_edited.png)
I'm guessing if you've made it far enough into my site to find this blog, you've asked yourself
"What's with the name?"
Good question.
Fabulous (meaning extraordinary, amazingly good, mythical) + Philosopher (someone who is a semi-professional lover of wisdom and probably doesn't get paid much for it) = Fabulosopher.
To be honest, I've never seriously considered myself to be "fabulous". I aim for "effortlessly cool" when I remember to care, but I probably end up landing more in the territory or "that's...interesting". But those descriptors wouldn't make for a catchy portmanteau title, and I'm a big believer in fake-it-til-you-make-it anyway.
(portmanteau: a blend of words in which parts of multiple words are combined into a new word, as in smog, coined by blending smoke and fog, or motel, from motor and hotel.)
I am currently a doctoral student in Philosophy, trying desperately to finish my dissertation in the next year so I can move back out of my parents' house and get a decent paying job. I'm not in it for the money though: I truly and deeply love doing philosophy. I also love teaching, which is good because that's inevitably what I'll be doing for the next several decades.
Here's where the fabulous comes in, in the sense of "extraordinary": the way I think about, practice, and teach philosophy is not the way philosophy ordinarily happens. The dissertation I'm currently writing (and kinda of procrastinating on by writing this) is all about how to do philosophy differently. At it's heart, this collection of papers that add up to at least 150 pages, and which has taken me several years to write, is about a very simple idea: philosophy is for everyone. Everyone, and anyone, who ever thinks about any question beginning with "Why?" is capable of doing philosophy. In my book, you pretty much already are. Philosophy isn't a specialized set of knowledge that only some people can know or learn. It isn't exclusive to the old white men in tweed coats lecturing about esoteric (intended for or likely to be understood by only a small number of people with a specialized knowledge or interest) subjects in fancy expensive universities.
Philosophy belongs to everyone.
Philosophy, to me, is a way of thinking about things, of exploring the answer to "why?". It's like making art: anyone can make art if they have a few tools, like paintbrushes or crayons and a surface to apply them, and then just...create! It may not be good art until you've taken classes, learned techniques, studied historical examples, and/or practiced a lot, but you're still making art. So too with philosophy: if you're exploring philosophical questions with philosophical tools and methods, you're doing philosophy, even if it doesn't look like standard academic philosophy.
In particular, my research is focused on Neurodivergent Philosophy. Coming up with a decently exact definition of this is part of the work of my dissertation (and will likely be a future blog post), but the gist is that it's philosophy done by neurodivergent individuals, taking on neurodivergent perspectives, and/or involving topics, tools, questions, knowledge sources, or forms of communication that are outside of the neurotypical norms of academic philosophy.
What that looks like, how it works, and why it's important are all topics within my dissertation, and that will, at some point (I hope), make it onto this blog. I myself am multiply neurodivergent, including being autistic and ADHD. Remembering and making the time to post regularly is a challenge with my ADHD and the whole "finishing a dissertation" thing, but I aim to share here on a semi-regular basis about my research, about teaching philosophy, and about life as a neurodivergent grad student, instructor, and philosopher.
You may also get some occasional stories about my cats. You're welcome.
As a final note, I'm going to migrate the few old blog posts from my now defunct Wordpress site, so you can enjoy a taster of what's to come. Like I said, no guarantees of the frequency of posts, but if you'd like the occasional suprise storytime in your inbox, feel free to subscribe.