Think you don't need a 'philosophy' student where you work? Think again!
Most people tend to malign philosophy as impossibly impractical, which means that I've had to learn to be quite defensive about my choice of undergraduate study. Fortunately, this defensiveness has paid off in making clear (to myself and others) the value of my own work. Unfortunately however, this value is hard to sum up in one sentence. In a single phrase: I don't get stuck thinking one way, but am open to any.
I entered undergraduate school not with the idea of learning something like psychology, economics or computer programming, but with the wish to learn how to learn whatever a situation requires of me. Sarah Lawrence College, one of the country's premier liberal arts schools (#1 Faculty in the US (Princeton Review, 2013)), proved to be the best place to do such a thing. Over the course of three years there and one at the University of Oxford (Wadham College), I was able to develop my own program of academic research––which I was able to take further than I ever expected it to go. My work eventually grew into the manuscript of a book I'm writing, from which I'm starting to advance a new, pragmatic problem-solving method based in in the historical development of the visual-conceptual arts––primarily philosophy, art and architecture––a style of creative inventiveness built into deep thinking through and about the concepts of form.
Mine is an open-ended, open-minded approach . . . which is to say that I'm more or less open to everything. Wherever I find or am given one picture of a situation, one account of a state of affairs, I try to come up with other descriptions or explanations which might serve to bring to light new aspects which you hadn't been able to see before. Nothing delights me more than finding one way of looking at things that's just as well-justified as the picture we already had––not because the new one is right, more comprehensive or more detailed, but simply because it's different. When you're not stuck seeing things in one way, you're free to see it in any––and thus all the more likely to solve or dissolve your problem.
In short, what you want is to cease being fixated on something. And at the risk of sounding immodest or of promising too much, I can help: and I want to help! You see, I've never let myself be trained into any one sort of tunnel vision, and if you team up with me we can remove whatever blinders you're beset by.
What I lack in experience I make up in boundless curiosity and a willingness and ability to learn (all wrapped up in a friendly, approachable demeanor, I promise!). I also have a refined instinct for business and branding (I grew up in a product development + brand management family). [RW]
Perhaps that makes me your ideal research assistant, the perfect intern, a choice copywriter––whatever! Remember, I just want to help. Give me a project and we'll see what we can do together.
