JEREMY BOWMAN
e-mail:		jeremyphilosophy-type.com
text/phone:		+353 87 2270515
Skype™:		jbepyks

Basic information

education:		B.A. in Philosophy and Mathematics, University College Cork, 1985 M.A. in Philosophy, University College Cork, 1987 Ph.D. Candidacy, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 1992 Deemed politically incorrect by academic establishment, c. 1997
employment:		Lecturer in Philosophy & Logic, 1990 — 2000 Researcher, writer, parent, 2000 — 2006
recent:		Vocational training in Graphics for Print Media, 2004 — 2005 Work experience, advertising section of Irish Examiner, 2005
other info:		I work at home using an Adobe Creative Suite 2 Premium edition for the Mac, which is registered in my name and can be used for commercial purposes. I am familiar with both Mac and PC computing systems. I have a 1.5k broadband connection in my house, so I can send and receive large files quickly via the internet. I drive my own car and can travel easily at short notice.
interests:		Technical interests include typography, the use of diagrams to explain abstract ideas, and "embedded" indexing. This involves putting invisible codes into a text to mark the places where the entries in an index point to. This enables the reader to jump from index to text with a click of the mouse.

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For best printing results, open a PDF version of my résumé (plus generic covering letter and thumbnails of certificates) by pressing the button on the right.

What's it all about?

The name of this website is "philosophy-type" (with a hyphen) because my interests straddle philosophy and preparing text for publication. If you interpret the hyphen as an en dash, it expresses the fact that I am making a transition from writing about abstract philosophical issues to doing practical work with text and typography.

If you are seeking the services of someone who can carry out pre-publication tasks such as typesetting, copy-editing, book layout, someone who also happens to be skilled in the use of graphics applications such as Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, please contact me using the information above. I am also learning how to produce professional-quality book indexes, and I am becoming quite familiar with the practical business of creating and maintaining modest websites (such as this one).

As this website develops, I will upload short articles on philosophical topics and examples of recent graphics work as a showcase for my talents (or lack thereof).

In addition to what you will eventually be able to see on this website, I am an Adobe-certified expert in InDesign CS2. I have acquired editing skills through years of teaching. During my academic career I supervised thousands of student essays and corrected thousands of exam papers, which in effect amounts to an informal training in proofreading. I am familiar with mathematical/scientific symbolism as well as with the specialized vocabularies of the humanities. I am enrolled in the Society of Indexers' training course, and expect to get official accreditation in a few months' time.

I have two specialized areas of interest: embedded indexing (which enables readers of interactive PDFs or HTML to mouse-click on an index entry and so "jump" to the relevant text) and the use of diagrams to explain abstract ideas.

The Story of my Life

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap . . . So here is a picture of my birthplace on the right.

Actually, my childhood wasn't lousy at all. I was born in Halton, an RAF base, during my father's period of "national service", which men in the UK were obliged to do for a number of years following the end of the Second World War. Not far away, in the Chiltern Hills, there is a brewery which recently commissioned a rather exciting painting of Halton, which they now use as the label on the bottle of their beer. That's where the picture on the right comes from. I'm not convinced that Halton was quite as exciting as the beer label suggests. Or that life for servicemen's families was quite as grand. I think we lived in one of the prefabricated huts somewhere outside the frame of the picture.

One of my earliest memories is of huge and threatening Vulcan bombers (which were then part of the UK nuclear deterrent) in the sky. For many years, I used to tell everyone that that was where I first got my lifelong interest in aircraft. Or rather, I used to say that until one day I was travelling with my young children and old wife across southern England by road. We stopped at the RAF museum at Tangmere, as a break for the children during the long car journey. I mentioned to one of the retired RAF chaps who ran the museum that my earliest memories were of Vulcan bombers at Halton. He assured me that there couldn't possibly have been Vulcan bombers there, as all it ever had was a small grass airstrip, not nearly long enough for large aircraft. So it turns out that my cherished "earliest memory" was nothing better than a symptom of "false memory syndrome".

