Name: Alex Tsunoda
Department: SILS
HC: What is your favorite form of transportation?
A: Well, it’s walking. Walking manages to simultaneously be the most practical and active form of transportation. Particularly when accompanied by music. It’s just not the same when you’re listening to music in the car or in the train. I feel music is an accompaniment to an activity. If walking is an activity, music turns you into the protagonist of a story.
HC: When and why did you decide study philosophy?
A: I studied philosophy in high school but I didn’t know it. Everyone experiences philosophy, but a very select few treat it as an academic discipline: something to make sense of with concrete academic methodology. As a philosopher, one my biggest questions is ‘why people aren’t people thinking about or engaging in philosophy at every moment of every day’?
HC: How can we get more people to engage in philosophy?
A: I don’t necessarily encourage the study of philosophy. It takes a certain sort of masochist to subject themselves to the literally pointless cycle of philosophy whilst maintaining the self-delusion of progress.