Although my main academic interest is philosophy, I am also interested in many other subjects that are commonly studied at university. For example, science was the first academic subject I fell in love with. This began when I was still in primary school. I used to love growing trees from seeds on the farm where I grew up in Australia. This led me to an interest in biology. When I got to high school, I didn't actually study biology as a separate subject, but I read the books my classmates had and became especially fascinated by how cells worked, especially the genes. In high school, my interests soon moved from biology to chemistry: I wanted to learn how life and everything around me came from a small set of chemical reactions operating on a very limited set of about 100 elements. And by third year, this led me to physics, which remained my main scientific interest for the rest of high school.
But with my interest in science, i was also fascinated by mathematics. Unlike the theories of science, mathematics was absolutely provable. We knew, without any experiment, that 1+1 = 2, and we could prove that for a right angle triangle, the sum of the squares on the other two sides = the square on the hypotenuse - there was zero doubt that Pythagoras's famous theorem was true. It was a more solid fact than any result in physics, chemistry or biology. Mathematics remained a passion for many years, and I continued studying it and physics at university, but even at the end of high school, my interests were evolving.
In my final years, one of my teachers, a Marist Brother at my good Catholic high school, suggested I read some philosophy. This teacher was the mathematics and physics master and also taught my class religion, meaning the Catholic version of Christianity. I suspect he was worried that my love of science was going to destroy my belief in Christianity. If that was his reason for suggesting philosohpy, it was a total failure. Although he suggested a read the work of Soren Kierkegaard, a deeply Christian philosopher, I soon learned of Plato, Aristotle, Hume and other great thinkers, whose ideas were not very supportive of religion. By the time I got to university at age 17, philosophy was my main academic interest, along with some of the dead languages in which much of it used to be written, and this has continued to today.
Tuesday 1 August 2017
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A lot of people in our group like math. And, that's very (very!) strange for me, because I don't understand mathematics at all (to be honest I hate it). In Russia when you study in school you can't choose subjects you are interested in, and you have to study almost all (starting from Russian language to higher mathematics). But when I was younger I preferred literature or history, but not math. I still remember that it was big stress for me - to pass the exam in math every year. And almost all my life I have waited when I can use my knowledge, for example, about logarithme. I think in Russia that's a school problem, because nobody cares about personal interests of a person. All knowledge must correspond to a system.
ReplyDeleteSo, it looks like in your school - on the opposite side - teachers care about personal interests of students. Perhaps not successful, but anyway they do.
In my opinion philosophy is a very difficult study. I remember from General Writing 2, that you started PHD, but didn't finish. What topic did you work on? That looks amazing, because I find philosophy a fairly complex science for understanding.
I started working on a thesis to explore notions of commensurability in ethics from Aristotle's solution to a problem in Plato (his akrates). My plan was to relate that to modern issues by following how it has influenced Western moral philosophy for the following two thousand years. I still think it's really interesting, but, like most PhDs, an all-consuming effort for at least three years of my life.
DeleteWe are going to read some moral philosophy this term, hopefully starting tomorrow, but it won't be Aristotle or the particular question that fascinated me a couple of decades ago.
Wow I strongly agree with Kate that why so many people interest in mathematics. That's because for me math is tough and stressful subject lo learn even they have many theories to make it easy but I seem myself no where near to understand some of them and could think how could I use it in my everyday life, I mean not the general mathematics but the complex theory.
ReplyDeleteAnd now due to your philosophy interest, which is I am also interest to study in my future university education. I am now know that.... I can ask you this question, Would you mind be my philosophy adviser and my grammar correctable?