My day job is teaching and writing academic philosophy in the Netherlands. (For more about my academic work see here.) But here on this personal blog and in my own time, I try to do a different kind of philosophy.
Public Philosophy
First, I write for the general public rather than for a specialised sub-group of philosophers. You shouldn't need to have gone to grad school to understand what I'm talking about, or to care about the topics I discuss.
Second, I write about issues, from prison to love and robots, that I am not an expert on but that I want to try to think through by writing. This blog is not the kind of public service that reports or translates the discoveries of academic philosophy into something ordinary people can understand. I write for myself as well for my readers. What I am trying to do here are essays in Montaigne's sense: personal efforts at making sense of the world.
I do not claim - as I implicitly must do in my academic work - that what I write here qualifies as a definitive contribution to the sum of human knowledge. To the contrary, I am continuously revising my past essays as I reflect further, read further, and am persuaded by the comments of readers of errors of judgement, fact, or reason.
Published Essays
Several of my blog essays have been republished elsewhere, such as in Think, Quartz, Philosophy Now, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Religion and Ethics site, and Open Democracy.
I write a regular column for 3 Quarks Daily and I have also written original pieces for Aeon magazine and The Critique.
Many of my blog essays are available to republish directly under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To discuss publishing other pieces or adaptations please write to me at thetomwells at gmail.com.
