20 20 5655 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/c093256a800c96fbe8cf0ac63ceec9d4.pdf 596c2b4fd1c8913f45821a76eefca5d6 PDF Text Text F t MINUTES /Of a Meeting of Descendents of Francis Scott Key and Mary Tayioe Lloyd held at St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland, on May 2Z, 1959. 9^ * * * * i|t * * * « * * 413|i # :(i # * *1)1 ** * Invitations to the dedication of the FRANCIS SCOTT KEY MEMORIAL HALL on the Campus of St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland, having been sent to 123 addresses of descendents by the College, the following assembled at that place on May 2 Miss Ellen Key Blunt Miss Elizabeth Blunt Col. & Mrs. Wilfrid M. Blunt Col. & Mrs. Arthur T. Brice Gen. & Mrs. Richard W. Cutts Mr. George Washington Dobbin Mrs. Robert A. Dobbin Mrs. William Harvey Doyle, Jr. Mr. Howard rfay Doyle Mrs. S. Wilson Heaton Mrs. William Tabor Jarvis Mrs. John Forsyth Joline, Jr. Mr. Laurence Turnbull Joline Mr. Christian Albert Keller Mr. & Mrs. Francis Scott Key 1/ 1959: Mrs. Herrick Faber Kidder Mr. Edward Lloyd —-— Mrs. Josephine Browne Masi Mrs. James Edward Palmer <Mr. Gilbert Key-Smith Mr. Robert H. Key-Smith Mrs. Mlles P. Standish Mr. JohnT. Wainwright Miss Mary Katherine Weld Miss Katherine Key-Smith Mrs. Morgan Burdette Schille Miss Mary Howard Lloyd After an impressive dedication ceremony which was attended by The President of the United States - Dwight D. Eisenhower - and a buffet luncheon served on the College Campus - all of the above-listed members of the Francis Scott Key family - with the exceptions of Mrs. Palmer, Mr. Keller and Miss Lloyd, - assembled in a conference room of the Memorial Hall The purpose of the meeting, as outlined in the call to assembly, was to consider the formation of a permanent Key Family Society to establish and maintain in the St. John's College Library complete genealogical data and records of the Family. The meeting was opened at approximately 2:30 PM by the President of St. John's College, Dr. Richard D. Weigle, who welcomed the descendents �MINUTES- - - ------------- -{2) of Francis Scott Key, Class of 1796, to the College. Dr. Weigle stated that, ever since his advent to St. John's College a decade ago, he had hoped for a memorium to that honorable and distinguished gentleman and alumnus - our ancestor « that would be of a permanent nature; and that he had also hoped for the establishment of a Key Family Society that would be related in some way to the College. He reported that, as a result of the efforts of the Old Dominion Foundation, the Maryland Historical Society, the Board of Governors of the College, and the friends and alumni of the College, the ground-breaking for the memorium had taken place in October, 1956. He offered to the proposed Key Family Society the freedom of the Memorial Hall, the use of the St. John's College Library, and secretarial service and assistance to facilitate the collec-tion and maintenance in the Library of complete genealogical data and records of the Society and Family. Dr. Weigle also brought tolhe attention of those present the fact that the interior decoration of the Ijobby of the Memorial Hall had not been completed, and that the College would like to have a memorial plaque, tablet, or bas-relief for the space above the fountain in the entry, covered at the time by a United States Flag of 1815. Dr. Weigle withdrew, and the meet­ ing was turned over to Col. Brice - (Cousin Arthur). Cousin Arthur explained how the idea of a Key Family Society had come up in his immediate family, and told of the work that had been done by himself and his wife (Cousin Alice) - Mrs. Joline, his Sister (also a Cousin Alice) - Col. Blunt (Cousin Wilfrid) - Mr. Donald Key King (a professional genealogist but not in our direct lines) - the Library and Secretarial Staff of St. John's College and others - toward compiling a complege genealogy and directory of living �MINUTES.................................... (3) descendents. He told how he and Cousin Alice, when his Mother, Cousin Jeannie, was confined to a wheel chair in her old age, as something to occupy her time and thoughts, had set her about the task of listing her "100 First Cousins ' - which she had often mentioned, not .juite believing that she could do it, and how she had recalled from memory by name 75 of them, with some of whom a correspon ­ dence was started, family interest aroused, and ancestral diggings begun. Cousin jeannie died at age 90 in 1950, and Cousin Arthxxr - hoping to amass for himself the 100 cousins, as his Mother had, and he had not - had continued the work and correspondence from that time - thinking at the same time that it might be nice for all of us to know each other better so that we might all be able to claim 100 or more cousins. He concluded his report and remarks by stating that finally - thanks to the help of those mentioned - he had discovered that the St. John's Library had compiled a list of 118 of us - just the right number to fill one of the new jet passenger airliners by which he expected to return to California after the meeting. The meeting was then turned over to Col. Blunt (Cousin Wilfrid). Cousin Wilfrid stated that he had been very pleased by the number of descendents who had responded to the notice sent to them all; and that out of 118 sent, only 8 were returned undelivered - indicating that the St. John's mailing list is essentially correct as to addresses. He informed us that he had conferred with President Weigle and advised that a perpetual record of the Key Family could be established and maintained in the Library of St. John's College in the event that we might decide to form a permanent Key Family Society. As a matter of genealogical interest he reported that the record of �MINUTES -.................................. --(4) service of John Ross Key as an Officer in the American Revolution had been lost - so that any of us who might wish to establish eligibility for membership in the Society of the Cincinnati through lineal descent from John Ross Key , 1754 - 1821, would be disappointed. Mrs. Standish, at this juncture, stated that a record of John Ross Key's service as an Officer in the Revolution existed in I aunce's Tavern in New York City, and volunteered to look it up on her way home to Connecticut. The meeting was then turned back to Cousin Arthur. Cousin Arthur called for discussion from the floor, and suggested that we might appoint an "Acting Board of Regents of seven or eight to study the problem of establishing a permanent Society and report to the Family as a whole at a future meeting. He mentioned that Mr. Foster, the Director of the Maryland Historical Society, had offered the use of the Key room of that Society in Baltimore - in its present building or in the larger room in their proposed new building expected to be started during the next five years - to any such permanent Key Family Society that might be formed. There was a general discussion from the floor on the question as to whether or not any such permanent Family Society should be formed. Cousin Arthur pointed out that we would have to establish certain rules of eligibility for member­ ship, and stated that he would favor not more than two classes of membership - ' Hereditary , for all direct lineal descendents,-and Associate , for husbands and wives only of direct lineal descendents. this time. He also made small mention of dues at Cousin Laurie Joline suggested that we consider what kind of a Society we might have in mind - whether of a sophisticated type with annual dues, or of simpler type merely for the purpose of keeping up the genealogical record. �(5) MINUTES It seemed the concensus of opinion that the primary purpose of the Society should be for the establishment and maintenance ox complete genealogical records - although no vote on this question was taken. It was pointed out that almost all of us have Key memorabilia of one kind or another > letters* docu­ ments, portraits, and other physical property of our ancestor, which few of us would be willing to part with. Mrs. Jarvis (Cousin Edith) suggested that a temporary Secretary should be appointed . A voice vote on the question was taken and passed in favor of forming a permanent Key Family Society. Since he lived in Baltimore, and knew Mr. Foster of Maryland Historical Society personally, Mr. George Washington Bobbin, Jr.(Cousin George) was nominated and accepted the appointment to act as Secretary and representative of the group to it's sponsors designated as St. John's College, of Annapolis, Md., and the Maryland Historical Society, of Baltimore, Md. The question of rules of eligibility for membership « whether an^/or "Associate" Hereditary or other was again raised and discussed briefly. Since there were only approximately 21% of the known living descendents on the St. John's College mailing present, it was moved and passed that this question be tabled until a latter date; and suggested that a write-in vote by mail on it could be allowed. Mrs. Jarvis (Cousin Edith) suggested that someone should study the structure of some of the old Boston Family Societies, which could be of use to us in patterning our own. Cousin Arthur requested her to undertake such a study, and agreed to act as temporary chairman of a planning Committee or Acting Board �MINUTES . . . ............................ *(6) of Regent®” for the B’amily. Committee. He called for volunteers for members of such a The following accepted nominations and were appointed: Gen. Cutts (Cousin Dick) Kir. Dobbin (Cousin George) Col. Blunt (Cousin Wilfrid) K^r. JLloyd (Cousin Edward) Mrs. Jarvis (Cousin Edith) Mrs. Schiller (Cousin Elizabeth) Mr. Key (Cousin f rank) Mrs. Wm. Ward Clore (Cousin Catherine - in absentia) Mrs. Masi (Cousin Josephine) There was general discussion as to the proper time and place for the next meeting - to be for the purpose of acting on the recommendations of the Planning Committee. Cousins Dick Cutts, Eaurie Joline, and John Wainwright, pointed out that commencement time at St. John's College would be an imposition on the President of the College, having so many other matters of importance to attend to at such a time. Photographs of a portrait of our ancestor Francis Scott Key painted by the well known Artist Charles Wilson Peale during the year 179b in which he graduated from St. John's, and now in the possession of Cousin Arthur were shown, and there was brief discussion on the possibility ot having a bronze bas-relief done from it by a recognized sculptress in California. No decision was reached. As it was getting late and some of the Cousins had some distances to go to reach home, the meeting was adjourned at about 5:00 PM - (sine die). SS*SSSS>ii*3»iS««*:|t:)<********>t<*S*iK*** As the meeting was of an informal nature - many of the Cousins were meet­ ing each other for the first time - no agenda or order of business had been pre­ scribed, and there was confusion at times - apologies are hereby extended to those who may have taken part in the discussions or made recommendations or suggestions and whose names may have been passed over by your reporter. ELLEN KEY BLUNT � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Society of the Descendants of Francis Scott Key Records Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SDFSK Description An account of the resource The Society of the Descendants of Francis Scott Key Records contain correspondence, publications, and administrative and financial records relating to the Society, Francis Scott Key, and St. John's College. Many of the records involve compiling a genealogical record and address list of members of the Society, but the records also document Francis Scott Key's history and his influence on American society and St. John's College.<br /><br />For more information about the records, please see the <a href="https://sjc.libraryhost.com/repositories/2/resources/9">finding aid</a>. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 6 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Minutes of a Meeting of Descendents of Francis Scott Key and Mary Tayloe Lloyd held at St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland, on May 22, 1959. Description An account of the resource Minutes of a Meeting of Descendents of Francis Scott Key and Mary Tayloe Lloyd held at St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland, on May 22, 1959. The descendants met to discuss the formation of a Key family society and the creation of a genealogical record of descendants of Francis Scott Key. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Blunt, Ellen Key, 1932-1975 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant St. John's College, Annapolis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1959-05-22 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <strong>In Copyright</strong> <br /><a href="https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en</a> <br />This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses, you need to obtain permission from St. John's College. Please make sure to credit St. John's College using the citation provided in this record. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Subject The topic of the resource Key family St. John's College (Annapolis, Md.) Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SDFSK Records Box 2 Folder 27 Francis Scott Key Francis Scott Key Auditorium https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/e79c177705f54dbd57ffa1a8df86a9b6.pdf 903e5e5ced5c9464d617e1dd5806f21a Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Collegian Description An account of the resource The Collegian began as a student newspaper; became a college community literary publication in 1952 and continued until 1969; became a student newspaper again in 1969; discontinued publication from 1980 until 1989 when it again became a student literary publication.<br /><br />Click on <a title="The Collegian" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=26">Items in The Collegian Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 56 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Vol.11 no.3 Nov 1898 Title A name given to the resource St. John's Collegian, November 1898 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1898-11 Description An account of the resource Vol. XI, No. 3 of the St. John's Collegian. Published in November 1898. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bohanan, F. J. (Editor-In-Chief) Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Student publication https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/f2efbf04e30a1395be280eaac0f3e8d0.mp3 91ca47741b433f215ce84c29f9ed96fb Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Lecture Recordings—Santa Fe Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data wav Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:56:20 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Religious construction east and west Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture given on September 28, 2018 by Stephen Bokenkamp as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bokenkamp, Stephen R., 1949- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018-09-28 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Bokenkamp, 2018-09 Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/e2c3cad1d2acb56339e8d81ff65f8e90.pdf 8e6ff50fd31b3c0deb9821aac9c39574 PDF Text Text Liberal Education and STEM Education St. John’s College 50th Anniversary Conference Presentation Michael J. Bolin, Wyoming Catholic College September 15, 2014 Abstract: One of the single biggest obstacles to the proliferation of liberal education is the modern tendency to consider STEM fields as the most or only important fields of study. I argue, to the contrary, that the beneficial cultural effects of progress in the natural sciences and related fields depend in part on a foundation of liberal learning both in scientists themselves and in the broader populace. In a post-Baconian scientific world, scientific progress has both a technological/practical aspect and a philosophical/theoretical aspect. Success with regard to the first aspect is necessarily defined in terms of one's conception of human flourishing, the philosophical debate over which is behind disputes over, e.g., energy, nuclear, and agricultural policy. Interpretations of the second aspect inevitably influence the first, as is seen in the tendency of physicists to extrapolate from their scientific research to broader conclusions about its implications for human nature and existence. It is not a foregone conclusion, then, that education in STEM fields will achieve the goods at which it aims, unless the resulting knowledge is first recognized as fundamentally human and therefore necessarily understood in the broader context of the human good. Establishing this context is one of the fundamental tasks of liberal education, upon which the good of specialization thus depends. Presentation: In a 1944 letter to Robert Thornton, then a new professor of physics at the University of Puerto Rico, Albert Einstein wrote the following in response to Thornton’s desire to introduce the philosophy of science into his classroom: I fully agree with you about the significance and educational value of methodology as well as history and philosophy of science. So many people today—and even professional scientists—seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is—in my opinion—the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth.1 1 Einstein to Thornton, December 7, 1944 (EA 61-574). 1 �The generational prejudice, the seeing of the trees but not the forest that Einstein described seems to me to be a common consequence of contemporary education, in large part because of our society’s focus on STEM education and corresponding disinterest in liberal education. My intention in this talk is to show how the task of fully reaping the fruits of STEM education cannot be separated from the project of liberal education, and that the latter is essential both on the part of scientists themselves and on the part of the broader populace if the former is to be achieved. In the interests of time, I shall focus primarily on the “science” part of STEM education. After the early modern era in which Francis Bacon declared that knowledge and power are really the same thing, science came to be seen by many as fundamentally oriented toward technological and practical application. In the modern era, this idea has taken such strong root that scientists have had to deal with politicians wishing to restrict public funding of scientific enterprise to areas that will have a significant practical application, as if this could always be known in advance. Disciplines in the humanities, such as philosophy, or liberal education in general, are ridiculed as a waste of time, their critics saying such things as “If it’s not producing food, I’m not interested.” Higher education has come to be seen as just being vocational training, with programs such as the St. John’s College liberal arts program considered outdated at best, almost a relic of a pre-scientific age. These sentiments lead us into the first issue I shall discuss. What such critics are really saying is that one ought not devote one’s life to