One aspect of my childhood that definitely wasn't a symptom of false memory syndrome was my interest in astronomy. I still have an astronomy book for children from that period. Inside the back cover are planetary tables that predict the position of the planets right up to the year 1972. I remember being very impressed by the ability of scientists to predict that far ahead. I was also impressed by the thought that although I would probably be alive in 1972, I might not be. Looking back on my childhood, I'm not sure if I was as aware then of the possibility of death as I later became. In any case, a few years later, when I was 8, I had an accident that I was lucky to survive. So it's a pleasure to look at the old planetary tables and see that I did indeed live to see them go out of date. (By the way, you may be wondering why I suddenly brought in a ghoulish reference to human finitude. I'm convinced that astronomers and philosophers get a very similar kind of consolation from thinking about the whole universe. The more we realize how small we are in the larger scheme of things, the more aware we get that our problems and anxieties are relatively small too.)

The inside front cover of the book is inscribed with my own name, "aged six and a half" written in a childish hand. Childish though the handwriting is, it was written using joined-up writing, which I had recently learned with pride. I nagged my older brother to teach me how to write that way as soon as he had learned how to do it in his more advanced class in school. I always liked the idea of being a sort of master of written symbols, the more arcane the better. I also wanted to get a "fountain pen" of the sort that were usually forbidden to children of my age. I got a pen, a green one, but whatever I did with it can't have been a pretty sight.

Writing symbols that no one else could understand was not my only childhood ambition. When I was a bit older, I wanted to become a writer of novels, like Hemingway. My father was a big fan of Hemingway's early work, and he taught me that the best writing tends to leave things out. If a novelist can provide a convincing but sparse outline, the reader will fill in the descriptive details himself. The imagery the reader puts in will be more haunting and believable than any imagery a novelist could describe, because it comes from the reader's own imagination, like the imagery that appears in his dreams. It is likely to "suspend disbelief" more effectively than anything that comes from someone else's imagination (or memory). I've long believed that the main purpose of novels and movies is to suspend disbelief. If morality enters a plot, its only role should be to help suspend disbelief more effectively. If you want your audience to overlook the fact that the mountains are made out of papier maché, it helps if they are very preoccupied hoping and praying that the bad guy will get it in the neck. The aims of fictional writing and factual writing are very different, of course, in that one is usually trying to hide the truth and the other is trying to reveal it, but in both, saying too much is a mistake.

If only I could follow my own advice, I would have shut up a few sentences ago. But I want to add: even non-fictional writing works better when the writer only says what he needs to say. He must never show off his own erudition. (In other words, he should try to avoid what I did in posing for the photograph on the right. Please be charitable — I was but a child.) Academics tend to wear their learning like a leaden suit, and most of them do not realize that didactic writing is like feeding a baby with a spoon. You cannot hope to get all of the food into the baby's mouth, and you will get very little in there by force. But you can trick the baby into thinking it's eating something pleasant, and if you're lucky about half of it will go where you want it to go. For teaching purposes, a good book will not itself contain the information you want the student to get, but it might lead him to go and find it out for himself. Alas — academic writing is very rarely like that. Most of it is isn't even read. Instead it's aimed at fattening the CV of the person who wrote it, because nowadays academic positions are allocated on the basis of how much paper a job applicant has been able to re-cycle over the years, passing it all off as just-written original work, naturally. This isn't plagiarism, because the writer isn't passing someone else's work off as his own, but it isn't exactly plain dealing either. I have never submitted any of my writing for publication in an academic journal, and I never will, although I admit I've probably done a bit of re-cycling when pressed for ideas. I would like my writing to be read, preferably with some enjoyment, or failing that, with the slight sense of anguish that goes with discovering something painful but true.

You can tell that I wanted to become a writer, because sometime around 1972, when the planetary tables in that old astronomy book became obsolete, I must have arranged the photograph above of me sitting at a desk with a typewriter. I think I was trying to give the impression that that was "what I did". (You can tell that this was the early 1970s, or the early 1890s, because of the Aubrey Beardsley poster in the background.) It might appear from that old photograph that I was a prodigious child who could use a typewriter, but in fact I only learned to type properly — using eight fingers and one thumb — about a year ago, after hours of compulsory "typing practice" at a vocational reprogramming course.

