Discussion Question: Origins
I am often amazed at the different ways that individuals have come to philosophy. Some from a novel or movie, others through religion, many through a philosophy course, and even a few from coming across and reading actual contemporary philosophy on their own.
So I am curious: What inspired your desire to learn more about and study philosophy? Was it a book(s)? What book(s) and why? Did you arrive here from some other path?
5 comments:
I was a voracious reader from a young age and novels where my entrance point to philosophy. Some of the earliest novels I read that got me thinking, with hindsight, more philosophically were: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. I read these first (I’ve read each of these at least three times) between 11-14 years-old. The first reads were, for the most part, over my head. Nonetheless, they started me thinking about the way the world was: the nature of good and evil, the influence and danger of authority and power, and how individuals relate (or fail to) to each other. These are themes I still think about and struggle with to this day.
My freshman year at Tufts, I took an introduction to philosophy class where we read Plato, Descartes, and Quine. (Yes "two dogmas" during my first semester of college!) I hated my teacher, so I got somewhat turned off to academic philosophy and ended up an English major. By my junior year, I had reread all three of the above novels again and my interest in philosophy re-emerged. I took several more philosophy courses and the rest, as they say, is history.
In high school, I had an excellent history teacher who taught history as the analysis of causes and effects. You could see how one event led to another, how certain facts about communities culminated into revolutions/wars/strikes. In other words, you could see the events of the past, not as random occurences that just happened to take place at a certain time, but as rational conclusions to certain situations. I loved it and decided then and there I wanted to study history for the rest of my life.
It was my interest in history that led me to William and Mary, where you do not only live and breathe history but also sometimes accidently step in it. Unfortunately, it is history that leads just about everyone to William and Mary, so the lower-level history courses are always completely full. As a freshman, I had absolutely no chance of getting into any of the history classes, so I had to concetrate on just fulfilling my general education requirements instead.
My advisor (a philosophy professor) suggested that I take the critical thinking course, as it would certainly be helpful no matter what I do and it would give me a better idea of what philosophy was like (all I ever learned of it before college was that there was a guy named Plato who suggested learning was like ascending from a cave and there was a guy named Sartre who was kind of kooky).
So, I took critical thinking. Now, in part, I'm extremely lucky that critical thinking happened to be taught by an absolutely fantastic professor. However, even with a bad professor, I suspect I still would've been able to tell that what I had loved so much about history I could find in a far more condensed form in logic. I just loved it, and I decided to move my interest to philosophy. And, in the end, I never did end up taking a single history class.
It was the thing that I was the least bad at.
It was the thing I was most bad at.
A great undergraduate professor...I was originally a psychology major. In my junior year, I finally took a philosophy course to fulfill some general requirements The professor was wonderful! I had some similarities with him, and we developed a friendly working relationship. He was so passionate about philosophy that he inspired me to change my major.
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