activities that are not in some way conducive to human flourishing. Supposing that this is true, the conclusion that one ought not devote one’s life to the humanities or to liberal education does not immediately follow, since we cannot know whether this is conducive to human flourishing until we have established what human flourishing 2 �is. For example, the only we reason we care whether a discipline is producing food is because we care about food. But why do we care about food? Unless we are hedonists, it is principally (though not only) because we need food to live. But why do we care about living? Presumably because we wish to do something with our lives that goes beyond eating. Thus, it is clear that whatever this “something” is, it is worth doing even if it is not producing food. This example is an instance of a more general observation, namely that the extreme position that maintains that only what is useful is good is implicitly a contradiction in terms. For the useful is by definition useful for something, for the sake of another good; and the ultimate good, also by definition, cannot be for the sake of another good. In the human sphere, the ultimate good is the human good, human flourishing. Thus, again, it is pointless to criticize some branch of learning for not being useful unless we first know what human flourishing is. This issue arises in many concrete contexts, not just in abstract philosophical discussions. It lies behind the desire of some public figures to reduce funding for NASA, on the grounds that much of NASA’s research is not useful, or at least not obviously so. In a similar vein, sometimes people object to the production of GMO crops not just because they believe them unhealthy but also because they maintain a particular view of the human race’s relationship to nature and what constitutes the good of this relationship. The foregoing may give the impression that I see the role of liberal education to be restricted to the study of ethics and politics, in which the notions of human flourishing and the common good are considered. But the debate over human flourishing itself depends on prior theoretical philosophical questions, such as what it means to be human in the first place, and what the relationship of human beings to the rest of nature is. These questions cannot be escaped if one is to have a complete account of reality. And if one assumes from the start that one’s own 3 �discipline ought to yield such an account, one will naturally attempt to answer these questions from the perspective of that discipline. Thus we have the phenomenon of physicists, biologists, and other practitioners of the sciences lecturing the public on the “meaning” of their discoveries for human nature, the nature of the universe, and of existence itself. I do not mean to suggest that scientific inquiry never has relevance to these questions. Rather, I mean that the kind of relevance it has is subtle and difficult to discover, and one cannot hope to judge well of it without much learning and practice. The learning required, however, is not training in the hard sciences but rather liberal learning, which teaches one to consider human knowledge as a unified whole and to distinguish accurately the scope, nature, and limitations of each of its parts. This is why interpretation of the results of scientific inquiry is naturally posterior to liberal education. Here is a concrete example of what I mean. Physicist Sean Carroll, in a thoughtprovoking article entitled “Abortion and the Architecture of Reality,” writes about the types of issues that arise in debates over abortion, such as the notions of life and personhood, and argues that it would be foolish to think that scientific knowledge of the world cannot bear on questions such as these. Regarding this general claim, I think Carroll is quite right. But, as is typical in such cases, when he attempts to apply the general principle to specific cases, he mistakes his philosophical presuppositions for the conclusions of science. Science, he writes, tells us that there is no magical moment at which an incorporeal soul takes up residence in a body. Indeed, the concept of a “person” is not to be found anywhere 4 �in the natural world; it’s a category that is convenient to appeal to as we try to make sense of the world.2 Now, physical science does strongly suggest something relevant to the concept of soul, which is that (as Carroll himself points out) however closely one inspects the matter of living things, one will not find it following physical laws different from those followed by inanimate matter. But soul is a fairly nebulous concept, and there is still a long way from the claims of physics to Carroll’s interpretation of them. Likewise, that “person” is not a concept in physics is not much more significant for debates over abortion legislation than the fact that the same could be said of “tax return” is significant for economic policy debates. The general point is that it is actually very difficult to delineate precisely what philosophical, ethical, or otherwise humanitarian implications the scientific worldview ought to have for our broader human worldview. And it is exceedingly unlikely that one will be able to do this well if one has never even studied that broader worldview and the writings of the thinkers who formed and influenced it. Yet this is implicitly what we expect when we encourage students to pursue careers in STEM fields without first exposing them to the liberal education that will allow them to understand what they are actually doing in those fields and how it relates to their lives as human lives and not merely as employees. What does all of this mean concretely? I am aware, of course, that universal liberal education is not in the cards for the foreseeable future. A more plausible first step is the recognition of disciplinary boundaries. Someone need not be an expert in physics to recognize 2 Sean Carroll, “Abortion and the Architecture of Reality,” Discover Magazine, http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2009/06/04/abortion-and-the-architecture-ofreality/#.VBeNaBagv-o (accessed September 15, 2014). 5 �that the physicist is stepping outside of his discipline when he speaks about free will, or the soul, or the meaning of life; or to see that medical training does not automatically render a person competent to speak about ethical matters. Yet questions about these things arise perennially, and if the scientist as such is not the expert on them, someone else must be. Until we are able to distinguish between questions that the hard sciences can and cannot answer, we will be unable to see the value of the education that actually does teach one to answer the questions that STEM cannot, nor even see the true value in STEM itself. I want to conclude by saying a few words on that last topic, lest I seem to belittle or denigrate the natural sciences, which I in no way intend. Though a philosopher, not a scientist, by profession, I have an amateur’s (in the etymological sense of that word) interest in natural science and have the honor of teaching it via my own institution’s interdisciplinary program. In the process, I have come to realize that the profundity of the modern scientific worldview faces severe impoverishment if it is approached without a background in liberal education. The significance of the historical shift from geocentrism to heliocentrism simply cannot be appreciated by one who has never dwelt on the thoughts of generations to whom the evidence of heliocentrism was unavailable. I am told that something close to forty percent of Americans reject the biological theory of evolution. This is true even of many who are well-educated, which suggests that a lack of scientific training is not the root cause. For many, religious issues are at stake, but I suspect that this is only a special case of the more general problem I have been describing, which is that we have lost the habit of understanding scientific discoveries in the context of our broader worldviews. As a result, the public frequently receives ideas such as evolution alongside shallow and ill-informed explanations of their “true meaning.” Richard Dawkins is a well-known culprit in this regard. Dawkins is a fine biologist, but he is not a great 6 �philosopher—he is a scientist who suffers, as Einstein said, from the prejudices of his generation, seeing the trees but not the forest. This sort of behavior is ultimately detrimental to science itself, which is really much richer than is suggested by presentations of it stripped of human context. Though superficially science may seem to be more exalted by a culture that has lost its sense of the importance of liberal learning, in the end it cannot help but be degraded by the same. 7 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 7 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Liberal education and STEM education Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 17, 2014 by Michael Bolin at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bolin, Michael J. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-17 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Mathematics -- Study and teaching Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004522 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/1a135bd3b37632671bd685e6783aff92.pdf 8340866e44df736be5798caad20b9287 PDF Text Text �������������������������� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College at the Santa Fe, NM campus. