APA Member Interview: Tomas Albergo

Tomas Albergo is a PhD student in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. He is mainly interested in metaphysics, (meta)ethics, and perception, with keen curiosity also in the philosophies of physics and science, logic, and epistemology.

What excites you about philosophy?

Oh, boy. To adequately answer this question would be a task for another day (or week or year). So, I’ll keep to one thing that originally drew me to philosophy: the possibility of clarifying a thought, and what this makes possible in turn. I’m excited by the prospect of achieving understanding by way of clarity, and also by the valuable ends towards which clarity can be put to use.

When I was young, I was tremendously into physics and cosmology, and was thoroughly set on becoming an astrophysicist. Early in high school, I read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and was baffled and bothered by my first encounter with quantum mechanics. I headed to college determined to understand both it and the world more generally, believing that a focus on physics would serve as the best guide. Yet when it finally came time to study the quantum, my confusion mostly remained. I learned how to toy around with the Schrödinger equation(s), but I still had no idea what we were really talking about. What actually are electrons? What, if anything, is a wave function? How can something be both a particle anda wave? I was sure that these were legitimate questions, but my thinking about them was exceptionally fuzzy and left me with little idea about how to approach them. My perhaps naïve belief that efforts made to learn the formalisms of physics would immediately pay back in knowledge of “the truth” began to fade. My interest in physics became complicated, and I was unsure of how to proceed.

But by a stroke of fortune, during the fall of my senior year I found myself in a seminar on the philosophy of quantum mechanics, led by Elizabeth Miller (who is both an incredible course leader and a wonderfully kind person). There I discovered that what I’d been interested in all along was mostly this thing called “metaphysics”, especially in the contexts of quantum mechanics and of physics more generally. We read about and discussed the so-called measurement problem and the several interpretations of the quantum formalisms it spawned, abutted by concerns about determinism, realism, scientific theorizing, and the like. By the end of the course I still had little sense of how to properly engage with these matters — everything felt so interdependent, and I had no idea where to start in. But the need for detail and conceptual elaboration was nonetheless impressed upon me. I thought, for example, that I knew what probability was, but such certainty was dispelled upon finer inspection. Was it merely matter of observed frequencies, or could the world have some sort of “intrinsic chanciness” (whatever that means!)? I didn’t know the answer nor how to provide one, but became determined once more, albeit with an amended goal—to learn not just what to think about these things, but also how to think about them.

One thing led to another, and I’ve completed a master’s and began my PhD in philosophy. I’ve found a throng of new interests along the way, almost all of which have been amassed after confrontation with questions I didn’t yet have the tools to answer: “What does ‘good’ mean?”; “Do non-human animals have rights?”; “What does it take for things to be identical?”; “When is it reasonable to believe your eyes?”. For me, philosophy is deceptively difficult, and one partial remedy for progress in spite of this is (as a friend once advised) to be comically clear in your claims and your arguments for them; spell out the details to the extent your language will allow. Of course, this attempted perspicuity may often not be, and perhaps should often not be, the ultimate aim of philosophical activity. Contemporary analytic philosophy may sometimes be chided for a seemingly stale and mechanical fixation on “conceptual analysis”, but I believe this to be a caricature that doesn’t do justice to the potentially great ends toward which the consequent clarity can be put to use. To determine if a state has undermined its own legitimacy, we must be clear about how, when, and why a state has legitimacy in the first place. To know if someone is liable to defensive harm, we may have to determine the relevance of their playing a causal role in a wrong, and what that causal role consists in. (Thanks to my peers for working on these topics!) A secluded haven of conceptual clarity won’t settle these matters alone, but perhaps it’s a good place to start.

What are you working on right now?

I’m currently working on a paper about perception, epistemic justification, and rational responses to perceptual experience. I’m also thinking about how best to understand the notions of sentence and possibility as they figure in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, as either a guide to, or perhaps a product of, understanding what Wittgenstein took himself to be doing in that book and in his earlier philosophy more generally. And I’m just beginning to tinker with a (hopefully relatively metaphysically neutral) way of thinking about certain mathematical statements as hypothetical claims about physical magnitudes and quantities (but please don’t hold me to this).

What topic do you think is under explored in philosophy?

I’m not sure if this is “under explored” — maybe under attended to, but I’d like to see more work on the place of emotions in not just moral epistemology, but in epistemology more generally. Our current political moment has me vaguely concerned about the natures of belief and knowledge, and the expectations we should have about “rational discourse”. Of course, these matters likely have much to do with our psychology, but I’d be surprised if there were nothing important whatsoever to be said about them in theoretical epistemic contexts.

What do you consider your greatest accomplishment?

In middle school I won a home run derby by hitting just one(!) home run. You be the judge.

But actually, nothing I’ve done in my life so far compares to the efforts and sacrifices my parents have made for me and my brother, such as my father’s commitment to commuting long hours to a physically taxing job each working day for over 20 years, and my mother’s limitless provision of patience, care, and time spent year-round carting us to and from all things baseball. I wouldn’t be doing what I am if it weren’t for Anthony and Elena Albergo.

What’s your top tip or advice for APA members reading this?

If you’re hurting or struggling, please reach out. If the seemingly high incidence of impostor syndrome is any guide, I wouldn’t be surprised if many people in academia hold themselves to standards for being “deserving” of help that are much higher than the standards to which they hold others who are similarly situated. Please know that people care about you.

This section of the APA Blog is designed to get to know our fellow philosophers a little better. We’re including profiles of APA members that spotlight what captures their interest not only inside the office, but also outside of it. We’d love for you to be a part of it, so please contact us via the interview nomination form here to nominate yourself or a friend.

Sabrina D. MisirHiralall

Dr. Sabrina D. MisirHiralall is an editor at the Blog of the APA who currently teaches philosophy, religion, and education courses solely online for Montclair State University, Three Rivers Community College, and St. John’s University.