Peter's Academic Interests

When I got to high school, I fell in love with science - I was a bit nerdy, but I couldn't help it. I actually sat on the bus going to and from school reading my science text books, and, even weirder to my classmates, books I'd borrowed from teh school and town library. My first area of interest was biology - I was fascinated by how humans and everything else worked, and why they were the way they were. This led to a split interest - when it came to evolution, the obvious questions are why did it happen, and how does it happen? The first leads to philosophy, which is what I ended up majoring in at university, and teh second led first to chemistry, and then to physics, which continues to interest me today. At the same time, I was worried about how well, how solidly, we really knew all those things. Are scientific theories true? What does it even mean to speak of truth? The most solid of all was mathematics - that really did offer proof that it was right, and it is did not seem to depend on anything else, the way physics depends on actual experiments. So, at university, my main areas of study were philosophy and mathematics.

And in philosophy, logic, naturally, was one main area I focussed on, but after a spell, I moved from metaphysics (What is in the world? What sorts of things are there? and so on) to ethics and moral philosophy, which has continued to be something I've read ever since. At the moment I'm reading the latest major work by one of my modern heroes: Ian Dworkin's Justice for Hedgehogs, a very ambitious attempt to ground ethics.

_______