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My name is Bennett Smith and I'm a senior Philosophy major at Haverford.

I think I've always been self-conscious. In high school and for the first few semesters of college I devoted a good deal of time and thought and interest to developing an academic understanding of the forces that (entirely without my agency) constituted me in one way or another; I was after my essence, in retrospect, something that any philosophy major in the twenty-first century should know better than to do. It can, though, be both difficult and impossibly appealing to reconcile what we think we know about ourselves with how we feel about ourselves as people in the world: if what we know about our brains is true, how can we feel certain about our capacity for free will? If we know that the circumstances of our world radically inform the ways that we think and feel about things, from where does our confidence in our individual, irreducible singularity come? These are the kinds of questions, I think, which elude definite answers, and which instead we can use to unceasingly push the limits of our understanding and test the certainty of our knowledge.

In this class I expect to learn a tremendous amount about other people and the worlds they inhabit, which I expect will in turn reshape my conceptions of my own world. I hope that we can work together to confidently move forwards toward new understandings and new uncertainties. And I hope that I can provide a (potentially unique, given people's academic backgrounds in the class,) productive perspective driven, I guess, by an earnest interest in knowing more (and better).