to run a seminar as a guest lecturer (the topic was friendship). I wasn't allowed to participate, but I was his bouncer--standing outside the door checking names. By that point, I didn't care anymore. It seemed to me that philosophy was dead and philosophy professors were just cataloguing its corpses.
It turns out I hadn't been given a proper introduction to 20th-century philosophy. I left that MA program knowing nothing at all about Wittgenstein, Quine, Rorty, Dennett, Fodor, or any of the issues and debates that were animating philosophers in leading Philosophy departments. Without the Internet and online discussion forums, I might still be in the dark.
It was during a discussion on one such forum (the Darwin Awards Philosophy Forum, if you must know), back in 2003 or 2004, when somebody suggested I check out Daniel Dennett's work--as a way to improve my terminology, they said. I ended up quickly devouring two of his books: Consciousness Explained and The Intentional Stance. I also got turned on to Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature around the same time. Those books renewed my interest and faith in the currents of academic philosophy, and my passion began to widen and deepen like never before.
That one simple recommendation in an online forum twenty years ago has had a profound and longstanding influence on my intellectual life. I would love to thank that person today, but I have no idea who it was. We were all using pseudonyms back then, so I never knew their name. This is one reason why I use my real name when I blog: It promotes a better, deeper, more responsible--more human--relationship between us.
Getting back to the point, almost nothing I know about the last century of philosophy has come from university training or professors' curricula. It started in an online discussion forum and has been guided almost exclusively by my own nose ever since. I have had input from professionals from time to time--and some very lively debates with them, as well; and I did take a couple courses in Philosophy again, here in Szczecin, when I earned an MA in European Studies over ten years ago. However, my views, arguments, and style, and my knowledge of what is going on in philosophy today, have almost entirely developed here, on the Internet, through online forums, social media, email, and--especially--my first blog, Specter of Reason.
While I've learned a great deal by reading other people's work--books, articles, other blogs, and so on--more than anything else, my relationship to philosophy has been shaped by writing. A long time ago I became convinced that the better one writes, the better one thinks, and I have ever since approached my writing as an opportunity to improve my thinking.
That's why I've decided to start a new blog. Now that I'm returning to philosophy, I want a space to develop and focus new aims and ideas. I am not trying to distance myself from anything I've written on my other blog--or anywhere else, for that matter. I just want to establish a new space for a new chapter in my evolution as a philosopher. I hope to fill in a lot of gaps in my knowledge of the discipline, to lay the foundations for my dissertation and also for papers that I will submit for publication.
I do not expect this blog to gain a significant following, so there probably won't be much debate here. But if it happens, so much the better. For the most part, just expect to see me struggling with new ideas and arguments, working through other people's books and papers, trying to gain a mastery of issues that have been interesting professionals for the past few decades.
My research interests at the moment concern the possibility of understanding philosophy itself as memetics (and memetics as philosophy). I will elaborate in another post. Very briefly, it means the topics that I am primarily interested in pursuing right now are about informational semantics, speech act theory, the philosophy of mind, cultural evolution, and metaphilosophy.
If you've read this far and still have some interest in what I'm on about, I thank you for your diligence. I'll try not to let you down.