Towards the end of the 1960s my family moved to Ireland. We used to travel by air between London and Ireland quite often. In the spring of 1968, an Aer Lingus Viscount traveling from Cork to London crashed near Tuskar Rock off the south-east coast of Ireland. Later that year, during an escape attempt from a wet summer holiday in a caravan in Rosslare, I watched investigators unloading pieces of the wreckage from a trawler at the dockside. The cause of the crash remains a mystery. Some think it was the result of a unreported mid-air collision with an RAF aircraft, or perhaps even a missile. It's an intriguing theory, and a depressing number of civil airliners have fallen from the sky as the result of military activity. However, most airliners crash as the result of pilot error or mechanical failure. I'm agnostic on the question, because it seems to me that a person's position on the matter reveals more about their political allegiances than the state of their knowledge of the real world. And that fact in itself is rather interesting: when presented with a choice, we nearly always adopt the theory that confirms our political prejudices rather than the one that undermines them. We are a very social animal, and we seem to value "fitting in with the herd" more than having true beliefs. One of my few personal ambitions in life is to always try to adopt true theories rather than theories that will help me to fit in with my fellow man. I'm aware that I may be trying to do something very unnatural.

By the early 1970s the utopian dreams of the 1960s were dying, as were many of the people who sang about them. That was important for a boy of my age, because all through the 1960s, as one Beatles masterpiece followed another, children like me looked up to the young adults who were apparently changing the world. We looked with awe and admiration. They were younger than our parents, so they were not "squares", but they were older than us, so we thought of them as heroes. They seemed to be involved in a great "life experiment" that no generation had ever seen before, and the many deaths by drug overdose were noble casualities of that experiment. But really, they were a terrible generation to hero-worship. True love has nothing whatever to do with "free love". What they called "free love" had almost nothing to do with any kind of love. This was beginning to become obvious by the early 1970s, and it was beginning to make a deep impression on me. Woodstock and all of the other supposed celebrations of human togetherness and sociality had demonstrated that we really are not that sort of animal at all. We cannot love everyone blindly, although love is blind. We can become erotically attached to one person, and never more than one person at a time, although we can have sex with many people. By denying the exclusivity of attachment that is so much a part of human nature, the utopian "communes" of "hippie" types were bound to fail. Iain Matthews (a working-class folk singer from Scunthorpe, not the sort of person we associate with west-coast American lifestyles) expressed the growing sense of disillusionment very well in his version of the song Woodstock. The Matthews Southern Comfort version of the song changed Joni Mitchell's original words, from "by the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong" to "by the time I got to Woodstock, they were half a million strong".

Many people today are in denial about the fact that the "community spirit" of the 1960s was actually a failure. They yearn to engage with — even fight for — the sort of moral causes that in the 1960s gave people a sense of importance and purpose and togetherness. The ending of the Vietnam War was secretly considered a tragedy by such people, because opposition to that war was the most unifying cause of them all. After it ended, the best they could do was listen to the Eagles — and the pains of living as a rich-kid in 1970s California doesn't evoke quite the same high-minded sentiments as the sorrow and the pity of war. The historian of science Thomas Kuhn wrote that almost all human thought is guided by a small number of groundbreaking successes. The great moral success of the generation that preceded mine was that they brought an end to the Vietnam War through organized group protests. I don't deny that it was a genuine success, but I may as well tell you: I have a dream. I have a dream that someday young men and women will be guided by some other great moral success than that one.

