ben andrew colburn
19.15, 20/01/1982 - Greenwich, London
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Hello!
I'm 26 years old, and a philosopher working in the University of Cambridge. Officially, I'm a research fellow at Corpus Christi College, but I also do some lecturing and other teaching on the side in my capacity as an affiliated lecturer in the Faculty of Philosophy. Further details of that sort of thing can be found on my academic website, which I tend to keep more up to date than this.
My academic interests are now principally concentrated within philosophy and its near neighbours. My main area is political philosophy: my doctoral thesis concerns the attempt to ground liberalism upon a commitment to autonomy, and seeing whether it can work (and, if it does, what it means for political practice). My secondary area of research is in the philosophy of mathematics, where I'm looking at some interesting questions about Peano arithmetic and Church's thesis. I try to keep myself thinking about the philosophy of law and the political thought of 17th century England as well. I'm also becoming increasingly interested in the history, philosophy and policy of education - especially the comprehensive movement in Britain in the 1960s. In general, my outlook is of a wavering empiricist and a soggy logical positivist.
Outside philosophy, my interests are eclectic. In no particular order:
Thinking politically, I'm a Liberal (capital L) and a woefully inactive member of the Liberal Democrats. I'm also a signatory to Charter 88, the campaign for electoral reform, and Britain in Europe (though that's now been mothballed, I think). I'm fervently in favour of comprehensive, secular education; gay rights and the legalisation of many currently illegal drugs. I read the Independent or the Guardian. I'm an disestablishmentarian agnostic; a Private Eye subscriber; and a "so-called do-gooder".
In various respects I'm a thwarted student of architecture. Had I known when I was seventeen how interested I would come to be in the art and anthropology of buildings and city design, I might have followed a very different path. As it is, I satisfy myself by sketching plans whenever I need a break from philosophy, and by seeing as many interesting buildings as possible. My favourites include: the Pantheon in Rome; the vernacular architecture of Siena; the chapel of King's College, Cambridge; the Royal Naval Hospital in Greenwich; the Natural History Museum in South Kensington and the concrete jungles of East London. If you can find a common thread there, you're more perceptive than I am. One more consistent interest is in the architecture of English parish churches - particularly the wonderful churches of Suffolk and Norfolk, about which Simon Knott has written a wonderful website, but also the churches of Cambridgeshire, about which I've written a less wonderful website with Mark Ynys-Môn. At some point we may write a book on the matter, if I can find the time. Another pipe dream is to do some serious interdisciplinary work on the functioning of public architecture - social housing, schools, and so on.
I'm not quite so obsessed by the other arts, though I spend a lot of my time on photography. I love medieval paintings, especially the Sienese school, whose psychologically fraught geometry seems much more interesting to my mind than the mathematical perspective that was imposed on the world by the Florentine renaissance. I'm also tremendously fond of early Flemish oil-painters like van der Weyden and Van Eyke, and of modern painters like Klee and Van Gogh.
Speaking musically, I like Pulp, the Divine Comedy, and the Magnetic Fields. I like minimalism - Philip Glass in particular, but also Michael Nyman. My favourite composers tend to be early ones - Tallis, Dowland, Purcell and Handel, for example. I also have a soft spot for Mussorgky, Prokoviev and Rodrigo. I play the classical guitar, the treble recorder and the steel pan, and I used to try to play the oboe before I developed a social conscience.
Considering literature, I have loved the works of Tolkien ever since I first read them. My favourite play by the Bard is probably the Tempest, though I'm also a great fan of Lear, Richard II and Anthony & Cleopatra. Aristophanes is probably my favourite other playwright, although Alan Bennett and Plautus aren't far off. Books that I read when I was much younger and had a profound influence on my mental landscape include the Earthsea trilogy by Ursula le Guin, the works of Rosemary Sutcliffe and Penelope Lively and, above all, the ravishing Dark is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper.
I have recently rediscovered a taste for poetry, in particular the work of Philip Larkin, W.B. Yeats, and Ted Hughes. I also enjoy Anglo-Saxon and Gaelic poetry, though, my language skills being what they are, I have to cope with translations most of the time. Some of my favourite poems can be found in the unfinished books.
I don't smoke or take exotic substances, but I'll never say no to a glass of Laphroaig or Ardbeg. Indeed, I love Argyll dearly - go and have a look at Kilmartin House if you get the time.