Hi, I'm Peter, and my main academic interest these days is philosophy, especially logic and moral philosophy. I also like mathematics, but I don't study it any more. In primary school, I wasn't very interested in studying anything, and did not do very well. But my parents had a lot of books at home, including a great encyclopaedia - Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopaedia. It was very large, and in amongst the writing, there were some great photographs and pictures. I used to read the heavy volumes and feel thrilled that I was using such a large book with so many words, but the high quality photographs also helped. I must have been around 10 when my parents let my start to use it. Around the same time, I started to read books in the school library, which were rather more interesting than what my teachers were waffling on about.
In high school, I immediately fell in love with science - I was a bit of nerd, reading science texts on the bus, going home and reading science books for fun! and stuff like that. At first, I was fascinated by biology, but then chemistry caught my attention, quickly followed by physics. And all the time there was mathematics, which I loved. It amazed me how you could do things with mathematics and be absolutely certain that the result was true.
In my senior years in high school, the priest who was my physics teacher as well as our religion teacher (my family are Catholics, and we went to private Catholic schools) introduced me to philosophy, and that quickly took the number one spot, which it's pretty much help ever since, although my areas of interest have varied a bit. Logic has always been a strong area of interest, but although I started mainly reading metaphysics, my main concerns soon moved to epistemology and moral philosophy, which is the area I wrote my thesis on. I'm not sure why he did that. The first philosopher he suggested I read was Søren Kierkegaard, a modern Danish philosopher who wrote as a Christian, but Kierkagaard led to other writers, and that did not do my faith in Christianity, or any other religion, much good. But I'm very glad he suggested I learn about Kierkegaard as a research project. Although well worth reading, Kierkagaard has never been my favourite philosopher.
Language and literature are other areas I'm interested in, and as well as mathematics and physics, I also supplemented philosophy with a couple of dead languages at university. I'm not so good on modern languages.
Thursday 22 September 2011
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I forgot to mention that although I lived in Sydney for ten years when I was at university and working, my family is from the country, from a small area called Swan Bay.
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