About Me
I am a graduate (B.A., 2010) of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, having completed the most intellectually satisfying major/minor combination there is—philosophy, my first academic love, and classical humanities, something I picked up along the way, but which reminds me now constantly of its infrangibility in my life (and the fact of our torrid affair, no doubt) by surfacing in many of my writings and my imagination without conscious intent on my part. Since August 2010, I have been a Ph.D. student in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.
In philosophy, I am interested primarily in epistemology, particularly questions relating to the social aspects of knowing (e.g., disagreement-adjudication), and related issues in ethics and the philosophy of language and mind (such as the ethics of belief and semantic externalism). I wrote my undergraduate senior thesis on Cartesian skepticism under Professor Peter Klein, who served as my adviser and mentor throughout. To him I am greatly indebted for my success in not just getting through it, but, as a cherry on top, being awarded Highest Honors by the third-ranked philosophy department in the world for it!
In the classics, I mostly openly acknowledge my ineptitude and thus am consigned, for the most part, to painfully translating texts from antiquity.
Outside of academics, I am emotionally invested in and have loyalties to the Rutgers Scarlet Knights and, going up a tier in the football hierarchy, the Philadelphia Eagles. I am also actively interested and try to participate in all kinds of racquet sports, especially tennis and badminton. I am an avid reader and collector of books; one of my prized possessions includes a first edition print of The Great Gatsby by Scribner’s Sons.
Finally, although my childhood years were spent in Singapore, I was born in and am a resident of Tyler, Texas. Thus, it is to the latter that I go when I go “home.”
