Ian Lustick’s journey into political science began in the turbulence of the late 1960s. “I was a freshman at Brandeis in 1965,” he recalls. “It was a time of moral upheaval—the civil rights movement, Vietnam, the Six-Day War. Everyone was searching for meaning.” For Lustick, that search quickly became political. “I was drawn to questions of authority and dissent,” he says. “Why do people obey? Why do they resist?” A turning point came when he transferred to Harvard and began
Harvey Lederman’s route into philosophy began with an unlikely spark: “I was interested in mathematics, but I also liked talking about ideas,” he recalls. “Philosophy seemed to be the place where those two things could meet.” As an undergraduate at Princeton, he took courses with philosophers like Hans Halvorson and Gideon Rosen, who helped him see how logical rigor could coexist with ethical and human questions. “Hans’s class was the first time I realized you could do philos
Philip Kitcher’s path into philosophy began with what he calls “good advice and a bit of serendipity.” As a math student at Cambridge, he realized he was “getting progressively less interested in mathematics,” until one supervisor told him bluntly that if he continued, he’d “end up like me—I’m only in Cambridge for the music.” That moment set him on a new course. “I decided to do the one-year course in the history and philosophy of science, thinking I’d study the history of a
