Elijah Spiegel: A different kind of answer

ELIJAH SPIEGEL, 17
HIGH SCHOOL: de Toledo High School
GOING TO: Stanford University

Even as a young child, Elijah Spiegel would pose theory-of-mind questions to his family and teachers; he loved to ask about the world around him. Fortunately, he had a relative with similar inquisitive interests who bought him a comic book about philosophy. 

When Elijah was about 10 years old, his mother bought him a copy of Rene Descartes’ “Discourse on Method,” which sat on his shelf for many years — it took him until he turned 15 to begin reading it. 

“I think it’s that kind of environment,” Elijah explained of his childhood home, where they don’t “necessarily force you to sit down and read this book, but to simply have that on the shelf.”

Now 17, Elijah has come a long way from that first comic book. As a senior at de Toledo High School, he’s read numerous philosophers — it took him a few minutes to name his top three. 

“Everyone, of course, has to say Plato, and with Plato comes Socrates,” Elijah said.

“All of Western philosophy is just footnotes to Plato.”

Then, he listed Baruch Spinoza. “Not just because he’s Jewish, though I do have that connection to him, but also due to his rigorous analysis. And for the third, I have to say Bertrand Russell, because he is a tried-and- true analytic philosopher.”

For the past four years, Elijah has been a member of his school’s debate team and in the most recent season, served as its captain.

This year, he qualified for the state championship in both the Lincoln-Douglas category and in the impromptu, but opted to give his latter spot to a classmate. 

“I’ve always been very analytical, and I’ve always enjoyed arguments,” Elijah said. “There’s a certain attraction to sharpening your mental abilities in terms of argumentation and those kinds of thought processes. I think that also there is a sexiness to conflict of the mental kind.”

Elijah said he’d learned a great deal from one of his teachers and mentors, Rabbi Devin Villarreal, who leads de Toledo’s Moot Beit Din team. 

From their first moments in class together, when, at first, Villarreal was just a substitute teacher, the two connected through a shared philosophical vocabulary, and they continued the conversation at lunchtimes and elsewhere. Through these encounters, Villarreal began to understand what separates Elijah from other students.

“It’s his ability to access the underlying questions of an issue,” Villarreal said. “He would want to get underneath that and ask, ‘How is it that we can evaluate an action to begin with?’ It is not the type of question that you hear a high school student ask. When I heard that inquisitiveness, it signaled to me that this was someone who was encountering the material on a different level and was looking for a different kind of answer.”

When he’s not studying rationalist thinker Eliezer Yudkowsky or reading Machiavelli, Elijah finds time to play on the golf team, participate in Moot Beit Din and volunteer at the Alzheimer’s department at the Motion Picture and Television Fund (MPTF). His favorite hobby though, is reading. He carries a list with him, noting the books and essays he has completed. 

Elijah aims for a career in artificial intelligence and plans to join the prestigious Symbolic Systems Program at Stanford University, where he will be attending in the fall. 

Artificial intelligence, he said, “is the new shiny field. But also the reason I want to do symbolic systems — which contains philosophy and linguistics rather than just straight computer science — is that I do like that philosophy side. There are a lot of interesting questions about the mind that can be asked there.”