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 24 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Leo Strauss and classical political philosophy Description An account of the resource Transcript of a lecture given on January 1, 1990 by David Bolotin. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bolotin, David, 1944- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1990-01-01 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Strauss, Leo. Politics Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24000036 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/838edbf1365f7a1dc3cd2352142a4c8f.pdf 9b716a27fb427ec2207176abff91afc5 PDF Text Text THE QUESTION OF FINAL CAUSALITY IN ARISTOTLE'S PHYSICS _( . David Bolotin I • I St. John's College, Santa Fe April 3, 1992 �t ee _g0s &J' 63~ ..... , '""' ... .- " . • �From the time that I first read Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics as a sophomore in college, I fell in love with it, and I looked to it for guidance as to how I should live. It appealed to me by its presentation of the moral life as a life of fineness, rather than of mere obedience to law, and also by its encouragement to the striving for excellence. was intrigued by its suggestion, so unlike anything I had heard before, that taking pride in one's excellence is not a vice but a virtue, which as such can coexist with and.which ( even enhances the comprehensive social virtue of justice. And above all, the E1b.ics. struck a chord in me by its claim that activity in accordance with virtue is both the natural end of man and the core of happiness; for although I scarcely understood this claim at the time, I was moved by its promise of a meaningful and happy life, a life that seemed beautifully reflected, moreover, in the discussions of friendship and contemplation with which the book concludes. But as I continued to study, and became more and more persuaded by Aristotle's teaching about human life, I began to be troubled by the fear that this teaching might depend on an obsolete and indefensible view of nature. For how can virtuous activity be the natural end or purpose of human life if, as I had been 1 \,. taught to believe, modern natural science has shown that there are no such things in nature as ends or purposes? Must we not say, therefore, that ends are not given to us �2 by nature, but that we give ourselves our own ends and create our own meanings? For a time, I tried to ignore this difficulty by telling myself that natural science was not relevant to an understanding of human life, and by giving it, accordingly, as little thought as possible. But this evasion could not go on forever, and I eventually had to face the challenge that modern, natural science presents for anyone who wants to return to the Aristotelian teaching about man. I therefore welcomed the opportunity as a tutor at St. John's to study this science in some detail. At the same time, I began to study Aristotle's Physics, and in particular his arguments for the existence of ends or purposes in nature, to try to see whether his natural philosophy, on which his moral philosophy at least in part seems to depend, might possibly be true. . But enough of this talking about myself. Instead, let me proceed by discussing the question of natural ends - or_of teleology, as it has come to be called - directly. My discussion will focus primarily on Aristotle's treatment of this question in his Physics. For the modern objections to teleology are already present, and responded to, in the Physics itself. And modern science, it turns out, has nothing conclusive to say about the matter. Contrary to what I had been told in school, modern science has nm shown that there are no purposes in nature. Indeed, it has not even attempted to do so. What it does, rather, is systematically to disregard the possibility of their existence. As Jacques Monad, a Nobel Prize-winning biologist, has written in his work Chance and. Necessity, The cornerstone of the scientific method is the postulate that nature is objective. In other words, the systematic denial that "true" knowledge can be got at by interpreting phenomena in terms of final causes -- that is to say, of "purpose." An exact date may be given for the discovery of this canon. The formulation by Galileo and Descartes of the principle of inertia �3 laid the groundwork not only for mechanics but for the epistemology of modern science, by abolishing Aristotelian physics and cosmology. ..... science as we understand it today ... required the unbending stricture implicit in the postulate of objectivity -- ironclad, pure, forever undemonstrable. For it is obviously impossible to imagine an experiment which could prove the nonexistence anywhere in nature of a purpose, of a pursued end. But the postulate of objectivity is consubstantial with science; it has guided the whole of its ~ digious development for three centuries. There is no way to be rid of it, even tentatively or in a limited area, without 1 departure from the domain of science itself. I will not bother to quarrel here with Monad's contention that the systematic denial of purposes in nature is a requirement of science. What is important, rather, is his clear awareness that this denial is merely a postulate of modern science, not the assertion of an evident truth. And Monad's statement to this effect, far from being the unmasking of ( a hitherto unseen limitation of modern science, is only the restatement of a thought that was well understood by its originators. Indeed, some of the founders of modern science appear personally to have believed in purposes in nature, even as they excluded all reference to them from their strictly scientific work. As Descartes put it in his Fourth Meditation, in addressing the question whether it is for the better that God made him subject to error, l ... it occurs to me in the first place that I should not be astonished if my intelligence is not capable of comprehending why God acts as he does; ... knowing that my nature is extremely feeble and limited, and that' the nature of God is on the contrary immense, incomprehensible, and infinite, I have no further difficulty in recognizing that there is an infinitude of matters in His power, the causes of which transcend my knowledge; and this reason suffices to convince me that the species of cause tem,ed final finds no useful employment in physical [or natural] things; for it does not appear to me that I can without temerity seek to investigate the [inscrutable] ends of 2 God. �4 Now questions have been raised about whether Descartes' professions of piety are wholly sincere. But at all events, his argument against the attempt to explain natural things in terms of ends or purposes is compatible -- to say the least - with there being such purposes in fact. Or to take another example, Newton himself, whose account of the motions in the solar system remainsu ne of the greatest achievements of modern science, claimed that the solar system was originally put together by an intelligent God acting for a purpose. For although the planets and the comets, he wrote, may, indeed, continue in their orbits by the mere laws of gravity, yet they could by no means have first derived the regular position of the orbits themselves from those laws . ... This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of 3 an intelligent and powerful Being. Newton's claim, however, about the origin of the solar system appears only in a General Scholium that he appended to his Principia twenty-six years after its first publication. And these theological reflections play no role in the body of the work, just as they have played no role in the subsequent history of modern physics. More generally, modern science from the beginning has sidestepped the question of ends or purposes in nature, while encouraging people to take less and less seriously the possibility of their existence, by trying to formulate laws that would encompass as many phenomena as possible without any reference to such ends. And even in the case of those phenomena that it does encompass, the claim that it has understood them adequately is dubious. For its laws are mathematical idealizations, idealizations, moreover, with no immediate basis in experience and with no evident connection to the �5 ultimate causes of the natural world. Newton's First Law of Motion, for instance, the law of inertia, requires us first to imagine a body that is always at rest or else moving aimlessly in a straight line at a constant speed, even though we never see such a body, and even though according to his own theory of universal gravitation it is impossible that there could be one. This fundamental law, then, which begins with a claim about what would happen in a situation that never exists, carries no conviction except insofar as it helps to predict observable events. Thus, despite the amazing success of Newton's laws in predicting the observed positions of the planets and other bodies, Einstein and lnfeld are correct to say, in I.he Evolution Qf Physics, that "we can well imagine that ( · another system, based on different assumptions, might work just as well." Einstein and lnfeld go on to assert that "physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world." To illustrate what they mean by this assertion, they compare the modem scientist to a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. If he is ingenious, they acknowledge, this man "may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes." But they add that he "may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility or the 4 meaning of such a comparison. " In other words, modern science cannot claim, and it will never be able to claim, that it has the definitive understanding of