Selected Essays
This site is a work in progress. I’m still collecting and compiling essays I’ve written over the past few years.
Philosophy (ethics & language)
A Phenomenlogy of Love and its Neccessity. Undergraduate Philosophy Thesis, Spring 2024. Argued that current theories of love do need sufficiently address why people feel that it is a necessary aspect of life. PDF
Ethical Challenges of the Recommendation Algorithm: Should we make social media more boring? Undergraduate coursework. Argued that social media reccommendation algorithms undermine free will (and thus personhood, as free will is necessary for personhood). PDF
Should Companies be Allowed to Patent Vaccines?. Undergraduate coursework. Argued that it is immoral for companies to patent vaccines. PDF
Is there a special kind of love that we can have only toward a person? Undergraduate coursework. Argued that love towards a person and animal is not neccessarily different. PDF
Romantic Love and Self-Creation: Stefano and Lila in My Brilliant Friend. Undergraduate coursework. Argued that romantic love is one of the most damaging obstacles to self-creation. PDF
Happiness: A Pernicious Fantasy. Undergraduate coursework. Argued that there is no singular definition of happiness, and believing there is a definition prevents us from achieving it. PDF
Happiness and Superheroes. Undergraduate coursework in-class presentation. PPT PDF-script
Becoming who you are: Gay Science 290 and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Undergraduate coursework. Argued that self-creation can be seen as becoming rather than creating with reference to Nietzsche’s Gay Science. PDF
Evaluating Paul Grice’s Theory of Conversational Implicature. Undergraduate coursework. As title. PDF
The Problems of Intentionality. Undergraduate coursework. As title. PDF
The Prison of Ignorance, or the Prison of Truth? Undergraduate coursework. Argued that although truth is valuable in many circumstances, we should not conceptualize it as an intrinsic moral good or a goal of life. PDF
Will the Truth Set You Free? Truth and Freedom in the Matrix and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Undergraduate coursework. Argued for the subjectivity of truth and that it is possible to have true beliefs that are contradictory and that do not correspond to universal objective truth. PDF
Memory and Suffering in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Undergraduate coursework. Argued that we should not take a utilitarian approach when considering the value of memory and suffering. PDF