You'll need to access this essay (from a Festschrift issue of Synthese) from a university computer with subscription access to read the whole thing. An excerpt:
I entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1961 with no other intention but to read Classics, in which I had excelled at school. It came as an unpleasant surprise to realise within but a few months of starting that I had absolutely no appetite to spend 3 years translating contemporary political speeches into Ciceronian rhetoric or John Donne into Catullan verses—and that it was likely to prove a recipe for disaster to continue to try. The only practical option was to seek a switch to a non-school subject, where I might have at least some chance of catching up with the requirements of the Prelims curriculum. Psychology and Economics might both have been possibilities. But in your first year of residence in a Cambridge college there is an understandable tendency to form a first round of friendships among your staircase neighbours. Two of mine happened to be reading Moral Sciences, and within a short while I started accompanying them to lectures and trying to talk philosophy with them and the other four moral scientists Trinity had admitted that year. Perhaps partly because of the exoticness of the idea of studying a subject whose name I had never heard before (though I had indeed done a little philosophy—including a reading of Language, Truth and Logic—as a sixth form option at school), but more because of the invariable good humour, and occasional hilarity, of those discussions, together with a sense that I had at least some idea what was going on, I decided to request a formal transfer to the Moral Sciences Tripos.
This necessitated an interview with Dr. Casimir Lewy, Trinity’s Director of Studies in Moral Sciences. I recall this as a highly uncomfortable experience, and although I don’t now remember any of the philosophical questions that he asked me, I do remember feeling that my answers ranged freely from the irrelevant to the stupid. Towards the end of the interview, he asked me why I wanted to read Moral Sciences. I could think of nothing to say but that I had been going to some of the lectures, and had been enjoying discussing them with my friends. I am sure I had given him no evidence of any aptitude, and Trinity could easily have insisted that I continue with my course in Classics. So I have reason to be hugely grateful to Lewy for recommending that I be permitted to change.
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