Franklin & Marshall College

Part III of the 2011-12 series on new, tenure-track faculty members.

As he talks about his fascination with philosophy, Nick Kroll points to complexities in things that appear to be simple or obvious. So maybe it is appropriate that Kroll’s path to Franklin & Marshall College was anything but simple, a journey along a winding—and remarkable—road.

Kroll, who joined the Department of Philosophy this year as instructor of philosophy, will soon defend his dissertation at Yale University. Kroll’s Ph.D. is the culmination of an academic journey that has taken him from a small tech school to the Ivy League, and seemingly everywhere in between.

A native of Williston, N.D., Kroll began his undergraduate career at Music Tech (now McNally Smith College of Music) in Minneapolis, where he followed his passion for playing the drums. But he wanted to get more serious academically, and enrolled at a community college back in Williston. The lure of music eventually took him back to Minnesota, this time to Moorhead State University, where he played in a band with several friends. During one winter break, he met his wife and decided to move with her to Arizona.

Kroll earned his B.A. at Arizona State University in 2000, then taught English to at-risk students at a Phoenix high school. But something pulled him back to Arizona State, this time for his master’s in philosophy.

“When I was younger, I was a drummer in lots of bands,” Kroll says. “Punk bands make you reflect on things people at age 16 or 17 don’t normally reflect on. This is how I became interested in philosophy. In philosophy, you question assumptions. Because I was already doing that in music, I found it interesting.”

So Kroll embarked on a path toward a career in philosophy. After earning his master’s, he began working toward his Ph.D. at Cornell University. He continued his studies at Yale, where he was originally accepted and where his dissertation adviser at Cornell moved a few years ago. His journey through academia nearly complete, Kroll looks back on his education with a new perspective.

“The higher I went in the hierarchy of schools, the more opportunities people had given the institution they attended,” he says. “At each step in the process, there were more opportunities for students.”

Kroll specializes in the philosophy of language and metaphysics. His research uses insights from semantics and linguistics to argue that some basic problems in metaphysics, such as the nature of dispositions and causation, are best explained in terms of teleology.

“In teleology, the basic idea is that things are directed at certain ends,” Kroll says. “For example, an acorn’s end is to become an oak tree. This idea of things being directed at certain ends hasn’t been taken too seriously in philosophy for quite some time. I argue that this is a mistake for a variety of reasons, one of which is the fundamental laws of nature depend on things being directed at certain ends.”

Kroll will teach Free Will and Introduction to Philosophy next semester. He and his wife are expecting their second child in the coming months, so life will remain busy for the new professor. “I’ve been very fortunate with the things that have happened to me,” Kroll says. “I’ve been able to land at a great place and work in a wonderful environment.”