By the time I got to high school, physics had become my main obsession, but mathematics was also growing in interest. I loved mathematics because unlike everything else, it proved its results. There was no need to do experiments to be absolutely certian that Pythagoras was right, that the sum of the squares on the other two sides of a right angle triangle really did equal the square of the hypotenuse. It was equally certain that the square root of 2 was not a rational number, and that there were an infinite number of prime numbers.
My math teacher in the last year or high school was a Marist brother who might have been a bit worried that my interest in science would lead me away from my Christian religion, so he introduced me to philosophy. That didn't work out the way he hoped: I loved philosophy, but it didn't help me to remain a Christian.
Coral trees is very rare in the present time. Do you have them now?
ReplyDeleteI do think the same as you that mathematics proves itself.
You also learn philosophy. Do you like it?
I love it. It seems to me to discuss questions that are important, it teaches valuable thinking skills, and it's fun. Some philosophers are also very good writers, so it's a pleasure to read their work, although unfortunately, not all are good writers, and some are pretty awful. Plato, Hume and Nietzsche are some great writers, whereas Aristotle and Kant are in the other group, even thought their ideas make it worthwhile to read them.
DeleteI started to read The Republic in Thai translation and I fell asleep ... my bad T^T
DeleteI find it is easier for me to selectively read only the interesting part like the concept of justice.
Perhaps start with Euthyphro or one of the other short works. I think Euthyphro is interesting because it not only discusses what the good, the just are( What it means to be good or just), but it also tells us the start of the story of how Socrates was executed by the legal system of democratic Athens.
DeleteI noticed you mentioned about religion in the last paragraph. Could you tell me what is your current religion now?
ReplyDeleteI agree with the majority of scientists and philosophers that either there is no god or no way to discover that any such claim is true. So like the majorities in those academics, and I suspect among academics generally, I have no religion.
DeleteHowever, the question is slightly more complicated because having religion and believing in a god are necessarily the same thing. In Western countries, even in the US, loss of belief in religion is growing faster than loss of belief a god or similar entity. But there are clear trends towards both atheism and no religion in Western countries and among academics.
See, for example, "Religion among Academic Scientists: Distinctions, Disciplines, and Demographics" (Ecklund & Scheitle, 2007); "Scientists and Belief" (2009); and "The World's Newest Major Religion: No Religion", (Bullard, 2016).
Although I thought it was higher, the most recent statistic I could find for philosophers was that 62% are atheist. (Johnson, D. K., 2014, "Why 62% of Philosophers are Atheists (Part I)")
Delete