Philosophy Student Discovers He Has Been Thinking for Four Hours and Missed All His Classes

Undergraduate philosophy major Kevin Aporia sat down on a campus bench at 8:45 AM Tuesday to briefly consider the nature of knowledge before his 9:00 AM epistemology lecture and did not move for four hours and fifteen minutes, missing all three of his morning classes while staring at a fixed point approximately six feet in front of him. 'I was just going to think about it for a minute,' Kevin told campus security officer Diane Practical, who found him at 1:00 PM. 'But the question what is knowledge led to what is justified true belief, which led to the Gettier problem, which led to the question of whether the Gettier problem undermines all epistemic certainty, which led to the question of whether questions themselves constitute knowledge, and by then I had no idea what time it was.' Officer Practical confirmed that Kevin showed no signs of distress, intoxication, or medical emergency. 'He was just sitting there,' she said. 'Perfectly still. Eyes open. Breathing normally. Thinking. I asked if he was okay and he asked me to define okay. That's when I called his advisor.' Kevin's advisor, Professor Helena Dialectic, was unsurprised. 'This happens about twice a semester,' she said. 'Philosophy students occasionally fall into what we call a thinking hole. They start pulling on an epistemological thread and can't stop. Most emerge within an hour. Kevin's four-hour session is unusual but not unprecedented. We had a student in 2019 who sat in the library for nine hours thinking about whether chairs exist.' Kevin's missed classes include Epistemology (the class he was preparing for), Ethics (which he forgot existed), and Introduction to Logic (which he has been meaning to drop). His epistemology professor has excused the absence, noting that 'sitting on a bench thinking about knowledge for four hours is arguably the most epistemological thing a student has ever done.' Kevin has since installed a timer on his phone that alerts him after fifteen minutes of continuous thought. The alert reads: 'You are still thinking. Consider stopping.'