About this blog

In my official capacity I work away as a philosophy graduate student trying to develop original and exciting - but somehow also nuanced and relevant - contributions to a handful of very specialised ongoing academic conversations. It's a very fulfilling and privileged life to lead.

But I still miss the glorious knockabout philosophical conversations of my undergraduate days, the kind of Big Talk that goes in all sorts of unanticipated directions and lasts until 3 in the morning. I don't want to give up thinking and talking about Big Ideas just because I am becoming a professional academic. So what I'm trying to do in this blog is to develop and organise my thinking on all sorts of topics that puzzle or intrigue me but generally lie outside my area of academic expertise. Sometimes the issue is itself philosophical, but often not. A general theme across my writing is articulating and defending a moderate liberal perspective - what you might call the perspective of the bourgeois philosopher.

My posts take the form of essays that try to work through an issue in what I think of as a philosophical style (informed, critical, rigorous, open to correction), while avoiding the dry formal and technical style of proper academic philosophy. I continue to revise them in the light of reader comments, and further thinking and reading, and sometimes return to them a year later to rewrite them completely.

I hope that anyone will be able to understand what I'm arguing and be interested enough to agree or disagree, and I invite critical comments that aim to improve my analysis by pointing out its many flaws. Philosophy is about critical thinking and your criticisms will help me think better.

Republishing

Several of my essays have been republished elsewhere (e.g. The New English Review, Philosophy Now, Open Democracy, Think, Arts and Opinion, Jane Austen's Regency World, The Canny Outlaw).

I'm happy to consider requests for non-exclusive publication. Please send them to philosophersbeard@gmail.com.

A note on pseudonymity

I write under a pseudonym because I feel a greater freedom to choose what to write about and how if I don't need to worry about the consequences of connecting it with my 'real' identity (with respect to my career, reputation with my colleagues, and internet crazies). You can decide for yourself whether such worries are reasonable or whether this reveals a reprehensible cowardice. But I hope you will accept that insofar as my arguments make sense, my real identity is irrelevant, and insofar as they fail, a picture of me or a link to my Facebook profile would not save them.