Early Life and Education
Sanger was born in Bellevue, Washington. When he was seven years old, the family moved to Anchorage, Alaska, where Sanger spent his formative years and excelled in the classroom. At an early age, he was interested in philosophical topics. Alan Boraas from Anchorage Daily News writes "I can visualize the scene in his high school counselor's office when he announced his intended major. 'Kid,' I can hear the counselor say, 'What are you ever going to do with philosophy?' 'Well, change the way the world thinks, for one thing.'"
He graduated from high school in 1986 and went off to Reed College, majoring in philosophy. As a college student, he explored the understanding and sources of knowledge. He also became interested in the Internet and its publishing abilities. These interests helped him to realize the benefits of using a wiki for an online encyclopedia. He set up an early attempt with a listserver as a medium for students and tutors to meet up for "expert tutoring" and "to act as a forum for discussion of tutorials, tutorial methods, and the possibility and merits of a voluntary, free network of individual tutors and students finding each other via the Internet for education outside the traditional university setting." He started and moderated a philosophy discussion list. The Association for Systematic Philosophy, managed by Sanger, published a journal. Dated March 22, 1994, Sanger wrote in his opening manifesto:
The history of philosophy is full of disagreement and confusion. One reaction by philosophers to this state of things is to doubt whether the truth about philosophy can ever be known, or whether there is any such thing as the truth about philosophy. But there is another reaction: one may set out to think more carefully and methodically than one's intellectual forebears.
He received a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from Reed College in 1991, a Master of Arts from Ohio State University in 1995, and a Doctor of Philosophy from Ohio State University in 2000. His bachelor thesis is titled Descartes' methods and their theoretical background and his doctoral thesis concerned Epistemic Circularity: An Essay on the Problem of Meta-Justification. From 1998 to 2000 he ran a website called "Sanger's Review of Y2K News Reports" (formerly at sangersreview.com), a resource for Y2K watchers.
In December 2001 Sanger was married, meeting his wife online, and they have since had two children.
Read more about this topic: Larry Sanger
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