Studying Thinking Itself: What I Learned at Fifteen in a College Philosophy Class
Aanya Padhi is a sophomore at Monta Vista High School in Cupertino, California. She is interested in applied ethics and political philosophy and is active in advocacy work to overturn wrongful convictions and address prosecutorial misconduct.
Last year, as a high school freshman, I signed up for an Introduction to Philosophy class at my local community college, where I was the youngest student in the class. If you’re wondering how I ended up there and why…
Let me dial it back a little: My grandma was a professor of eastern ethics in India and had introduced me to the subject of philosophy. Her work raised a lot of questions for me and inspired a deep curiosity to learn more. I wanted to understand how philosophical thinking and logic worked, how I could use existing frameworks to shape and communicate difficult ideas, and what a philosopher actually did. Ethics intrigued me and became one of those interests you read about in your spare time but other core philosophical concepts—like epistemology and metaphysics—were completely foreign to me. Signing up for the course, I thought it would be a great opportunity to challenge myself.
By the end of the course, I was excited about everything I’d learned and felt as if I was thinking in a whole new way. Not only did I feel I’d been challenged, but I also challenged the facts I already knew and began looking at ‘what I know’ with a new perspective. That shift in how I think is exactly why I’m writing this blog—to reflect on what I learned and why I believe more students should give philosophy a chance early on.
The course itself: I’m not going to sugar coat it—having to do ten assignments, consisting of assigned readings and video lectures, plus ten corresponding quizzes a week was not easy. Although we went through so much mind-bending content at a fast pace, I stayed the course because of the interesting topics I was being exposed to. Within a few days I went from reading Plato’s Phaedo, grappling with the concepts of opposites and death, learning about knowledge and skepticism, and about the current evidence and arguments for and against the existence of God.
While going through the course material, certain ideas and questions really stayed with me. For instance, I learned about Descartes, a philosopher who was a skeptic. He proposed the idea that everything we think is true might actually be false and that for all we know, our thoughts could be controlled by an evil genius—an intriguing (and scary!) thought that successfully challenges our belief system and wakes us up to other possibilities. Another idea that stood out was the mind-body problem—a problem concerning the relationship between mental and physical entities—especially Searle’s analysis that the mind is a real, biological product of the brain’s physical processes.
For one of my finals, I was asked: “Do you believe that God exists?” My first instinct was to start my essay with “God does not exist” because even after everything we learned, my practical side couldn’t believe in a God I couldn’t see or prove. And honestly, I was so overwhelmed by all the information that I couldn’t settle on one perspective. But the more I sat with the material, the more I realized my initial reaction was kind of lazy and uninformed. Philosophy isn’t just about accuracy; it’s also about interpretation and perspective—and about the fact that there doesn’t have to be one final answer. With everything I had learned, just saying “no” felt like taking the easy way out.
Of course, there were many more requirements for the essay, like understanding and including arguments from several different philosophers. I read through all the ideas I found thought-provoking, ranging from Anselm’s Ontological argument from the 11th century to Freud’s more contemporary view of an anthropomorphized god based on psychology to Carroll’s naturalism theory. As I considered these different arguments for God, I kept circling back to one that made the most sense to me and seemed the most plausible.
One of the most interesting and probable concepts I came across in the course was the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s idea of pantheism. He redefined what we mean by “God,” suggesting that God isn’t some human-like figure granting wishes to fulfill our psychological needs, but that God is nature itself and present in all things. That really shifted my thinking, and I used that perspective to frame my essay.
I really cared about doing well on my essay and in the class so I reached out to my professor for help. And, not to my surprise at all, he had a lot of comments for me which was humbling but really helped me understand the connections between the various points at hand. He helped me refine my ideas and taught me the importance of digging deeper into one specific argument. So, after a few office hours with my professor, that’s exactly what I did. I was blessed by the community college gods with a professor who helped me understand the concepts and establish a thoughtful, articulate argument.
My takeaways: To keep this blog short, sweet, and informational, I would say taking a college-level philosophy class as a 9th grader was not just an educational experience but also encouraged me to become a more reflective person. Sure, it made me a skeptic, but not in the pessimistic way of thinking we are all being controlled by an evil genius. Instead, it taught me to ask questions like, “How do we know this is true? Is there anything else to consider?” or “What does it really mean for something to exist?” Philosophy is not just about asking and answering fundamental questions as I thought when I began the class. It is really the study of thinking itself.
I will continue to take philosophy classes in the future, likely in ethics and political philosophy, which are areas connected to preparing me to compete with my Ethics Bowl team and to become a more effective advocate for social justice. I am so glad I stepped out of my comfort zone to take full advantage of this opportunity, and I look forward to all I will do with what I have learned.
