I was amused to see in Oxford Blackwells my new economics book in between the great philosophers Immanuel Kant and Søren Kierkegaard. I’ve always fancied myself as something of a philosopher.
But when I studied PPE at Oxford University, I was hopeless at western philosophy. I couldn’t read a page of Kant for love nor money. One of the few rebellious things I’ve done in life was when I worked out you could more or less fail philosophy, but still pass on to the second year of PPE where you could concentrate on just economics and politics. So I stopped going to philosophy lectures. Never read a philosophy book and scrapped a third on my philosophy 1st-year exams. Then I happily dropped the philosophy.
In my second and third year, I did start going to lectures in economics and politics. It’s not true that PPE is a complete holiday.
What would Keynes do? Is philosophical but very much from the perspective of a practical applied economics. It’s not quite in the same league as Immanuel Kant!
Related
- My old school Bradford Grammar School did a nice feature on this page – T.Pettinger – a former pupil