Student Spotlight: Philosopher Micah Tillman

Hometown:
Gainesville, Florida
Major:
PhD candidate, Philosophy

PhD candidate and freelance writer Micah Tillman is about to finish his dissertation here at the University. He recently spoke to the Tower about music, philosophy, faith and the intersection of the three.

Q. How did you become interested in Philosophy?
A. It was my mom. I was home schooled and she taught a co-op class for other families that were home schooling. One of the classes she taught was on Philosophy, and she was so engaged in it and taught it so well that I became interested in it and tried to take as many philosophy classes as I could when I was an undergraduate.

Q. What was your interest before philosophy when you went to college?
A. It was music and computers. I was a song writer, a musician and a programmer.  I majored in computer science and minored in music.

Q. In college you played in a band?
A. I was going to school at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania which is just south of the capitol, Harrisburg. It was about a two hour trip home and on weekends and I would often drive home to play shows.

Q. What kind of music did you play?
A. We were a mixture of punk and grunge, which I guess is a kind of a natural mix since Kurt Cobain thought he was a punk artist. We were a Christian grunge-punk band and we played at a lot of churches.

Q. After you graduated you decided you didn’t like computer programming you went back to school?
A. I actually decided I didn’t like it when I was a junior but by then it was too late for me to change. The first two years of the computer science major was heavy in programming and the second two years were not creative at all.  I realized that not only did the major not fit me but I didn’t fit in to the culture of the computer science majors.

Q. Where did you recieve your Master’s in Philosophy?
A. I went to West Chester University in Pennsylvania. I was actually accepted to Catholic University but I turned Catholic down so I could have two more years playing with my band to see if [it] was going anywhere. It was a good experience being at a secular university for a while - being the only Christian in a secular environment taught me to be quick on my feet as a thinker. It was a good experience but I knew I wanted to come to Catholic afterwards.

Q. Was there a teacher here who impacted you in a certain way and had an influence on you?
A. Msgr. Robert Sokolowski has been a big influence on me here, especially on the phenomenology front. One of the reasons I chose Catholic University because it had a strong background in religious philosophy and I knew I wouldn’t be able to get that schooling I went to another University.

Q. What is your dissertation on?
A. It’s on the philosophy of Edmund Husserl and how he deals with presence and absence.

Q. What classes are you teaching?
A. I am teaching two sections of the Classical Mind and I teach Modern Mind in the spring. What I like most about teaching any of the classes is getting to interact with the students. I like to think I help my students.

Q. One of your assignments is to analyze a song and how it relates to the principles of philosophy. Does that have anything to do with you being in a band and because you like music?
A. Every semester I assign my Classical Mind students to take the course topics that we have been learning about and show me how they appear in lyrics in the song of their choice. One of the reasons I like music so much is it that it fills some of the same needs as philosophy.  It helps you cope with life, it helps you think about the world, it shapes the way you look at things and interact with other people. Philosophy’s job is to help you to think more clearly about your life and I want my students to see that philosophy’s ideas actually do apply to there lives if nothing else they apply to the music they are listening to.

Q. You have your own blog. What have you written recently?
A. It’s micahtillman.com.  I write a weekly article for freeliberal.com, which is a libertarian site. On my own blog I do a lot of political commentary.

Q. After your dissertation what are your plans? Do you want to go into teaching philosophy? Do you want to stay in the area?
A. Immediately I would like to stay in the area. I really love Catholic University and the environment here. Even though I am not Catholic myself it is a good place to be, philosophically and religiously. Even as a musician, I felt that my mission was to [help] Christian youth think about their own faith and their lives.

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