EDUCATION:
UC Berkeley, PhD program in Philosophy
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, SB, Philosophy; Mathematics
ABOUT ME:
I'm currently working on finishing my PhD thesis in the UC Berkeley philosophy department. I specialize in a fairly broad area that includes philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and related areas of metaphysics, theory of knowledge, and to a lesser degree, certain sub-areas of philosophy of science, philosophy of math, and philosophy of logic. Within these, I'm currently focusing on the debate between intentionalists and disjunctivists in the philosophy of perception, which has broad implications for thought and meaning in general. This work overlaps the theory of content (internalism vs externalism; indexicals and context dependence); classical mind body identity theory; the place of the conceptual; etc. This kind of wide range of specializations is typical for those working on core issues connected with human understanding; examples include some of my teachers: John Searle, Donald Davidson, Barry Stroud, W.V. Quine, Hilary Putnam, Jerry Fodor, Ned Block, Paul Grice, and Saul Kripke. Recently I've been attending the seminars and studying the works of the disjunctivists Michael Martin and John Campbell. I also have a good understanding of significant parts of the work of: Tyler Burge, Jaegwon Kim; Michael Dummett; Peter Strawson; John McDowell, Gareth Evans; Dan Dennett; David Chalmers; Alva Noe; Keith Donnellan; David Kaplan. I have a good background in the history of analytic philosophy (Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Hempel) and modern philosophy (Kant, Hume, Berkeley, Locke, Descartes), but because I'm not a specialist I normally wouldn't offer sessions on these.
I've been a teaching assistant (GSI) at UC Berkeley for 9+ years, and have taught a wide range of topics in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, metaphysics, philosophy of science, theory of knowledge, and lower division history of modern and ancient philosophy. I've often taught Philosophy 100 (Philosophy writing course), which is organized around weekly one-hour tutorial meetings with individual students.
Separately, I worked for 9 years at Apple Inc in Cupertino, the last several years as a 3D graphics software engineer. More recently I've done work with small software startups (part time so I can spend substantial time on philosophy). I was involved in the early stages of the Tutor Hero project as a consultant on the design of the technology platform, strategies for implementing the platform, and some aspects of the business model. My work on this project is part of a broader interest in developing ways of applying modern technology to contribute to a high quality education. Also, I've had a long-standing interest in alternative energy sources. As an undergrad at MIT, I initiated a successful project that carefully examined the performance of pure hydrogen (and air) as a fuel for a conventional internal combustion engine.
SPECIFIC TUTORING SERVICES:
Philosophy of Mind
Philosophy of Language
Metaphysics
Theory of Knowledge
I think it makes most sense to think in terms of specific authors and papers / books; I can do major works of all of the authors listed above (from Searle to Kaplan). Put another way, I can do any of the standard anthologies or readers that would be used in upper division courses in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, theory of meaning, etc. I would like to know two or three days ahead of time which paper(s) we'll be discussing, unless it's something that I've gone through many many times. Until December 2010, my availability is likely to be limited.
