St. John's

St. John's College is a Great Books school where students read foundational texts and discuss them in small seminars called tutorials. I attended the Graduate Institute in Annapolis. These are papers I wrote during my time there, covering everything from Euclid to Shakespeare. They're student work, not polished publications. I've kept author's notes on most of them to flag what I'd do differently now.

• Being Themselves in Henry IV
  01 Nov 2025 — My last paper at St. John's. Literature was probably my weakest subject so the quality of the writing improves less than I would have hoped.
• The Irrational Line in the Meno
  01 Jul 2025 — I was told to write on one text only, so I couldn't bring in the allegory of the cave. The point I make about approximations should have been about images. The drawn line is an image of something unspeakable, which is exactly what the cave is about. You can see me reaching for it in the paper without being allowed to name it.
• Motion and Being in Aristotle
  03 Mar 2024 — I chose this topic because I was struck by how the refutation of Aristotelian science posed real theological problems for Christianity. If Aristotle's cosmology is just an illustration, you can swap it out for Copernican astronomy and move on. But this paper traces how Aristotle builds from observable motion through nature and causation up to the unmoved mover. The physics and the theology are continuous with each other. If that's right, then dismantling the physics pulls out a structural support from the theology built on top of it. The paper gets close to making this point but never quite says it. The numbered argument near the end overreaches, trying to construct a parallel between motion and being that the text doesn't fully support.
• A Steelman of Divine Providence
  20 Feb 2020 — This essay was never completed. I withdrew from this class due to covid and I offer the essay in this state as a historical artifact of my thinking at the time.
• The Powers of Euclid's Book 1
  01 Oct 2019 — I wanted to use a graph to describe the dependency structure, freeing the essay to explore it rather than just describe it. My tutor advised against including one and I didn't push back, a decision that damaged the essay, leaving it mostly description.
• Reason and the Lawmaking Process
  01 Apr 2019 — My first paper at St. John's. I was still thinking and writing like an engineer — in engineering school we were taught that the easiest way to write was to make a diagram and describe it, which is exactly what I did here. While writing this I kept imagining Aristotle, Aquinas, and Cmdr. Data from Star Trek arguing whether Data reasons or not. A talented writer might be able to produce such a dialogue, but in my heart I am an engineer not a writer.
• GI Admissions Essay
  01 Aug 2018 — A typed essay addressing the strengths and weaknesses of my formal education, how I hope to benefit from the Graduate Institute, and a discussion of War and Peace.