Richard Lauer

Richard Lauer, Lecturer Of Philosophy

My father grew up in rural Delaware and my mother emigrated from rural Honduras to the US in the early 1980s. Neither of my parents went to college and my father joined the Army because it was the best way he could find to make money after I was born. I went to a local public vocational high school in Columbus, Georgia after bouncing back and forth between different states and countries (and school curricula) for several years. Needless to say, it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that I would go to college, much less become a philosopher. In fact, I had a pretty rocky start to my college career!

I went to Columbus State University (a small regional public university in Columbus, Georgia) because it was local and I didn’t have a strong academic record coming out of high school. To put it mildly, I had no idea what college would entail and finished my first semester with less than a 2.0 GPA (!). After some time away from school working as a customer service representative at a credit card processing company, I realized I needed to go back to school. So, I went back, ended up falling in love with philosophy, and decided to pursue it as a career.

While in college, I majored in political science (Columbus State did not have a philosophy program) and minored in philosophy. There I developed a passion for political theory and the philosophy of science. Once I got to graduate school, I ended up focusing on questions in the philosophy of science, particularly questions in the philosophy of the social sciences. Philosophers of social science address questions about what the social sciences can tell us about the nature of the social world (are there races? Can states, corporations, or other collectives believe and intend to do things the way individual people do?) and ask questions about the methods and goals of the social sciences (should the social world be studied using mathematics? Are there genuine “laws” in the social sciences like scientists seem to find in the natural sciences?).

I wouldn’t have made it all the way to my PhD without the one-on-one interactions and support I received from my undergraduate and graduate professors, some of whom I now consider friends. Their support and encouragement helped me figure out how to pave a path through my discipline.