Peter's academic interrests

My major at university was philosophy, but I also did a couple of years of mathematics, physics and a couple of dead languages. However, my earliest academic interests were very different.

I grew up on a farm in Australia. It was beautiful, with a wide river bordering my parents property on three sides, lots of trees left untouched, and of course the animals and plants that my family grew and bred for a living. I wasn't much interested in farming, but I was fascinated by gtowing things. While still in primary school, perhaps from age six or seven, I grew different types of trees in pots. My favourites were figs, which were very malleable. I'd seen TV shows about Japanese bonsai, and it caught my interest. I would use scraps of copper wire to bind my trees and shape them. I found moss and pretty stones to decorate them .This very earthy interest led to a wider interest in how things grew, so I started reading on biology in my school library.

My local primary school was a Catholic school run by old  nuns. I'm not sure that they were great teachers, but they let me read as much as I wanted. In fact, maybe because they were so ancient and accepting, they were great teachers. I don't know how old they really were, but they all seemed about 70 or more to me. Anyway, I started reading more widely, with one topic leading to another.

By the time I got to high school, I was in love with science, especially biology, where cells and evolution were my initial favourite topics. These both led to chemistry, which was also fun to do in our high school lab: our teachers, who were now Marist brothers (my family were good Catholics), probably led us do things that were a bit dangerous, but they were also good teachers .They knew their subjects well and could make them interesting, at least to me.

it was in my first years at high school that I found a more enduring and fasinating interest even than science: mathematics. Science had some problems from which mathematics was perfectly free, and it became an enduring passion. It remained my main academic interest until it was challenged in the final years of high school by philosophy.

Philosophy was not a high school subject, but one of the brothers, perhaps worried that my fascination with science would threaten my religious faith, recommended some philosophers for me read. I read them and then many others: that pretty much killed my Christian faith. But it set me on the path I pursued at university.