Anderson has been an avid baseball fan since his youth. His favorite figure in baseball history was a man named Branch Rickey. Rickey developed the farm system for baseball, allowing even the worst teams to slowly cultivate talent through their minor league affiliate clubs. In between the baseball season, teaching and ongoing research on Plato and Emmanuel Levinas, he fits in racquetball with fellow philosopher and Washington College professor, Dr. Kevin Brien. It is all part of the old Greek ideal and the balance between music and gymnastics.
Music is as emotional as it is mathematical and helps to harmonize the whole person.
They may be hard to reconcile for most people, but for a philosopher like Anderson, they are the essential complements for a happy life, one in which contemplation is an essential quality of being human. Philosophy is still difficult to learn. The questions run ever deeper and the students return year after year to drink long draughts from its deep well. No other discipline can answer it the way philosophy can. While Anderson attended graduate school at Yale, he was struck most by the brilliance of his peers, and found himself in an atmosphere where students regularly gathered outside the classroom to discuss these basic questions about happiness, virtue and living well.