[First off, an administrative note. Lately I have been getting LOTS of hits to my blog, usually very early in the morning or very late at night. I mean, like, 75 to 90 hits around 1:00 am or 11:00 pm. It really skews my numbers and makes me think more people are reading than there really are. I suspect they’re spam bots or script kiddies trying to break in to my site, but I’m not sure. Who knows, but it’s definitely annoying.]

If you have known me for any length of time, then I’ve probably already told you that I have a Bachelor of Arts degree in Philosophy from UC Davis. I studied a broad range of philosophy, from the pre-Socratics to Heidegger and so on, but my true loves were symbolic/predicate logic, the philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of science. In high school, after all, my favorite subjects were science and religious studies (English was great too, but that’s a different blog post). And my favorite part of the science classes were the history sections of the text books. Galileo, Aristotle, Galen and more were my jam. I loved reading books by Carl Sagan, too. The science itself (especially chemistry) I was mediocre at, but I really loved talking about it.

So when it came time for me to graduate college, I seriously considered going to graduate school to study philosophy. But I didn’t. I was a generalist, and the thought of focusing on a specialty or a specific philosopher for four years seemed constricting. And I didn’t know which of the professors I could approach to write letters of recommendation for me. And I was intimidated by the GRE test I’d have to take. And and and. I suppose this is why I attempted library school twice: to recapture my sense of scholarship and studying, but library school just wasn’t it.

Do I regret not pursuing graduate school in the history and philosophy of science? Yeah I do. I wanted to write in the field; I had a dream in high school of writing a book or a series of books called The Neverending Symphony, doing for life on Earth what Carl Sagan had done for the universe in Cosmos. I still think it would be interesting and I’d be good at it, although I did let my Penguin Scientific science writing blog lapse and I killed the domain because I was never using it. You need scientific expertise (or a journalism background) to do that sort of writing professionally, and I have neither.

BUT, here’s the important thing: You can’t regret these choices to not pursue anything, because regret doesn’t change a thing. And, for me, there were good reasons for not to pursue them at the time. Or so it seemed. I like to think that I made the best choices possible using the information I had and the resources I had. I think that’s so important that I’m going to put it into an HTML blockquote:

The choices you made in the past were the result of the best information and resources you had at hand at the time.

This is the main reason why I’ve stopped saying I was an idiot when I was younger, and stopped saying things like, “If you don’t realize you were an idiot back then, then you’re still an idiot.” As a therapist mentioned to me, “A degree in Philosophy from UC Davis is nothing to sneeze at.” So yeah, I guess I was a pretty smart guy. I made some choices that I think I would have made differently if I’d had better information, such as yeah, going to graduate school in Philosophy. Then again, as they say, what could have been isn’t necessarily what would have been. I did meet someone who had their master’s degree in the history and philosophy of science, and they were a travel agent.

I don’t know for sure that any of this makes sense. I hope it does. I hope I get something out of it.

Today’s recommendation is A Time for Murder, forthcoming on February 2, 2025, by my friend Paul Austin Ardoin. It’s a neat detective story with a time loop thrown in. I read a draft of this novel, and I loved it, and I strongly recommend it to everyone. Pre-order now!