Summary
Philosophy in a public voice.
Essays, collaborative experiments, and projects for readers beyond a specialist audience.
Public philosophy should preserve intellectual seriousness without assuming that every worthwhile exchange begins with a journal article or ends with expert consensus. I am interested in forms that invite people into philosophical disagreement while making the underlying concepts and assumptions easier to see.
Selected writing
My essays for the Blog of the American Philosophical Association bring philosophical distinctions to questions of education, political membership, and academic life:
- On Belonging in Graduate School — April 2026
- An Invitation to Take the Question of Secession Seriously — March 2025
- On AI and Philosophy Education — October 2024
Paschal’s Post
My Substack is the home for my irregular public writing: shorter arguments, exploratory essays, responses to current debates, and work that benefits from a less formal setting.
The 2020–2021 archives are from before I switched over to Substack, and most notably document my experience with getting my Covid-19 vaccinations, which I documented to try to alleviate vaccine distrust in that time.
Projects in development
Better philosophical surveys
Popular instruments such as the Political Compass are engaging but often hide contestable theoretical assumptions inside their scoring. I would like to work with philosophers and social scientists on transparent, publicly available surveys of moral reasoning, political ideology, and philosophical belief, similar to the work that PhilPapers does with PhilSurvey.
The aim would be iterative: publish aggregate data, examine where questions or models misfire, and use the findings to improve later versions.
Open working groups
I have organized working groups within graduate communities and am interested in extending that model across institutions. A live, open discussion forum could combine research collaboration, public philosophy, and an alternative to formats built entirely around reading and prepared papers.
I am also interested in conference organizing and in the institutional work required to sustain philosophical communities.
Human reasoning in an AI classroom
AI makes it newly important to design assignments, discussions, and oral components that reveal philosophical understanding without treating polished prose as the only evidence of thought.
This project connects my public writing about AI with my broader teaching practice.
