About Stephen

I’m from Canada, where my family has roots in the Maritimes and Prairies. My educational background is in philosophy and classical music, which you can read more about below. I spend my free time reading, writing, playing piano, listening to music, or playing games.

Contact Me

Feel free to get in touch at contact@stephenagross.ca or, for university matters, at rosss23@mcmaster.ca.

What is this website for?

I wanted a place to share things online which wasn’t on a large social media platform. It’s also a place to write, mostly short to medium length thoughts about this or that. As a friend of mine put it:

This is gonna sound corny and hippie as all hell but I think there’s something to say for a travelogue of the mind, dude. I think it would be super far out for people to document their academic explorations.

Academics

I have graduate degrees in philosophy (MA at Calgary, PhD at McMaster) and music (MMus at UBC), as well as an interdisciplinary undergraduate (BA at St. Thomas). You can see my CV here for more information. But yes, this meant a lot of moving around!

I defended my doctoral dissertation, entitled Pluralism, Truth and Synthesis, in September 2025. It was in an area called the history and philosophy of science (or just HPS). I analysed the strengths and weaknesses of scientific pluralism, which is the view that science doesn’t, or perhaps shouldn’t, have one monolithic structure, but instead many different approaches which can’t be reduced or combined together. I looked at a historical case study, the evolutionary synthesis, to try to be concrete about which aspects of pluralism work and which don’t, and to offer a constructive way to save the former and fix the latter. The dissertation is in McMaster’s repository if you’re curious.