Larry Sanger family name Sanger
Early life and education
Lawrence Mark Sanger was born in Bellevue, Washington, on July 16, 1968. His father Gerry was a marine biologist who studied seabirds and his mother raised the children. When he was seven years old, his family moved to Anchorage, Alaska, where he grew up. He was interested in philosophical topics at an early age and decided "to study philosophy and make it my life's work" at the age of 16.In high school, he participated in debate, which Sanger says influenced his views on neutrality due to these debates exposing him to different issues and arguments from both sides":
And so I'd look up articles about those things, and I was always furious when I came across an article that failed to present one side fairly or at all. The worst instances were when [the author] would just come out and say what their position is. It just struck me as being really unfair.
Sanger graduated from high school in 1986 and attended Reed College, majoring in philosophy. In college he became interested in the Internet and its potential as a publishing outlet. Sanger set up a listserver as a medium for students and tutors to meet for 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 libertarian philosophy discussion list, the Association for Systematic Philosophy. In 1994, Sanger wrote a manifesto for the discussion group: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.
Around 1994, Sanger met Jimmy Wales after subscribing to Wales' mailing list titled Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy (MDOP).Sanger received a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy from Reed in 1991, a Master of Arts from Ohio State University in 1995, and a Doctor of Philosophy from Ohio State University in 2000. Beginning in 1998, he and a friend ran a website called "Sanger and Shannon's Review of Y2K News Reports", a resource for people such as managers of computer systems who were concerned about the year 2000 problem.
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