A College Philosophy Lesson

There are three things I remember from my metaphysics seminar;

1. platonic universals are untenable concepts;

2. time travel must have always already occurred; and

3. there are gaps in the experience of many coastal elites that has rendered them ill prepared to make sense of the 2016 presidential election.

In the fall semester of 2016, PHIL 410 met on Wednesdays, in the Campbell-Meeker seminar room, from 7:00 to 10:00 p.m. It was my first upperclassman seminar, as well as my first course with Alexandra Bradner, who would later become my faculty advisor. As a sophomore, I was intimidated by the other students, primarily senior philosophy majors, who had a good two years on me in both their studies and their philosophical development. All of them were more experienced than I was in that delicate game of participating in a seminar — knowing when to speak, knowing how to draw out their reflections on texts with eloquence, knowing enough that they could connect the course's content with their own extracurricular reading. When our first class on Plato's Phaedrus included a fellow student quoting a lengthy sympathetic passage by the Persian poet Rumi from memory, I knew that I was in a foreign space — a space that I knew I wanted to belong to and felt I had some place in, but a foreign one nonetheless.

In my incoming class, if I remember correctly, out of around 500 students, nine of them were from Florida. Of those I had the chance of meeting, all were from south Florida, places like Miami, Tampa, and Saint Petersburg. Even within the student body at large, I am the only student I know of (besides a childhood friend who encouraged me to apply) from northeast Florida. This distribution of Floridian students is, to a degree, a microcosm of the student body at large. With the exception of a large number of students from Ohio, the next represented states are California and New York. My Florida is a far cry from the stereotypical image(s) of our most southern