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
Scott Aaronson’s fascination with computation began, as he recalls, “when I was two or three.” As a child, he was obsessed with “huge numbers… infinity… the speed of light and black holes—just sort of pushing things to the limits.” His father, a science writer, introduced him to ideas like the Big Bang and relativity, but it was a Nintendo console that changed his life. “I wanted to create my own Nintendo games,” he says. “It seemed like these were whole universes that someon
