Do you want to listen to this episode? Or do you want to want to listen to this episode? Ashley tells us a bit about first and second order desires in her thesis studying moral responsibility. She also shares with us how she selected her major and shares some of her own struggles with mental illness in her time at Reed.
Reed community members can read Ashley’s thesis, “How Mental Illness Impacts Moral Responsibility,” online in the Electronic Theses Archive.
Betsy spent her thesis year thinking and unthinking what it’s possible to know about science, and how science can be used and mis-used in the field of psychiatry.
Reed community members can read Betsy’s thesis, “Now Doc, Hear Me Out— Epistemic Injustice in Psychiatry and a Case for Philosophy of Science as a Resource for Intervention,” online in the Electronic Theses Archive.
This is a podcast, and that was an assertion. Joseph spent a year exploring the nature of assertions like this in his thesis (which was mostly written after midnight, apparently).
This is also the last interview conducted by last year’s student producer, Amelie. Thank you Amelie for all the work you did for the podcast, and for helping us get to where we are.
Reed community members can read Joseph’s thesis, “Asserting as Committing,” online in the Electronic Theses Archive.
Louise talks about learning to accept criticism, and how an influential class got her interested in Aristotle.
Reed community members can read Louise’s thesis, “An Aristotelian Argument for Restorative Justice: How We Can Use Forgiveness Instead of Punitive Punishment to Heal from Wrongdoings,” online in the Electronic Theses Archive.
Join Misha and Amelie as they talk about Misha’s thesis on Leon Trotsky’s theory of revolutionary language and symbolism. You’ll also learn a bit about Misha’s thoughts on how the literary thesis experience is more of a reading project than a writing project.
Reed community members can read Misha’s thesis, “Trotsky Writes the Russian Revolution: The Symbol of the Explosion in Trotsky’s My Life and The History of the Russian Revolution and its Meta-Symbolic Significance,” online in the Electronic Theses Archive.
Frank interviews Rowen about a thesis year like no other. Rowen’s thesis experience explored some arguments about the epistemology of mathematics, or, as Rowen puts it, it was “a philosophical argument that used elements of mathematics.” Rowen touches on Gödel’s Theorem, Peano Arithmetic, and related theories.
Reed community members can read Rowen’s thesis online in the Electronic Theses Archive, which includes a short preface on the usefulness of epistemic thought in times of great crisis.
In this special episode we hear from Seth Paskin ’90, Reed alumnus and co-founder of Burn Your Draft, on the motivation behind the podcast. We’ll also hear about his own experience as a co-founder and co-host of the podcast, The Partially Examined Life, and his time thesising at Reed as a philosophy major.
This live interview was recorded during the 2020 Paideia week on January 25th in the living room of Prexy, a building on the Reed College campus that housed presidents of the college in the early days of Reed. It’s now the home of the Center for Life Beyond Reed and Alumni Programs.