Curious Methodologies

I'm not a professional philosopher.

Yet.

I'm halfway through my bachelor's degree in philosophy, having returned at the beginning of 2024 after a two-decade pause.

I took so many philosophy classes back then that I've only got to take three more after this semester, and the rest of my credits have to come from non-philosophy electives to fulfill gen ed requirements.

Enough credits I could pick up two minors if I wanted to.

I didn't want to drop out two decades ago. I dropped a semester after I came home from a work study shift tutoring math and philosophy on my birthday to discover my then-husband and our girlfriend moving out because she didn't want to share anymore.

It took me 20 years to go back, but I did it.

But I wasn't doing nothing during that 20 years.

I've studied.

A lot of things.

I read open source textbooks for fun.

So I've learned a lot of things.

Philosophy is what I always come back to.

The great love of my life.

Sussing out the answers to all the big questions.

I've read a LOT of philosophy.

But there's also a lot of philosophy that I haven't read.

So now it's time for Deep Dives.

Because college isn't challenging me.

It's just a piece of paper to hang on my wall that might give my future content some more credibility. If I go to grad school, I'm sure that will be more challenging, but in the meantime, I need to engage my brain more than this degree program is doing for me.

That's where this Curious Dialogues series comes into play.

And I do have a methodology in mind.

Sort of.

This is going to be a meta-dialogue.

Most of the thinkers I'll be working through are dead. (They might all be dead, haven't looked yet.) I'm pairing thinkers who lived in different eras. Who covered different areas of focus. Looking at what they say, what inspires me, what I agree and disagree with, what I think they're missing, etc.

Both liberatory and conservative thinkers.

There will be lots of reading and highlighting and making notes - I'll be sharing those here on this Digital Hermit's Garden.

But above all, I'll be thinking.

I'll be thinking about how the ideas apply directly to my own life, examining my biases to see if my agreement/disagreement is done because if affirms/conflicts with my existing beliefs, and analyzing the logic of their arguments. I'm an anarchist myself, so I'll be especially careful to give the conservative thinkers I'll be reading fair consideration rather than the kneejerk impulse to shut them out.

I'll also be looking at their backgrounds - academic philosophy strives for objectivity and so often leaves out the background of the philosophers we study - especially in undergrad, which is where most college students end their education because they're really only in it for a job.

Background is important. It gives us context. When you realize John Stuart Mill's father basically used him as in experiment in how to raise a superthinker, which led him to have a mental breakdown at 20, you get why he emphasizes liberty and freedom of personal expression, condemning social tyranny as much as political tyranny. Thomas Hobbes lived through the English civil war, seeing power flip-flop back and forth, leading him to declare that as loathsome as it might be to live under the Leviathan of a centralized authority, it was better than the alternative chaos and destruction.

I'm not looking for right or wrong here.

I'm looking for understanding.

Where's all hand waves this... come from?

I mean, I have a good general idea - social behavior is a particular interest of mine.

But I want to get deeper into it.

And also just see what I can learn.

As my notes develop over time, I'll eventually start to find themes and questions that spark my curiosity and follow them.

I'll write essays to publish on Medium, Paragraph, and Substack. I'll create podcast episodes that will blend the NotebookLM AI-generate conversations with my own questions and commentary.

And hopefully, as the series grows and more people become interested in it, I'll also add a monthly audio discussion session for anyone who wants to talk about their thoughts on the material.

There's already some themes developing - liberation philosophers tend to focus more on human and personal rights vs conservative philosophers who focus on property rights. Edmund Burke, that father of modern conservatism, felt that "personal rights" were abstract, property rights were concrete, and that all other rights were derived from property rights, and that's pretty consistently held true since he wrote on the French Revolution in the late 1700s.

But I'm not aiming at anything in particular.

There's no overarching thesis here.

This isn't hard science.

This is philosophy.

This is crashing ideas together that our modern political systems have positioned as diametrically opposed to each other and seeing what happens, and sharing the process as I go.

<3 Gwynne