I think my interest in philosophy may have arisen because of events that go back into my very early childhood. I was six years old and kept a secret from my mother and father that I regarded as very significant. I felt that my not telling the truth was keeping from them something of importance. I felt guilty and apart from them in a way I had not before.  From that day onwards in my life I felt that I was outside looking in. Even though I was very successful, popular, and good at sports, life felt like a mystery to which I did not have an answer. I began to read voraciously at about the age of ten. I read Dostoevsky’s novels while in high school.

I started off at UCLA as an economics major and then as a political science major. These disciplines didn’t seem to provide me with the kinds of answers I was searching for. Life was a puzzle for me. After a course I took at UCLA called “Logic in Practice,” taught by Abe Kaplan, I thought philosophy was an area that might hold for me what I was seeking. So I decided to switch my major.

I went to Cornell with the thought of either majoring in mathematics or being pre-med. It was pretty clear by my junior year that though I was fascinated by and interested in mathematics, and got good grades, I didn’t have the chops for it. It struck me that it was not a thing to do unless you could do it well. I was also serious about doing pre-med, but then I made a decision pretty early on, though after taking organic chemistry, that the whole process of going to medical school would take forever. (Little did I know how long it would take to do other things!) And so I wound up being focused on history and literature and math. I was ok with being all over the place so long as things stayed interesting. I took philosophy courses as an undergraduate and really didn’t like them. I couldn’t shake the sense of its being about cleverness, and while I could be clever, I didn’t like where it took me. I was interested in ideas; I liked thinking about thinking, about the way people thought about all sorts of things. I was also interested in narrative. I wound up with a double major in mathematics and history and thought I would go on in history, primarily intellectual history, in graduate school.

I grew up in a small town in Newfoundland, but it was the biggest town for a good distance around. There were no bookstores, but there were two drugstores that had little revolving racks of books and there was a public library. I was going to a Roman Catholic high school so I knew there was such a thing as philosophy from school. In the drugstores I found two books, one was Jacques Maritain’s A Preface to Metaphysics and the other was a collection of selections from Aristotle. I brought them home, and I didn’t understand either of them but I could tell that these were heavy-duty stuff on first reading. At the public library I found a couple of things of Bertrand Russell’s including his Why I’m Not a Christian and parts of his autobiography, and I read those and I decided “OK, I want to be Bertrand Russell.” And so I set out to be Bertrand Russell. When I went up to university I wanted to do math and philosophy. But I had the following relationship to math: I liked having done it but I didn’t actually like doing it that much. Whereas the philosophy I liked actually doing, so I moved more over into philosophy. But I didn’t intend to become a pro at all. I think the thought never crossed my mind in those days. Even when I was in graduate school, for a lot of my fellow graduate students at that time, being an academic wasn’t what they wanted to do particularly. So that all came much later, by accident again.

I was first introduced to philosophy in my junior year of high school. I went to a religious high school here in Southern California, and it required all students to take a philosophy of religion class. The teacher (who, incidentally, was also my teacher for a rock climbing course) focused the class first on arguments for and against a traditional monotheistic God and then on issues related to cross-cultural variation in religious ideas and practices. I absolutely loved the topics of the class, as well as the teacher’s quasi-Socratic style of running it. That summer another student named Chris Weaver (who is now an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois) and I decided we wanted to do a reading group—we read Alvin Plantinga’s God, Freedom and Evil and a book by Marilyn McCord Adams [a recently deceased emerita member of the UCLA faculty]. I remember being blown away by the thought that one could engage with large, systematic questions about the world in a way that was both technical and clear. I was totally hooked.

I came into college not knowing anything about college. I was the first in my family to go to college and, in fact, my dad hadn’t finished high school. The only reason I applied to college was because my high school counselor had pressured me to. So, I submitted exactly one application—to Ohio State University—the day it was due.

I started as a math major, then I switched to political science. Then I took a philosophy class taught by Robert Kraut.

If you’ve ever met Professor Kraut, you’d know it’s a bit of an understatement to say he’s a boisterous person who makes his opinions clear. Students would enter thinking there’s no right answer to these philosophical questions, but he taught us early on that there was, that there are better or worse ways to approach the issues, and by being systematic and rigorous we can be confident that the answers we arrive at are the right ones. I was fascinated both by the philosophical method and how he employed it.

The final push came one day when Professor Kraut asked me, in the middle of class, “Are you majoring in philosophy?” And I was like, “No.” And he responded, “You are now. Come see me.”

What happened to me was a little different from that. I got my first exposure in high school where I took a class called “The Shaping of Western Thought”. The teacher had an M.A. in philosophy and we ended up reading a lot of philosophical figures. It made me not necessarily want to be a philosopher, but it made me want to take philosophy in college. I took an intro to philosophy course my first semester at Amherst. I don’t think I did super well but I liked it. I just decided to take another philosophy course and then another. All of a sudden I was like, “I’m a philosophy major.” Even then I wasn’t sure that I was going to go on to graduate school in philosophy. I was also totally interested in journalism. I did a summer internship at a local newspaper and ended up having to write obituaries all summer! Then . . . I thought I would go to law school. Between my junior and senior year of college I determined there was no way I would take both the LSAT and the GRE. I made my decision then. I chose philosophy and there has been no looking back.