Leadership, Elevators, and Missing Car Payments: A Reflection on Aphorisms in Recovery
On the wall of the bookshelf in my office is a poem, “If” the Most Powerful Word in the English Language. The poem reads...
Thermodynamic Insider Baseball (or: Why Philosophy of Physics Matters)
There’s something slightly awkward about being a philosopher in a room full of cosmologists. Of course, the other students in this 500-level physics course...
Insights from “A History of the Self”
Introduction
A year and a half ago, I embarked on my first college philosophy class titled "A History of the Self" at the University of...
Mere Conservationism, Concurrentism, and Occasionalism in Teaching
In the spring of 2024, I took a graduate seminar on Leibniz taught by Professor Sukjae Lee in the Department of Philosophy at Seoul...
Reflections on Graduate Student Life
Before I began writing for the Graduate Student Reflection Series, I made a point of reading nearly all the previously published contributions. What struck...
Selena Gomez Over Hobbes, or How To Be Successful in Academia
I began my PhD in Philosophy at Durham University (UK) in 2022. Since then, to my surprise, many BA and MA students interested in...
A Graduate Student’s Nightmare
Those who supervise or assess dissertations should recognize that the power they exercise is easily abused and can result in the destruction of careers....
No Les Digas Que Eres Pobre!!! (“Don’t tell them you are poor”)
"Ya te dije! Y más te vale que no les digas que eres pobre!!!" Those were my mom’s last words as I left for...
Letting Go of the Prime Mover: Interpreting Aristotle’s Metaphysics
Studying ancient philosophical works might seem to many students like an antiquated endeavor, akin to reading Euclid’s Elements or Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural...
How Graduate School Confirmed My Passion for Philosophy
My first semester as a graduate student at San Jose State University reassured me that pursuing a career in academic philosophy was the right...