James Kroeger, Philosopher

Some years ago it occurred to me that I can actually remember my first “philosophical” thought. As a six-year-old, after being sternly reprimanded by my father for making too much noise playing with my siblings, I can remember thinking to myself, “Why can’t we all just be friends?” It is a question that has stayed with me my entire life.

I suppose I became a true student of philosophy as a teenager, when I started to look for some explanations of Human Nature that were actually helpful. After a period of deeply religious investigation (I wrote to a Franciscan Monastery at the age of 14 to tell them that I was ready to spend the rest of my life as a Monk), I then turned to Psychology and Philosophy for the broader and deeper explanations I desired.

Unfortunately, it was a path that led only to eventual disappointment. It seemed psychologists were interested only in reporting their observations of various curiosities of human behavior without taking on the tough questions. Philosophers did take on many of those tough questions, but the answers they came up with did not satisfy.

And so it was that I began to look more and more to my own analysis, to my own path of curiosity for answers. For some reason, it seemed that when I asked a key philosophical question, when I wrote it down and pondered it at length, answers would just start to enter my mind. It often seemed as though the key was simply asking the right questions.

And so it is that, after many years of contemplation, I have compiled a body of explanations re: Human Nature that I think a lot of people will find quite valuable. Those who are much more cautious by nature would probably use words like ‘interesting’ or ‘provocative.’

Even if you are one of those who is much more cynically inclined, I think you might have to admit that at least your imagination was tweaked in a somewhat novel way by some of the arguments that I make. We shall see…