Edgar Boedeker

Why I teach:
Whenever we do, say, or think anything, we take a host of things for granted, rarely stopping to focus on them or articulate just what they are. Sometimes, however, we find ourselves needing to decide what to believe, what to do in our  personal lives, or how to live together with other people. Such situations call for trying to understand what’s really, fundamentally, going on: to make explicit what we usually just implicitly presuppose. When we’re doing this, what we’re doing is philosophy.

I’ve found myself again and again trying to clarify what’s presupposed in a range of things that I and others do: reasoning; speaking and listening; and living life within the possibilities and confines given by the communities we belong to, the technologies that surround us, and the mortality that at certain junctures in our lives compels us to make choices as to what to do with all this. What guides my teaching is the joy of working with students to see, describe, and come to grips with these and other fundamental phenomena.