20 Alumni Stories - Stephen Priest

Stephen Priest graduated with the class of 2020 after attending Cambridge since second grade. He went on to Baylor University, where he majored in mathematics, philosophy, and linguistics, and is now completing a master's in philosophy at Georgia State, where his research touches on AI ethics and moral cognition. The throughline connecting all of it runs directly back to Cambridge. Stephen's episode is a sustained meditation on how ideas connect. Latin and Ancient Greek taken simultaneously led him to linguistics. Logic opened the door to set theory and philosophy of mathematics. A senior thesis topic became an undergraduate thesis topic and remains an area of active inquiry. The Cicero he studied in rhetoric class became the subject of a first-semester college research paper, written in Latin, drawing on three distinct strands of his Cambridge education at once. What he finds most striking is that it was not only his training in mathematics that prepared him for advanced mathematics. It was his training in the humanities. Upper-level math is about proofs, and proofs are arguments, and knowing how to find, develop, and communicate an argument clearly is the same skill Cambridge builds through essays and debate. The disciplines were never as separate as they appeared. For Stephen, philosophy is where all of it converges. It is the discipline that asks what the other disciplines are actually doing, and Cambridge, without ever teaching a philosophy course per se, spent years preparing him to love exactly that question.