It’s a privilege to be here writing at SkepticBlogs, and I want to thank Ed, John and the other SkepticBloggers for having me. I’ve been reading many of the posts here and they’re very impressive indeed.
I’m an English student, currently finishing off my MA in Philosophy. I also have a Bachelor’s degree in Music; the name ‘Notung’ is the sword in Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, used to kill the greedy giant-turned-dragon Fafner (this was supposed to represent my political views!).
I’m an atheist (and have been for as long as I could think for myself), a skeptic, and a political lefty. My main philosophical interests are epistemology, ethics, logic and the philosophy of religion. The purpose of this blog is to concentrate on these issues, examining them as critically as I can. My hope is that the commenters will set me straight on where my arguments fail and how they might be improved. That is the spirit of philosophical discussion, I think. We should all be accepting of objective criticism and strive to make our arguments as lucid, transparent and robust as possible.
So this blog is a philosophy blog. I’m a pretty terrible historian and my knowledge of science is fairly basic. Yet I think that anyone can be a philosopher – all one needs is a particular attitude towards thinking about issues that does not shy away from questioning our most basic assumptions. We may reason badly, but providing we are willing to think deeply, discuss the issue rationally and refine our arguments then I think that we can justly call ourselves philosophers.
Joining SkepticBlogs is a great incentive to be a more active blogger. My old blog was pretty inactive as my university work took precedence, but after completing my MA I want to continue thinking, reading and writing about philosophy and this blog will provide a great outlet for it. Unfortunately I’ll be losing access to my institutional login to academic journals (and I’m too poor to pay for subscriptions), so I’ll have to rely on books and papers in the public domain. I doubt that it will be a huge problem, but please let me know if you know of any strong and relevant scholarship on anything I discuss.
On any of my posts, please feel free to comment and let me know what you think. I hope you enjoy reading!