any natural �6 phenomenon. And accordingly, we should not allow ourselves to be so dazzled by it as to suppose that it has refuted Aristotle's teaching about natural ends. Let me now turn to my discussion of Aristotle and begin by reminding you of his doctrine of the four causes, among which the end or final cause is included. In trying to explain anything, or to answer the question "why?" about it, there are four ways, according to Aristotle, that we can respond. These four kinds of responses , these four ways of saying "because," are each a kind of cause of the matter in question. In one sense, we speak of the cause of something as the constituent or constituents from which it comes into being and of which it is composed. Thus, for instance, we call the bronze in a statue a cause of it, because the statue could not exist without the bronze that it is made of. In another and more important sense, however, we say that the cause of something is its form, since it is the form, rather than the constituent material, that explains why the being is what it is. Thus the bronze constitutes a statue because it has the form of a statue, not because it is bronze. And by the "form" of a being we do not mean its visible shape alone, but rather its whole character, a character that we may not be able to articulate clearly at first, but that we must already understand to a considerable degree simply to identify the being as what it is. To take our example again, we call a statue a statue because of its form , by which we do not mean its shape alone, but more impertantly its being the sculpted image of some other being, such as a man or a god. Similarly, we call a human being a human being because of its form, by which we mean �7 above all that we are animals capable of reason. Now in addition to the constituent cause and the formal cause, a third kind of cause, which helps to explain coming into being as well as all other changes or motions, is the source from which a given change begins. Hence, for example, the sculptor is a cau·se of the statue's coming into being, and therefore also, in a sense, of the statue itself, as the parent is a cause of the birth of its offspring and the wind is a cause of rustling in the leaves. This principle of change, which Aristotle sometimes calls the moving cause, can also, however, be a cause of a state of rest, as when a man decides to stop running and to remain still. Finally, a fourth kind of cause is the end or purpose for which something comes into being or for which it exists. Thus health, for instance, can be a cause of walking by being the purpose for the ( sake of which someone might take walks. Or to return to our first example, giving honor to a god or perhaps pleasure to the human beholders might be the end - or the final cause, as it is also called - for the sake of which the sculptor produced the statue. To focus specifically now on final causality, the examples I have just given, like those that Aristotle gives himself, suggest a definite manner in which the end of a motion operates as a cause. First, it is present in thought to the agent who begins the motion, and it is thought of as being good, and as being attainable by his own efforts. And as a consequence, the agent proceeds to try to realize in deed the end that he originally had in mind. In these cases, then, the final cause is itself a factor, together with what we have called the moving cause, in initiating the motion that leads up to it as an end. And �8 most of us would agree, I think, that this is a true account of such motions as that of a statue being sculpted, for it is the craftsman's anticipation of the completed work that directs his hands and tools. But Aristotle says explicitly that the end is a cause of natural motions, such as the growth and reproduction of living beings, and not only of motions initiated by human art. 5 Indeed, he justifies his use of analogies from the arts to help explain natural processes by claiming that art imitates nature; and he means by this not merely that some arts are representational, but more broadly that all the arts 6 derive their own directedness toward ends from that already to be found in nature. He even goes so far as to speak of Nature herself as a kind of artisan who makes all things for a purpose and nothing in vain. 7 Yet we have no clear evidence to suggest that na- ture is an intelligent or even _a con~c_ic,us being, and so it is difficult for us to understand how it can act for a purpose. Nor is it easy to conceive of a way, other than as the object of intelligent forethought, that the end of a motion could play any role at all in first bringing that motion about. So couldn't it be, instead, the result of accident that natural processes often turn out in a manner that seems to suggest motion for the sake of an end? Now this is not, as it might appear, an anachronistic or post-Darwinian question, but is in fact a central question that Aristotle explicitly confronts throughout his account of purposes in nature. To see how he responds to it, let us look more closely at the text of the Physics itself. �9 Aristotle discusses accidental causation immediately after his account of the four causes, and he indicates the tremendous scope of the question about it by noting that some men had attributed the existence of this world, and indeed of all ordered worlds, to chance. Now by "this world" Aristotle does not mean the hypothetically expanding uni~ verse of contemporary science, but rather this perceptible world, the world in which we live, along with other animals and plants, upon the earth and under the heaven. The beauty and grandeur of this world have always aroused in men a sense of wonder, and many have felt, as Newton did, that it must be the product of intelligent forethought. 8 I Yet according to some of the early philosophers, this world of ours came into being, like many other worlds, merely by chance. Now in response to these philosophers, Aristotle begins by saying that their claim is worthy of wonder. For those, he says, who attribute the world and the most divine of the manifest beings (L.e..., the stars) to chance do not speak of animals and plants as coming into being by mere luck, but rather by nature or mind or some other such cause, on the grounds that each kind of seed typically produces some definite kind of result. And on precisely these grounds, he continues, what they say about the world as a whole is especially strange, since we see nothing in the heavens coming into being by chance, whereas we see many things resulting from luck 9 among the perishable beings here on earth. Now at this point, it would certainly be possible for us to raise objections to Aristotle's argument, and some of these may have occurred to you already. But I would suggest that we defer our objections and consider �10 instead that Aristotle has not said, at least not yet, that those who attribute the world to chance are wrong, but merely that their assertion is wonderful and strange -- as I venture to say it is. And he adds that if what they say is true, this very fact deserves careful attention, as indeed it does. Rather than assume, then, that Aristotle has already rejected the view in question about the origin of the world - whether on adequate or on inadequate grounds - we would do better to follow him as he goes further into the matter by investigating more generally what chance is and what its relation is to nature. Aristotle begins his account of chance by first discussing what he calls luck, and by observing that we do not speak of luck as a cause of those things that come into being always or for the most part in the same way, but rather of those that come about contrary to any such necessary or usual patterns. Yet it is not simply the unusualness of an occurrence that makes it a case of luck. It is also necessary that it be the kind of occurrence that mi.gb1 have been brought about for the sake of something and from intelligent choice. Such a result, when it comes about, however, merely by concomitance, is what is properly said to be from luck. Aristotle offers an example to help clarify what he means in saying that luck is a cause of its results by mere concomitance. A certain man, he says, would have gone to the marketplace to recover the money he was owed if only he had known that his debtor was there. But he did not know, and so he did not go to the market for that purpose; it was merely a concomitant of his going for some other reason that his trip served the purpose of recovering his debt. Thus, the �11 result came about from luck, and the man is said to h~ve gone to the marketplace from luck. If, however, he had chosen to go to the market for the sake of this result, or if he always or for the most part recovered money when he went there, neither his going nor its result would be from luck. To speak of luck as a cause, then, is not to deny that there must always be some definite, particular cause of a lucky result. Indeed, in keeping with the fact that luck is responsible only for the kinds of outcomes that might have resulted from intelligent choice, only agents who are capable of such choice can be said to act from luck. But we attribute the result to luck when the agent's action merely happens to serve a purpose without his having intended it to do so. After preparing the way with this account of luck, which has the merit of being ( immediately intelligible, Arist~tle turns to the discussion of chance, or spontaneity, as we ' might also translate the Greek term. Chance is a broader class that includes luck as a subclass. Like luck in particular, chance in general belongs to the over-all category of moving causes. 