Peter's academic interests

Although I've never studied it at university, one of my academic interests is biology, most specifically, evolutionary theory. This interests me because it's such a clear example of the power of scientific explanations as opposed to traditional religious or similar explanations for amazing things we see around us. I'm also interested in psychology, although I've never studied that either. Psychology helps us better understand the constraints and facts about how humans do behave and how they can, and cannot behave. What both of these have in common with my major at university is that they provide solid background and foundations for the philosophy that was my major.

In fact, my two main areas of interest in philosophy were moral philosophy and logic. The logic reflects and grew from my love of mathematics, which I did also study at university. And physics was one of my subjects there for a few years, too. Mathematics and logic don't really have much connection with the material world, although some philosophers, such as Willard van Orman Quine, and recently physicists such as David Deutsch, have questioned this - they argue that perhaps even something as deep as logic and mathematics are results of physics. I'm not sure that I agree with this, but their ideas are challenging and I like that - I like to read ideas from people who disagree with me.

Actually, with biology, I've come full circle - when I was in primary school, I was fascinated by plants and growing them. Because my family live in teh country, I was able to indulge this interest easily. So I guess that botany was my first love, and that led to biology generally. From that, my desire to understand the basics of cellular mechanisms led to chemistry, which led to physics, and thence to mathematics and philosophy.

On a completely different level, I also became interested in a couple of dead languages at an early age, but I'm not so good at them these days - I don't practise enough.