Five Questions with Professor Thomas Barrett on Music and Philosophy | Science & Tech - The Bottom Line

Noe Padilla, News Editor at The Bottom Line Newspaper inform, Thomas Barrett is a new assistant professor in the philosophy department at UC Santa Barbara (UCSB). 

Photo: Esther Liu

He’s only been teaching at the school for a year at this point in time, and he specializes in philosophy of science, philosophy of physics, epistemology, and logic. In an interview with The Bottom Line conducted over email, Professor Barrett answered a few questions about his life and study of philosophy.


Responses have been lightly edited for clarity.

What got you into philosophy of science?
“When I was in high school I wanted to be a professional musician. I was in a lot of bands. We ‘gigged’ around Southern California and I did a lot of home recording. My dad was (and still is) a professor at UC Irvine in the department of logic and philosophy of science. His graduate students would always be over hanging out at our house, and I got to know many of them very well. A bunch of them played music too, so in the course of hanging around them I somehow got the impression that graduate school gave you a ton of free time and flexibility to play music. This meant that my plan upon entering college was: Go to graduate school (in something — who knows what) so that I would have enough free time to pursue the music thing.
 
I ended up taking a philosophy of physics class from Craig Callender during the fall of my sophomore year at UC San Diego, and I loved it.
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Source: The Bottom Line