10 And it too is a cause of something which, while it is the kind of thing that might have been brought about for a purpose, does not in fact occur for the sake of what results. The greater extension of the term "chance" is due largely to the fact that the particular cause of what we call a chance outcome need not be an intelligent agent, as it must in the case of luck, but can be any being, whether animate or even inanimate. Yet Aristotle suggests more of a difference between chance in the wider sense and luck in particular than this. He also suggests that chance results need not be of such a kind �12 as even normally to require an intelligent agent, but that in some cases they are ones that might have been brought about by nature, where nature is understood as a power, distinct from intelligence, that nevertheless also acts for a purpose. 11 This suggestion, however, is a difficult one. For as I have already mentioned, it is hard to see what it can /4,. mean to act for a purpose if not to act from intelligent forethought, and so it is hard to understand what that nature could be that Aristotle is contrasting with chance. The examples, moreover, that he gives as illustrations of chance serve to highlight this difficulty. Let me mention only one of these examples, in which the difficulty becomes explicit. Aristotle says that a stone fell by chance when it hit a man who was passing by below; and the reason he gives for attributing its fall to chance is that it might have fallen •·through someone's agency, and for the sake of striking the man, although in fact it did not. In other words, to explain what he means by a chance event, he contrasts it, not with one that might have come about from nature, but with one that might have been chosen by an intelligent, if in this case an unfriendly, being. 12 Now Aristotle is aware that his examples do not fulfill our expectation that chance results are sometimes to be contrasted with what nature, as distinct from intelligence, might have brought forth. And so he adds that chance in the wider sense is most distinct from luck in the sphere of natural generation, when an animal or plant comes into being contrary to nature, i.£, maimed or with some deformity. In such cases, he says, we do not speak of luck, but rather of chance, and this not merely, it seems, �13 because these particular beings have not been produced by intelligent agents, but also because the nature that might have produced them, and done so for a purpose, ·is itself not an intelligence. Aristotle adds, on the basis of a consideration that we will come back to later, that these impairments and deformities are not precisely even from chance. Nevertheless, his reference to them serves to support the suggestion that chance, as distinct from luck, can be a cause of what might have arisen from the purposive action of nature. The question remains, however, of what it can mean for nature to act for a purpose. And Aristotle again calls our attention to this difficulty, in the course of a renewed attempt to answer the question about the cause of the world. What he says is this: since chance and luck are causes by mere concomitance of what either mind or nature might have caused, they cannot be prior to mind and nature themselves; so that even if chance is responsible for the world, mind and nature are necessarily prior causes, both of many other things and of this whole. 13 , Now it is not immediately clear, of course, how Aristotle arrives at this conclusion, or how it is to be understood. But what I would first like to emphasize is his claim that b.Q1h mind and nature must be prior to chance, even on the assumption that chance is responsible for the world. That he makes this claim about mind, in particular, comes as a surprise. For the assumption about a chance origin of the world can refer, and almost certainly does refer, to chance in the wider sense, as distinct from luck. After all, the philosophic position to which �14 Aristotle is responding claims that our world came into being through the blind interaction of the elements, not from the lucky or unlucky actions of an intelligent being. Yet if we assume that chance in this sense is responsible for the world, one might have supposed,· perhaps, that nature is a still prior cause, on the grounds that chance is a cause of what might have been produced by nature, which must, therefore, already be at work. But what Aristotle says, to repeat, is that nature arui mind must b.Q1b. be prior causes of the world. And if mind, as well as nature, must already exist for there to be chance in .the wider sense, this would seem to imply that nature is not capable of acting for the sake of ends - those ends that are presupposed whenever we speak of chance - unless it is somehow accompanied by intelligence. And however much this view of nature might help us to understand how nature can act for a purpose, it is at odds with Aristotle's earlier suggestion that it can do so on its own. And yet perhaps this new suggestion, that nature depends on intelligence in order to do its work, is an intentional modification of the earlier one; and in fact, the very next chapter tends to support this modified view of nature. Aristotle says there that a natural being has two sorts of moving causes, one of which is not natural itself, since it is wholly unmoved. He then identifies this unmoved mover with the being's end, or final cause, and also with its form; but the form he is referring to cannot be the form as it exists in perishable beings, since we have already been told that these forms are perishable themselves, and hence not entirely unmoved. 14 The reference must therefore be to ·, �15 some other kind of form, and the only other kind that Aristotle believes to exist is the form as it exists in thought, whether in human thought or divine thought. If natural change, then, is to be initiated in part by final causes that are also unchanging forms, it seems that these forms must be present in a divine mind, a mind that somehow solicits natural beings to move to~ard the perfection of their exemplars. 15 And indeed, Aris- totle has already suggested something like this earlier in the Physics. where he said that the two highest principles of nature include one that is divine and good and aimed for and another that naturally aims for and reaches toward the first one. 16 And there are quite a few passages scattered throughout Aristotle's works that speak of a divine mind as the prime mover and ultimate source of all life and nature. 17 ( And yet despite the attractiveness of this suggestion about the subordination of nature to a divine mind, it does not yet allow us to see how natural motion as such can be for a purpose. For purposive motion, at least as we understand it, presupposes more than the mere existence in some mind of the form that is to be aimed for as its end. It also presupposes that this form exist in the mind of an agent, such as a craftsman, that can set itself in motion with a view to that end. Thus, for instance, if the heavenly spheres are intelligent, living beings, as Aristotle says they are, it is at least conceivable that they might set themselves in motion in order to approximate the perfection of the divine forms. 18 But unless even the seeds of natural beings here on earth are self- moving, intelligent agents, or unless they are tools in the hands of some other such �16 agent, the assertion that the forms exist in a divine mind does not yet make it intelligible how natural growth, for instance, can be purposive. Perhaps, then, the claim that led us to these speculations about the divine mind, the claim that .Q.Q1b. mind .and. nature must necessarily be prior to chance, allows for another interpretation. In particular, in saying that mind. must be prior to chance, even if chance is responsible for our world, Aristotle may not be trying to help us to see how nature could act for a purpose, Le.., in conjunc- tion with mind, but rather to indicate something about mind and chance in themselves. And in fact, there is such a way of interpreting the claim about mind being prior to chance. For according to Aristotle, there are different senses of priority, not all of which need apply to the same member of a given pair. In particular, if knowledge of one thing • is presupposed by that of another, the former is said to be prior in terms of knowledge, and yet it is not necessarily prior in other senses, such as that of existing earlier in 19 time. Thus, if we assume, as Aristotle invites us to do, that the world emerged through chance, it might still be true, as he claims, that mind must be a prior cause of it; but perhaps this is only because of priority in terms of knowledge. At all events, Aristotle would have good grounds for saying that mind is prior to chance in this sense, for chance results are defined as those that might have been brought about for a purpose, and we understand purpose as that for the sake of which an intelligent being would act. Knowledge of chance, then, presupposes a prior knowledge of mind, or, more precisely, of the kind of minds that are capable of choice. 