An Interview with Dr. Yujin Nagasawa
Diotima conducted an interview with Dr. Yujin Nagasawa, a philosophy professor at the University of Oklahoma. Before the University of Oklahoma, he was the president of the British Society for the Philosophy of Religion. He works on the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of mind.
Diotima: What got you interested in philosophy?
Dr. Nagasawa: As a kid, I quite liked science. I had a telescope, I liked to study fossils and insects, and I thought it would be cool to understand the world. Then I read philosophy as a teenager. I found a book on the history of philosophy, and these ancient Greek philosophers were talking about Arche , which is the fundamental principle, and I thought, “Oh, this is very cool” because philosophers tend to talk about not just our observable reality, but everything. Even things that are unobservable. So, I think that we can understand the world better by studying philosophy. Which is why I was interested in studying philosophy Diotima : With your specific area, philosophy of religion, how did you get into that? How did you get into the philosophy of religion specifically? From what I understand, you went to Stony Brook, which is very continental, and then Australia, which is very analytic. How did you end up in philosophy of religion? Dr. Nagasawa: Right, so that is a long journey. As a teenager, I was vaguely interested in philosophy, I thought Oh, I want to study philosophy. And then I went to a Private high school which was linked to a university. But at this university, we did not have a philosophy department. So, I decided to study pre-law because I thought I could specialize in jurisprudence, which is the philosophy of law. I thought that way, I could study something that was at least partially philosophical. There was this philosophy professor, and he was making an AI system to emulate Lawyers' thinking process. It was a really primitive form of AI when you look back. And then he said I
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