beta: "Not 'guesswork' this time but insight"
teacher: "I abhor your pretentious insight. I respect conscientious guessing because it comes from the best human qualities, courage and modesty."
-Proofs and Refutations, Lakatos

Hi, I'm a 5th year grad student at Harvard doing Philosophy, particularly philosophy of math. I also dabble in recursion theory (aka computability theory), Nabokov-iana, and trying to program the 'Snood' of memorizing latin vocab. These days I seem to be the main one managing the informal harvard phil grad student blog Emerson Hall Problems so if you don't have permission to post new topics and want to, drop me an email.

Thesis

In my thesis I propose a naturalistic answer to the classic question 'how is a priori knowledge possible?' in what some have considered its most difficult case - mathematics. My answer involves a relationship between: meta-semantic facts, Quinean theory revision, natural selection and the availability of 'multiple targets' for mathematical knowledge.

Here's a fresh version of my thesis with a (hopefully) sexier chapter 1 and layout (thanks, 'memoir' document class). And here's my very-rough-work-in-progress wiki . Though I can't reimburse you for any permanent damage to your intelligence from the half-baked ideas therein.

Paper Drafts in Progress:

rough drafts:

Old Stuff:

Here's version 1.0 of the thesis as a slideshow part 1 , part 2 , part 3 , part 4 , part 5 some ancient thoughts about philosophy of math , my prospectus and related stuff , perception's content, why *exactly because* the mind is like a computer there probably isn't a language of thought and some amateur vaguely sentimentalist moral philosophy