Peter's Academic Interests

As I just mentioned as an example, one of my academic interests is history, although I've never studied that at university. In fact, I hated history when I was forced to study it at school, but that was because my teachers were not very good. Had they been good, they could easily have made history an exciting subject - there is war, blood, intrigue, progress, and lots of other fun things to hold the interest, even of lazy students. But at the same time, I was reading about ancient Egypt, Greece and other cultures of the past on my own. But so awful were my school experiences that I dropped history as soon as I could, to focus on science and mathematics. Science and mathematics were my real loves in high school  and I went on to study maths and physics at university, but already in high school I had become interested in philosophy.

My interest in philosophy began when, surprisingly, one of the Catholic brothers who taught me physics suggested I read some work by Soren Kierkegaard - he probably thought that that Christian philosopher might save me from a growing tendency towards atheism, but the effect was the opposite. Kierkegaard led to a wider interest in philosophy, to Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius and the rest, and by the time I finished high school I'd given up on the unfounded and often nonsensical beliefs of Christianity.

As mentioned, my university career began with science and mathematics, but while I enjoying that, I continued reading history and philosophy, and they became more interesting until I switched majors to philosophy. I kept on the mathematics, but also added a couple of dead languages, and that meant reading even more intensely in the history of those ancient cultures. I'm not sure that it was the most practical option to follow my interests, but I've never regretted my choices, and I had a great time at university.