Jay Tsai

  

Volume 8 | Issue III | September 2024

Collegiate School ’25

New York, USA

  

Although I doubted that the world existed outside of my imagination when I was nine years old, I have in my high school years fallen in love with a radically different approach to philosophy. In my view, philosophy should not be confined to private skepticism or conjecture; rather, it should serve as the conceptual foundation for all forms of human inquiry. I have extensively explored analytic philosophy for its rigorous approach to concepts, language, and logic, as well as its interdisciplinary connections with mathematics, science, economics, history, and, as I have delved in depth in my essay, literature. For my junior English thesis at school, I chose to focus on Pride and Prejudice because I found a compelling connection between the epistemological theories of Willard Van Orman Quine and Thomas Kuhn, whose works I had previously studied, and Jane Austen’s depiction of knowledge formation in her novel. Upon discovering The Schola and its focus on interdisciplinary thinking, I was inspired to refine my essay and submit it. The experience has been rewarding; the editorial feedback prompted me to structure my essay into sections, unveiling a new method to clarify the logical framework of my argument – a task that analytic philosophy considers of utmost importance. Outside of academics, I love soccer and poker but succeed only in the former.