Peter's academic interests

Since I was in high school, my enduring academic interest has been philosophy, which I love reading. Even if I disagree with the writer, as for example the disagreement I mentioned with Thomas Nagel's ideas about the nature of human consciousness in his brilliant essay "What is it like to be a bat?" I still enjoy understanding the ideas and playing with them. And I keep hoping that they I might learn something of worth. From my second year at university, my interests were mainly a combination of logic and moral philosophy. The logic went well with the mathematics classes I was taking.

In high school, mathematics was my favourite subject. I loved the way you could prove, with absolute certainty, that very non-obvious things were true, or even how difficult it could be to prove things that seemed "obviously" true. I think mathematics also taught me that sometimes things that seem obviously true can be false. The obvious example is perhaps the impossibility of proving Euclid's famous parallel axiom, which when accepted as not necessarily true leads to the expansion of geometry into non-Euclidean spaces. Studying this thrilled me in my first year university classes.

But apart from the subjects I've actually studied at university, I'm also interested in biology, especially evolutionary theory, and also economics, which has connections to my other areas of interest, but which I've never studied. For a few years now, I've enjoyed reading the work of behavioural economists such as Dan Ariely, More recently, I thought that there were some great insights in Thomas Piketty's famous book Capital in the Twenty-first Century, published earlier this year. I like the way that Piketty brings together masses of solid support for his ideas about how capitalism tends inevitably to lead to increasing wealth inequality.

I've never studied psychology or law (apart from one course when I was also doing philosophy of law), but students who've been in my classes before might remember that like reading the opinions of US Supreme Court judges.

And you? What areas of academic study interest you? Why? What do you like about them? What do you read or listen to? What are some of your favourite works?

But this is response writing, so you don't have to stay on topic and you don't have to follow any particular structure. And my ten minutes is up.