Dewiss life

"I got my BA from Harvard in 2000, after an unorthodox two-year

undergraduate program at Deep Springs College. Ive been lucky to go to
good schools, but never applied academic rigor to my own burning questions
until returning to school on my own terms. What is our basis for distinguishing
good from bad? Why do so many people believe in God? I run a private
tutoring startup out of Venice, CA (college admissions, SAT prep), and it was
candid, fundamental questions from my students that first helped me realize
how underequipped most of us are to answer them. CGU was the place to
pick up the spade and resume the dig."
"Since I went back to school to learn things, perhaps I should say what I
learned."
"My first semester I took a class with Anselm Min, where we read
Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit. It was the first book in a long time
whereupon finishing the last page, I turned back to the first and read the
whole thing again. Min had read it so many times, that as he turned pages in
his own copy they lifted clear out of the book. Reading Hegel through the
eyes of a Jesuit-trained, believing Catholic led me to treat
the Phenomenology like an inspired text. I wrote about necessity as a
metaphysical concept, and whether recognizing inevitable patterns of thought
constitutes a form of prophecy (as against the warning of Karl Popper)."
"That same semester I read Humes Treatise on Human Nature with Patricia
Easton. Forget about prophecy: we dont even know if the sun is coming up
tomorrow. I was specifically curious about why Hume hates Spinoza so much,
since two irreligious thinkers should get along well enough, I thought. I got to
read Spinozas Ethics in Eastons next seminar, which she taught for the first
time because of student demand. This was a life-changer for me. Shes the
best teacher Ive ever had, and Spinoza became my philosopher."
"I never expected or wanted to find the philosopher who gets everything right.
Becoming an acolyte of this or that might mean youre letting some dead
dude think for you. Spinoza has an astonishingly coherent explanation for how
we are as we are, however, and an utterly rational approach to morality.