a PhD in mathematics, which was my ambition at that point. By senior year I had come to regard the Program of Liberal Studies as my primary major.
Describe the Liberal Studies program. How did you get into philosophy, exactly?
It was an interdisciplinary Great Books Program. I love just about everything about the Program. It’s actually the thing that kept me at Notre Dame. If I had not discovered it, I surely would have transferred. Every single class was great. But it wasn’t a philosophy major. It was much broader than a philosophy major, though we did study lots of philosophy as part of this major. And though I loved it all, I particularly loved the philosophy texts that we read. I remember my first reading of Hume’s Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, I think it was during second semester sophomore Great Books seminar or maybe first semester junior year. I could not get the problem of induction out of my mind. It was the most fascinating problem I had ever thought about until then.
Hey, I still can’t get it out of my mind! Inspirational teachers?
Many. Katherine Tillman, Tim Lenoir, Phil Sloan, Ed Cronin, Stephen Rogers.
When did you decide to study philosophy at the graduate level?
At the last possible minute. After I abandoned engineering, and then graduate school in mathematics, I really didn’t know what I would do after college. I considered signing up for a twoyear stint doing missionary worth in Africa with a Catholic missionary group called, of all things, the White Fathers.
haha…you didn’t?!
I didn’t in the end. I applied for a Rhodes Scholarship. Was a finalist, but wasn’t chosen, in the end. If I had been chosen I would have studied PPE. At least that was my declared plan. I thought about applying to Law School. But on my birthday in November of my senior year, decided that I didn’t really want to be a lawyer and tore up may LSAT admission slip which was scheduled for some time just after my birthday in act of defiant self-definition. I had long conversations with a number of my teachers about my future. Katherine Tillman encouraged me to think about Graduate School in philosophy, because I had done particularly well in the philosophy component of PLS. She also encouraged me to apply for a Danforth Fellowship which I did and got. And one thing led
