Philosophy, Where Art Thou?

Like many other philosophy students, I am one of those lovers of philosophy that applied to 20 philosophy graduate programs and failed. Twice (two years in a row). Whatever the reasons--economic downturns, my lack of academic excellence, not good enough contacts--that route has been shut down in my life, and I do not think I will apply again. Honestly, I don't know what I could possibly do to make my chances significantly better any other time around. I think this is it. It sucks; but one needs to learn that sometimes that the world says no to your dreams and there is nothing that you can reasonably do about it.

However, I still love philosophy, and I want to explore it. I probably will be a mediocre dilettante, but I think of the great minds of the past that never were academic PhD octopuses (to use William James phrase) and professors, and think perhaps prospects are not so dismal. Frankly, reading comments on Schwitzgebel's The Splintered Mind or the Leiter Report makes me think that perhaps it is better to not pursue the academic route. At least it is my comforting thought. Anyway, I refuse to have my philosophical interests battered down by what I do not have control over: my acceptance into a graduate program that has funding and a decent placement history and not an obscene drop-out rate. Hence, this philosophical blog will be my first step into plowing into my lone wolf future, although I will try to contribute to the web philosophical community as I can. I imagine that that this blog will initially seem solipsistic, and my recent dosage of existential angst (not knowing what to do exactly in my life now that this onerous application process is over) is not helping matters. Oh well. I hope my fellow netizens will find something worthwhile here to chat about.

In my next post I plan on laying down what philosophical questions I am interested in, and thinking about what sorts of questions and groundwork (bloody prolegomena) need to be addressed before I can get to those. One subject I am particularly interested in is philosophical methods, and what justifies such methods. What methods have philosophers used to address philosophical questions in the past and what pitfalls and advantages do they have. I am interested in the nature of fallacies, and what is right about them (meaning, why do we find fallacies compelling at all? There must be something true about them, or why do people so easily fall into them? Why would they seem compelling if they were so obviously wrong?). Finally, I am very interested in abductive reasoning, as investigated initially by Peirce (I know there are others: Sidgwick, Wigmore), and further on by the Josephsons, and Walton. I plan to investigate heavily into inferences to the best explanation and "+1 reasoning." And then there is meta-ethics, those questions of what justifies (if anything at all) our claims about good/evil and right/wrong, that never cease to haunt and fascinate my mind.

Finally, a disclaimer. As this title suggests, this blog will function like a sandbox. Many things written will be hack-and-slash and fuzzy, requiring several posts to get anywhere on the subject. I hope that after a long string of such posts that I can write synthesis posts that summarize and structure my overall thoughts and conclusions on such subjects. And even these I will likely edit, and re-edit, and re-edit. Perhaps a cleaner form and process than Wittgenstein's having to cut up his journals and repaste the parts he liked into new ones, and beginning afresh. This age of the interweb is something to be grateful for. So thus closes my aims at professional philosophical glory (melodrama intended), and now it is on to amateur pleasantries.