Samuel Adeyemi

I have taught physics for twenty years, and every year a student asks a question I can't answer with an equation. What is time, really? If the world is just particles, where is the color red? How do we know any of this is true? I usually say, "That's a philosophy question," and move on. I am tired of moving on.

I want to understand what there is and how we can know it: the old questions of metaphysics and epistemology. I also want to know whether the world physics describes is the same world we live in, or something else.

I want to follow the questions about being and knowledge from the beginning. For ancient and medieval philosophy, Plato's Theaetetus, which asks what knowledge is, Aristotle on substance and cause, and Peter Adamson on the medieval debates about universals. For modern, Descartes, Hume, and Kant, which is the story of how philosophers tried to make knowledge as secure as science.

I know this curriculum leans Continental. That is part of the appeal. Phenomenology starts from experience instead of from physics, and I want to see what it does with time and perception. So: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger, with Derrida's critique of Husserl to see where it breaks. For electives, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and the course on Einstein, so I can bring it back to my own subject.

Four hours during the school year, more in the summer. Grading eats the rest. I would rather go slowly than quit in March.

Saturday mornings at the dining room table before my kids are up, and one lecture on Wednesday evenings. I keep a lab notebook for everything else, so I will keep one for this too, with each argument written out step by step.