Although my major at university was philosophy, which has been a major academic interest since I was about 15, I've also had lots of other interests. In high school, I loved mathematics, and continued to study that for a few years at university. Maths went well with my philosophy studies in logic, although it wasn't so obviously useful to my main interest in moral philosophy.
But then, the Ancient Greeks might have had the right idea when they did see connections between mathematics and other areas, and the Pythagoreans thought that mathematics, or numbers, were everything, so they got a nasty shock when they also proved that the square root of 2 was irrational!
And yesterday in class, we looked at different sorts of statements expressing ideas about the world. I was pleased that we did agree that 2+2=4 was true and a fact. But it's also something not proved by observation of the world, and that seems similar to moral truths - that slavery is morally wrong is not proved by experiment or observation. Or is it?
But even earlier than high school, I loved science. The only science I studied at uni. was physics, but I loved reading about biology much earlier. Maybe this was because I grew up on a farm: we had cattle, horses, pigs, sugar cane, corn, and other things, and my family home is a beautiful area surrounded by a curving a river with some virgin forest left on it, so there was lots of inspiring nature to get my interest.
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