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Ben Eicher's avatar

This resonated with me more than I expected. However, it was not because I came to philosophy the same way, but because I came to philosophy out of necessity and circumstance.

I wasn’t introduced to philosophy in a classroom. I was introduced to it in hunger, grief, and the dissonance between what I was told the world was and what I lived through. Where others found Plato in a syllabus, I found fragments of meaning in stolen library hours, late-night YouTube lectures, and notes scratched between shifts at work.

Philosophy didn’t feel like a field; it felt like a raft. When nothing else held, it gave me something to hold onto: not just answers, but the right questions. I’m not a professor, but I’ve built my life as a kind of philosophical witness. I write, I build, I question systems. And like you, I see philosophy as something that must reach beyond the academy and into the streets, into the commons, into our daily choices.

So I appreciated this piece. Thank you for showing how even through different doors, we may still arrive at the same house.

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Barrett Culmback's avatar

Check-out Barrett Culmback’s Substack! Philosophical/Spiritual ideas, often humorously presented!

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