20 Moreover, if being in the paramount �17 sense is what is true, or what is truly understood by some intelligence -- and Aristotle makes this claim in the Metaphysics - then this priority of mind to chance in terms of 21 knowledge also implies a certain priority in terms of being. Chance would not be fully what it is if it were not understood, understood, that is, in its relation to the ends pursued by intelligent beings. And to say all this is indeed compatible with the possibility that such intelligent beings may have come into existence, as our world itself may have done, through chance. In trying to account for the priority of mind to chance, I said that the definition of chance contains the notion of purpose, and that purpose is understood as that for the ( sake of which an intelligent being would act. And yet we cannot forget Aristotle's earlier suggestion that what is for a purpose is what might have been done filthfil from intelligence .Q.C ~ from nature.22 Thus, it seems that I have been ov.erhasty in claiming that we need to understand intelligent choice, as distinct from nature, in order to understand chance. However, the difficulty of even conceiving what it can mean for nature to act for a purpose has been our chief puzzle all along. And so let me suggest that natural ends themselves, like the ends that just happen to result from chance, can not be understood without a prior understanding of those ends that are pursued through intelligent • 23 choice. l Now it is true that when Aristotle first speaks of purpose in the Physics, he makes no explicit reference to intelligence or choice. What he says, rather, is that "nature," by which he means the form of a natural being, "is an end and [that] for the sake �18 of which; for in the case of those beings whose motion is continuous and has some end, this last stage is also that for the sake of which. " 24 And yet he has to add immediately that not just .a.D¥ last stage of a being's continuous motion is a true end or purpose; after all, he observes, it was ridiculous of the poet - presumably a comic poet -- to say that • death was the purpose for which a certain man had been born. Aristotle goes on to explain that only the best kind of last stage wishes to be an end; and he speaks repeatedly of ends or purposes as being, or as wishing to be, what is better or best. 25 But to be better or best presupposes a range of alternatives, and some being with the intelligence to compare these alternatives and to choose among them . Accordingly, all knowledge of what it is to be an end, including a natural end, depends on knowledge of the features of intelligent choice. My argument has now shown, I think, how Aristotle could justify his claim that even on the hypothesis that our world emerged through chance, mind would still be prior in causality to chance. But it has not made sense of the other half of Aristotle's claim, namely, that nature would also, on this hypothesis, be prior to chance. For I have not relied on the assumption that nature, as distinct from mind, acts for the sake of ends. But unless nature does act in this way, it is not even clear how it differs from chance, let alone how it must be prior to it. After all, chance happenings themselves are of such a kind that they m.igb1 have come about for the sake of ends. Now there is one difference between nature and chance, which I alluded to earlier, when I said that congenital �19 impairments and deformities in natural beings are not precisely from chance. For Aristotle's definition of chance included a criterion that I have not yet mentioned, namely, that the causes of chance results must be external. 26 Congenital impairments and deformities, by contrast, are said to have an internal cause. And it is not only such h deformities in natural beings that can be distinguished from chance results on the basis of this criterion. Their normal development is also said to originate from a cause within themselves. 27 Thus, the normal growth of living beings is said to be from nature, rather than chance, since it begins from a parental seed, which has within itself, as the parent did already, the power to initiate those motions that lead to a mature animal or plant. On the other hand, Aristotle thinks, rightly or wrongly, that in some species of living beings the usual mode of generation is spontaneous, La., from chance. Such generation comes about, he says, because the material, such as putrefying slime, from which these animals or plants begin their development can be moved by itself with the kind of motion that more typically must be caused in maternal residue by a paternal seed. 28 In generation from chance, then, the original source of motion is something other than the kind of being that results from it; and in general, we can distinguish nature, as an internal -source of change, from all external causes such as chance. Still, however, this criterion by itself does not suffice to explain why natural motion is said to be for a purpose. And neither does it allow us to understand Aristotle's claim that nature must be prior to '--. chance. Indeed, the view that nature is only an internal cause of motion adds an �20 additional reason for doubt on this score. After all, the survival, growth, and reproduction of natural beings are dependent on a great many external conditions. Accordingly, nature, or at least the nature of each kind of perishable being that we know of here on earth, must depend for its very existence on something else - either on some higher &> 29 principle of order or else on chance. And on the hypothesis that our world as a whole emerged through chance, chance would seem to be prior to nature, rather than the other way around. If, moreover, one holds that the world as a whole emerged through chance, it becomes all the harder to see how there could be a purpose behind the internal development of particular natural beings. And some of Aristotle's philosophic predecessors had in fact argued that there was none. Aristotle recasts their argument in the form of a perplexity, as follows. Zeus does not cause rain, the argument begins, in order to make the crops grow, any more than it rains in order to damage the crops on some poor farmer's threshing-floor; rather, the rain falls by necessity as the evaporated moisture rises and then cools, and it just happens to be advantageous or harmful for human beings. And if such blind causality is the truth behind the apparently benevolent order of the world as a whole, what prevents there being the same kind of causality at work in the formation of particular natural beings? This argument acknowledges that the parts of organic beings are suitably arranged for the activities through which they survive and reproduce. But it claims that these arrangements first originated from blind necessity, as �21 did many others, and that it merely turned out that these were serviceable, as the others were not, for survival and reproduction. The animals and plants that we see around us continue to survive because their parts turned out as. if they had been organized for a purpose; but they were not organized for any purpose in fact. Aristotle admits that one might be perplexed by this attempt to explain away the apparent purposiveness in the structure of organic beings, but he denies that things could have happened in the way that it suggests. He offers in rebuttal a whole series of arguments that nature is truly a cause for the sake of something. And at least the first of these arguments suggests that natural purposiveness is not limited to the internal ( structure of organic beings. For instead of granting the premise that the causes of rain are indifferent to good and bad, and arguing that the parts of living beings are nevertheless arranged for a purpose, he disputes even about the rain, or at least about its seasonal pattems. 30 Apparently, then, he agrees that it does not make sense to think of nature as acting for a purpose within a limited realm unless the world as a whole is ordered for the sake of ends. Unfortunately, however, this first in his series of arguments for natural' purpose is extremely problematic. And yet partly for this very reason, it is of such importance that I wish to go through it in detail. Aristotle begins by saying that "these things, and indeed all things that are by nature, come into being either always or for the most part in the same way," but that "nothing that is from luck or from chance does so." In support of �22 this assertion about luck and chance, he adds that "it is not believed to be from luck or from coincidence" - which latter term appears to be a synonym for chance -- "when there are frequent rains in winter, but [only] if they come during the dog days [~. in summer]." Similarly, he says, "heat during the dog days is not [believed to be from luck or from coincidence], but [only] if [it happens] in winter." 31 Now it is noteworthy that the explicit basis for Aristotle's claim that normal weather patterns are not from coincidence is what is commonly believed. For those who make the argument against him, and who speak of a temporal origin of the various species of living beings, would object that common opinion has too limited a time frame, and that the patterns whose regularity it is struck by exist only for a short time, in the light of eternity, as does our world itself. 32 They would say that even if the persistence of these regular patterns is not merely coincidental, but a necessary consequence of the elements in their juxtaposition, the whole order within which these patterns exist is the temporary and unintended aftereffect of an original coincidence. And yet despite the obviousness of this objection, Aristotle does not even attempt to justify, at least not here, his reliance on the common perspective regarding the permanence of our world; and by being explicit about this reliance, he calls attention to the question of whether that perspective is adequate. Aristotle continues his argument as follows: "If, then, [things] are believed [to be] either from coincidence or for the sake of something, and if it is not possible for these things to be either from coincidence or from chance, they would be for the sake of some- �23 thing." 