Jim Lamb

1. How I Became a Philosopher
2. Education and Teaching
3. As a Philosopher

How I Became a Philosopher

• I became a philosopher as a teenager in high school.
• I had been raised a Roman Catholic, accepting church dogma without question. But I was also quite rational. So I decided to live my life to maximize the probability of going to heaven. Which meant becoming a priest.
• But a thought struck me one day that changed my life:
  • What if I’m wrong? What if I live my entire life based on a falsehood?
• My irreligious experience woke me from my “dogmatic slumber,” in Kant’s wonderful phrase.
• I proceeded to ask myself the quintessential philosophic question:
  • How do I know? How do I know that God exists, that there’s a heaven and hell, that what the Church taught was true?
• I was a philosopher.

Education and Teaching

• I majored in philosophy at the University of Rochester, taking classes from Keith Lehrer, Richard Taylor, Lewis White Beck, and A.D. Woozley. I palled around with my fellow philosophy major, Ferdy Schoeman
• I received my Masters degree from the University of Illinois, studying with Charles E. Caton and palling around with my fellow graduate student Tony Anderson.
• I earned a PhD in philosophy from Brown University in 1972, studying under Ernest Sosa and the great Roderick Chisholm.
• I taught logic and philosophy full and part time at Southern Methodist University in Dallas for 35 years.
• I’ve published a handful of papers, for example:
  • On a Proof of Incompatibilism
  • Evaluative Compatibilism and the Principle of Alternate Possibilities
  • A Sceptical Paradox Concerning Epistemic Justification
• I was also Director of Computer Services at Ebby Halliday Realtors for 28 years.
• I currently teach informal courses on scientific theories, philosophy, statistics, constitutional law, and contemporary issues in the SAIL program at Collin College, Plano, TX.

As a Philosopher

• I try to believe based only on rational arguments.
  • View Skepticism
• I think in terms of arguments.
  • View Awareness of Arguments
• I know how to formulate and evaluate arguments (having spent nine years studying this stuff).
  • View Argument Analysis
• I try to articulate ideas clearly, precisely, concisely.
  • View Articulating Ideas Clearly, Precisely, Concisely
• I approach issues top-down: articulating the matter in question, framing competing views, and formulating and evaluating the arguments
  • View Framework for Investigation
  • View Framework for Decision-Making