The Philosophy Professor I’ve Followed Through Space and Time

He taught me metaphysical considerations for a better life.

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In my early twenties, I fell into an elitist crowd of philosophers who liked to sit around pubs debating abstract intellectual things such as Wittgensteinian theories. These were my years as a student at uni in a “college town” in the southern part of New Zealand’s South Island. I met a lot of philosophers who were influential for the rest of my life, but none of them were so great at making an impact on my way of thinking as my thesis supervisor, Josh.

Josh was not just a philosophy teacher to me. He was also my band leader. He was a young, skinny, post-punk dude who always had a friendly demeanor no matter who he was speaking to.

He genuinely loved philosophy. You could tell how much he loved talking about it just by sitting in one of his metaphysics lectures. He could think about space and time almost from an outsider’s perspective and had a great way of discussing it without judgment or ego. His specialty was research in the area of the spatio-temporal existence of objects.

You see, it isn’t completely obvious how objects exist. We take it for granted psychologically, but in fact, we don’t know for sure what makes an object the same from moment to moment, especially if it undergoes changes. Are your bodies the same as they were when we were babies? How are we persisting through life shifts? Mentally, what makes me the same person as ten years ago if almost nothing seems to remain of that person I once was?

The same dilemma applies to objects that seem to exist outside of us. How is a house the same if I remodel it and give it a makeover, and at what point does it become a different object? What is time? What is space? What are qualities? What is anything.

Josh taught me about these things. This is why, twenty years later, I still often think of Josh.

I narrowed my focus to the study of metaphysics in my postgraduate years. Josh joined the faculty exactly when I was entering my Master’s studies in 2006. Could it be a coincidence that the universe saw an opening for a great mentor in my life and sent me Josh? I don’t know if there is any other philosophy professor…