Ola Aksnes

2nd Year Graduate Student | M.A. program in Philosophy

Karl Jaspers once wrote that 'it is the search for the truth, not possession of the truth which is the way of philosophy.' Few things bring this to the fore more than having to write about my interests in a field where I know almost nothing. That being said, four years of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh led to a particular interest in the phenomenological tradition as it developed through Martin Heidegger, and how a phenomenological framework can further our understandings of the structures that govern our lives, both in terms of embedded and embodied experience. Beyond that, I am also interested in aesthetics, hermeneutics, value theory, political philosophy, and why logicism was wrong about everything.

Some questions that currently interest me are whether knowledge of the world can be obtained from aesthetic experience, whether values can be justified beyond their cultural underpinnings, what it means to be a self, and what it means to obtain self-knowledge.