KURT SYLVAN

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I'm a third-year PhD student in philosophy at Rutgers University.  My main area of interest is epistemology, but I also work a fair bit on some issues in the philosophy of practical reason, value theory and the philosophy of mind.  After taking a fun class with Ruth Chang and Derek Parfit in my first year, my fascination with epistemic normativity became part of a broader fascination with normativity in all domains, and with truths about reasons, rationality and value that are domain-transcendent.   If John Skorupski hadn't just published his brilliant book The Domain of Reasons -- go read it! -- something like it might have been my dissertation.  Few things excite me more than the prospect of a unified theory of normative facts.  
           I also loved metaphysics as an undergraduate and have taught it as a graduate student.  I still think like a metaphysician in spite of not doing much work in metaphysics anymore.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, my greatest vice is excessive abstraction.  (But I thankfully no longer accept as a presupposition of inquiry that issues are worth pursuing only in proportion to their relative metaphysical fundamentality!)
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I have a number of extraphilosophical interests, though these are always pursued with philosophy on the back of my mind.   I enjoy the visual arts, poetry, novels, literary essays, art and music criticism, and all sorts of music. 

Here are colorful square "avatars" for the subsections of this website.  Perhaps it is more interesting to click them and enjoy a small surprise than to do the boring thing and click on the clearly labeled links that are found above.  (???!)

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This website vaguely aesthetically rips off Paul Klee (in his Bauhaus period), my favorite visual artist.  He was also a delightful writer.   You should read his journals: http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/1085.php.
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