@fresco,
Well fresco, we are into a bit of philosophy now. That could keep us busy in perpetuity. The academic study of philosophy began, for me, more than fifty years ago in September 1963 at McMaster university in Ontario Canada.
Although my mother and my maternal grandfather were both strongly inclined philosophically, the formal study of the subject did not begin for me until that fall in 1963 at this university in Hamilton. This was just two months before the assassination of President JFK. The city of Hamilton now has a population of some 600 thousand, two to three times what it was when I lived in Hamilton and attended the university. Hamilton is, and was, a part of the densely populated and industrialized region at the west end of Lake Ontario known as the Golden Horseshoe.
This university in Hamilton beside Lake Ontario became a non-denominational private institution five years before I entered while I was finishing primary school. By the McMaster Act of 1968-69, after I graduated and while I worked as a teacher on Baffin Island, the University was organized into the Divisions of Arts, Sciences, and Health Sciences. By the time I graduated in 1966 I had had the field of philosophy opened before me, a field I have dabbled-in for the half a century since that first lecture in late September 1963.
Family influences in philosophy and religion were part of my life in the 1940s and 1950s, and the influence of the Baha’i Faith began in the 1950s. In 1964-65 I majored in honours history and philosophy. I taught philosophy as a component of various courses I was responsible for as a full-time teacher and lecturer from the 1970s to the 2000s. In 1994 I taught my last philosophy class as a lecturer in a technical and further education college, a Tafe college, as it is known in Australia. Ten years later in 2004 I taught my last class in philosophy to senior citizens in George Town Tasmania. In the next 9 years, 2005 to 2014, years of my retirement from FT, PT and most casual-volunteer work, I read extensively in philosophy, nearly entirely in cyberspace.
