About
A Byronic fox on politics, law, philosophy, academia, rationality, music, life, etc.
Paul Gowder, the author of this blog, is a fourth-year Ph.D. student (Ph.D. candidate, even!) in political science at Stanford University. He studies normative political theory, with particular interests in democratic theory, analytic liberalism, jurisprudence, enlightenment theories of history (and their modern equivalents), and rational choice theory. He also has a J.D. from Harvard Law School. In a previous life, he was a civil rights lawyer, a legal aid lawyer, a volunteer community organizer, and a New Orleans music industry middleman.
Intellectually, he also has interests in formal modeling (game theory, evolutionary game theory, social choice theory, etc.), religion in politics, perfectionism, professional ethics, free speech, corruption, money in politics, philosophy of science, cyberlaw, and organizational theory. Other-than-intellectually, he has been known to be involved with things like jazz music (avant-garde for preference), the English Romantic period (hence the “Byronic,” although that’s mostly a joking reference), aikido, and Kafka and Borges and their magical realist/vaguely existentialist heirs.
He grew up in Los Angeles, and has lived in many other places, including (obviously) the Bay Area, Chicago, New Orleans, Boston, Montana, Oregon and various suburbs of Washington D.C. A hopeless caffeine addict, he can recommend good coffeeshops in most of those places.
Because this sort of thing always tends to come up in the discussions raised on this blog: his views on race are roughly those of Kwame Anthony Appiah, with a dose of Malcom X. His views on class are roughly those of Herbert Marcuse, with a dose of John Rawls. His views on gender are roughly those of Susan Okin, with a dose of Simone de Beauvoir. He realizes this sounds incredibly pretentious but can’t do jack-all about it.
Contact Paul at paul.gowder (at) gmail (dot) com