In 1975, the first chinks of light began to break into the Dark Age of the 1970s. The Ramones emerged first in New York city, and reminded the world of the beauty of simplicity, something almost everyone had forgotten. Then the Sex Pistols appeared in London, and the Buzzcocks in Manchester. In 1976, I started studying engineering, with the intention of becoming an aeronautical engineer. But really, sad though it sounds, I was less interested in the electrical circuit than the electric guitar. Suddenly, everyone was able to play one, even me. But the aesthetic amoralism of punk rock didn't last long. Within a year or two, the corruption set in. It was perverted by the cloying moralism of "Rock Against Racism" and the "Anti-Nazi League" – the latter consisting almost exclusvely of Nazis. The return of 1960s earnestness was mostly inspired by überhippies The Clash, who inspired a generation as they toured the world doing their Good Works. It made me nauseous. In 1977, I bought a copy of Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, and my outlook on life was never quite the same again. A few years passed in which I spent a lot of time listening to music (and occasionally playing music). I barely held my head above water exam-wise, which says something about my innate mathematical abilities. Eventually, I switched universities and began a degree in philosophy.

For quite a while, it seemed as if I had finally found my true calling in life. I was awarded an MA in philosophy, and then I went to Chicago to study for a PhD. I got married and became a father to two brilliant boys. When I was "ABD" (= all but dissertation, meaning that I had completed all the requirements for a PhD except presenting a finished thesis) I was offered a teaching position in Ireland. I gratefully accepted the job. Although I looked forward to a return to Ireland, I began to realize just how attached I had become to America after living there for five years. Admittedly, it had been a bit frightening and rather annoying for the first year or so, but after that it had become a time of enchantment. I still have dreams of fireflies rising like slow sparks under the trees on summer evenings. Of nighthawks flying around the fire escape on impossibly hot summer nights. Of the ceaseless sounds of crickets and sirens in a big city of America. . .

Now, around this time, the sick academic cult of political correctness was in full swing. Adult teachers were expected to exercise a "duty of care" towards their adult students, which meant that they were not allowed to utter controversial views, or openly speculate about matters that some people might find "offensive". That was definitely a problem for me. I believe in the proliferation of different views, and in the value of moral disagreement. We must hear opposing views if we are to improve ourselves. But moral views that differ from our own always strike us as "offensive". So we must encourage the expression of views that at least some people find "offensive". (Yes, I didn't say merely "tolerate" but "encourage".)

Despite some real tensions between my own teaching methods and the expected teaching methods of the rest of the academic world, I enjoyed living in Chicago, and I enjoyed teaching American students. I enjoyed the snow in the winter and the heat in the summer, both unheard of in Ireland. I was a youngish man with a young family and a promising career. I had the good fortune to work with some of the best philosophers, and the bad fortune to work with some rather overrated philosophers. These were formative years in which I became more and more firmly a realist, and more firmly a liberal, with a conservative streak. By a "liberal" I mean someone who believes that freedom of the individual is the highest and perhaps the only social good, and that freedom of thought and expression is absolutely vital to human progress and happiness. By a "conservative" I do not mean someone who supports right-wing fiscal policies, but rather someone who recognizes that there is wisdom in tradition, and that is it unwise to swop arrangements that work tolerably well for utopian arrangments that have just been cooked up by someone of no experience with a sweeping moral agenda.

If you want to find out what I mean by a "realist", you will have to wait until my essay on realism becomes available via the philosophy page of this website. It is the key to my personality and my philosophy, and there is rather more to it than just an unromantic rejection of "idealism".

Although political correctness was the beginning of the end of my career as an academic, there was some life in the old girl yet. I was invited to the University of Iceland on two occassions, as a visiting lecturer. My first visit was in 1994 when I brought my old wife and children. My second visit was in 1996 when I brought my new wife. Sometime in between, my first marriage came to an acrimonious end, and that was a further factor in my giving up academic life. It goes to show that two people really can have too much in common. One thing we shared was an eagerness to spend as much time as possible with our children, and miraculously, we agreed to equal custody of our two boys. For the next ten years or so, I dedicated the first half of each week to acting as housewife and guardian, and the second half to writing the sort of philosophy that could not be written in the stifling climate of an academic job. While I miss teaching, and I miss the generous salary paid by a regular university job, I revel in my intellectual freedom. My eldest boy has left school, and my younger boy gets ever more independent as he gets older. I am ready for the next stage. (To be continued . . . )