For the John Templeton Foundation, I had a fascinating chat with philosopher Nathan Ballantyne. I think about his idea of epistemic trespassing a lot.
How did you get interested in your field?
As an undergraduate student, I commuted from my parents’ home to Victoria College at the University of Toronto. For three hours roundtrip, I travelled on trains, subways, and buses. I packed along a couple books and noise-blocking earplugs—this was years before I owned a laptop or cell phone. The commute was a gift of solitude. Inside certain books, I found worlds made by words that were more absorbing than anything I had encountered before. Early favorites were Pascal’s Pensées, Descartes’ Discourse on Method and Meditations, Augustine’s dialogues on skepticism and his Confessions, and some of Plato’s early dialogues. Those philosophers have been gone for centuries, but their writings confront us with enduring questions. What are the limits of human reason? How can we overcome our doubts and know with confidence? Whom should we trust when we can’t know something on our own? Questions like these unsettled me, but I found it somehow easier to be troubled while in the company of literary guides. Perhaps I had the immediate sense, while reading their works, that I wasn’t the only one to feel anxious perplexity about knowledge. Not knowing can be a perfectly acceptable state of mind, even when we desire to know.