About

The Person

Jessica Solomon is a person for whom thinking is a way of being in the world. She is drawn to the questions that sit underneath the questions — to what is actually happening when a child understands something for the first time, when two minds genuinely meet, when an experience registers as meaningful rather than merely passing through. She has spent more than a decade finding that these questions, followed honestly, lead somewhere unexpected: to a philosophy of relation that touches everything.

She holds open questions with patience — not as problems to be solved but as places worth inhabiting. And she brings to every encounter, whether with a text, an idea, or another person, the same quality of attention: full, receptive, and genuinely interested in what is there.

The Work

The philosophical project began, as most honest projects do, with a mismatch. Jessica was teaching — and had been teaching, across grades and disciplines, for years — and she kept noticing that the available accounts of learning didn't describe what she was actually watching happen in classrooms. The standard models placed cognition inside the individual: a mind receiving inputs, processing them, storing and retrieving. But what she saw was something more relational, more alive, more dependent on the quality of contact between people than any individual-centered model could explain.

That mismatch became a question, and the research question became a philosophical project, and the philosophical project became something larger than she initially anticipated: an integrated system spanning metaphysics, philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and educational philosophy. At its center is a single claim — that minds are constituted in relation, not in isolation — and from that center, the implications extend in every direction.

The system includes a foundational ontology she calls Lyric Metaphysics, in which Becoming rather than static being is the ground of reality, and in which the relational field — the Between — is not a space between entities but a generative site in its own right. It includes Significology, a new philosophical axis concerned with mattering: why some encounters, ideas, and experiences register as significant while others pass without trace. It includes a philosophy of mind, Enfielded Cognition, currently under peer review at Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, which argues that cognition is shaped not merely by environment but by the dynamic relational fields minds inhabit. And it includes a philosophy of education, Learning from Relation, and a philosophical anthropology, The Questioning Self, that ask what it means to teach and to be human in light of all of this.

The full architecture of this work — the corpus, the frameworks, the consulting and educational offerings — lives at The Lyric Institute, the research and educational philosophy organization Jessica founded in 2025.

The Writing

Alongside philosophical manuscripts, Jessica writes for two Substack publications. Mind at Large follows the philosophical project into public territory — essays on mind, meaning, cognition, and the edges of what we understand. Pedagogress thinks through education: what it is, what it could be, and what gets lost when we mistake the delivery of content for the cultivation of genuine learning.

Her writing has appeared in Education Week and Presence magazine. She has been a guest on the DebateMath podcast. Essays are forthcoming.

The Life

Jessica teaches Grade 5 at The Rashi School, where she also serves as Innovation Educator and Instructional Leader. She holds an M.Div from All Paths Divinity School, an M.Ed. from Lesley University, and certificates from Harvard and the University of Michigan. She lives in the Boston area with her family.

If the work calls to you — for consulting, collaboration, speaking, or conversation — she would be glad to hear from you.