About Me

Hi! I’m Khanh Nguyen, a philosophy student at the University of Edinburgh. While I am a philosophy student, I am also casually interested in mathematics. In fact, mathematics was my degree programme before I switched to philosophy! Now, why did I choose to switch from maths to philosophy? The answer, I think, will fall out once we get a sense of why I chose to do mathematics in the first place.

I chose to do mathematics for two reasons: (i) it was my best subject back in high school, and (ii) I wanted to see how proofs work. However, as I progressed with my mathematical studies, it became increasingly obvious that these are not very good reasons for pursuing mathematics. First, just because one is good at something does not mean that one would enjoy doing it full-time. While I enjoy mathematics casually, doing it full-time made me miserable. At one point, just the mere thought of it made me despondent, and because it was my degree programme, it was all I could think about. This, among other things, led to my two-year long depressive episode. It was a rather hard crash. My academics suffered for it. Even though the moral should be quite obvious, I had to learn it the hard way. Second, mathematics is not really concerned with how its methods work. It just assumes that its methods work and goes on its merry way solving problems. Of course, that is no fault of its own. If we required mathematicians to have to settle every question about their methods, nothing would get done. Mathematicians are concerned with mathematical problems. I am not. Philosophy was where I should have been.

When it comes to philosophy, my interests are quite wide-ranging. Of course, as a continuation of my previous interest, I am quite interested in the philosophy of mathematics. However, it is not my only interest. I am also quite interested in epistemology, logic, political philosophy, metaphysics, and the philosophy of science. For my final year dissertations, I have decided to write on scientific realism and philosophical naturalism as they cut across most of my interests. Anyway, feel free to shoot me a DM if you want to talk to me about any of these topics; I am always happy to have a discussion.