33 Now this conclusion follows, of course, if its premises are sound. But the premise that things must be either from coincidence or else for the sake of something is open to doubt. For what about the bad things that happen always or for the most part? In particular, what about the death that comes inevitably to all living beings here on earth? The fact that birth is followed by death is no mere coincidence, if anything is not, and yet it is hard to see a purpose for it. Aristotle helps us, moreover, to see the dubiousness of the claim that being from coincidence or else being for a purpose is an exhaustive alternative by explicitly basing this premise too on common opinion. And a further sign that he is aware of its weakness is that he dqes not go on to claim that everything by nature is for a purpose, even though he had begun his argument by asserting that everything by nature comes about always or for the most part in the same way. For if nothing that happens with such regularity can be from coincidence, as he asserts, and if being from coincidence and being for a purpose are the only alternatives, it would follow that everything by nature is. for a purpose. And yet, to repeat, Aristotle does not even claim that this is true. What he says, rather, is that if the particular things in question, such as normal weather patterns or the arrangement of parts in living beings, cannot be from coincidence or from chance, then ~ things would be for a purpose. By thus retreating from the full implications of his argument, Aristotle suggests that this more limited conclusion, regarding the parts of organic beings and the like, is not meant to rely wholly on the reasons that have been made explicit. Finally, Aristotle �24 concludes his over-all argument by observing that all such things are by nature, so that there is purpose, or "the for the sake of something," among the beings that come into being and that are by nature. But this final conclusion, since it is based on the previous one, can also not be justified by the explicit argument alone. The disregard, in Aristotle's explicit argument, of natural evils such as death is closely related to its other difficulty, its failure to respond to his adversaries' contention about the origin of the world. For whatever weaknesses there may be in the doctrine that our world order, and in particular its species of living beings, emerged through chance and ne_cessity alone, this view certainly allows for a straightforward account of death and other natural evils. And so by pointing to his awareness that he has failed to acknowledge these evils in his own argument, Aristotle calls still further attention to his having left it open, at least for now, that his adversaries might be right about the question of ultimate origins. But what, then, is the basis for Aristotle's emphatic assertion, throughout this whole series of arguments and elsewhere, that the end or purpose is a cause of natural development? For if there is no evidence that such development is initiated by a selfmoving, intelligent agent, and if the possibility must even remain open that life itself first emerged through chance and blind necessity alone, how can he speak with such confidence of purposes or ends in nature? Now to answer this question, we must begin by noting that whatever the origin of life, if it had an origin, and whatever the more �25 immediate moving causes of natural development may be, it remains.true.that this motion issues regularly, throughout human experience, in living beings whose parts work wonderfully well together in carrying out their life activities. These activities, such as nutrition, reproduction, perception, locomotion, and thought, are the manifestations of the form, or soul, of the being in question, and this form cannot be understood in the light of its material conditions alone. Rather, it is only in the light of the form that the material conditions can be seen as what they are. The bodily organs of a living being must be seen as instruments for performing its characteristic activities, activities. without some of which, at least, the body itself would cease to exist; and even the more ultimate conditions of life must be understood, at least in part, in the light of their contribution to ( this end. 34 Accordingly, even if in general the term of natural development plays no role at all in initiating it, as it would do if.it were a purpose in the strict sense, the notion of purpose, or of what something is good for, remains central to the proper understanding of natural beings. And since living beings become what they most truly are by attaining their mature form, their typical growth toward maturity must also be seen in the light of this end. This is not to deny that mature development may indeed result from the same kind of blind necessity, given certain conditions, as does deformity or premature death, given certain others. But as words like "deformity," "mature," and "premature" themselves already suggest, we nonetheless see·these outcomes either as successes or as failures of a tendency toward a natural goal. We can disregard, or pretend not to �26 notice, this privileged status of the mature form; but it remains an inescapable fact of the world as it presents itself to our experience. Now these conclusions, to repeat, are independent of the question whether the world as a whole emerged through chance. And thus the centrality of form to the understanding of natural beings also allows us to make sense of the claim that even if the world did emerge through chance, nature would still be a prior cause of it. For the world consists primarily of natural beings, and of living beings in particular, which are properly seen as what they are in the light of their forms. Hence knowledge of these natural forms, and of these forms as the normal ends of growth, is presupposed by the very question of whether the beings they characterize, or even the world as a whole, first .originated through chance. Nature as form and as the end of motion is necessarily prior to chance, at least in the sense that chance can not be understood without a prior knowledge of this nature, just as we saw that it could not be understood without a prior knowledge of the features of intelligent choice. 35 This notion of the mature form as the end of natural development is a far cry from the strict sense of purpose, according to which the end is anticipated by thought and thus helps to initiate the motions that lead up to its realization. And much of the difficulty in understanding Aristotle's account stems from the fact that he has blurred the distinction between these two senses of final cause. Now it would have been easy enough for him to insist on this distinction, and so I conclude that he chose not to, even though it is �27 only the weaker sense of final cause that he regards as being applicable to nature in general. In other words, I contend, he consciously wrote in such a way as to mislead his readers. Now I know that it will strike many of you as an odd suggestion that Aristotle would thus mislead his readers, and especially in what seems to be a purely theoretical account of the natural world. And yet there is considerable support for this suggestion, at least in general, among the ancient and medieval commentators. Themistius, for instance, writing in the fourth century of our era, practically begins his paraphrase of the Posterior Analytics by saying that "many of the books of Aristotle appear to have been 36 contrived with a view to concealment ...." Simplicius, writing two centuries later, concludes the introductory section of his commentary on the Physics with a fuller statement of the same thought. He says, and I quote, that [Aristotle's) writings are divided into two classes, into the exoteric ones, such as those in the form of inquiries and dialogues and in general those that are not concerned with the highest accuracy, and into the esoteric ones, [or those that are meant for hearing onlyJ, which include this treatise [i..e.., the Physics]; and in the[seJ esoteric ones, he deliberately introduced obscurity, repelling by this means those who are too easy-going, so that it might seem to them that they had not even been written. 37 And still later, in the tenth century, the Islamic philosopher Alfarabi wrote in his "Harmonization of the Opinions of Plato and Aristotle" that whoever inquires into Aristotle's sciences, peruses his books, and takes pains with them will not miss the many modes of concealment, blinding and complicating in his approach, despite his apparent intention to explain and clarify.38 �28 This consensus, then, across the centuries, that Aristotle deliberately concealed some of his thought should help make it at least conceivable that my interpretation of his account of natural purpose is correct. But why, you will ask, would Aristotle write books in which he deliberately concealed his thought? Now the primary answer to this question, an answer that will seem surprising only to those who are unfamiliar with political conditions in the ancient world, is the fear of persecution. We are told, in fact, that despite all his precautions, Aristotle was indicted on the charge of impiety late in his life and that he had to flee Athens in order to escape the fate of Socrates. And underlying this charge against Aristotle is the fact that the study of nature was not in his time a respectable pursuit. Those who devoted themselves to natural philosophy were suspected of being atheists and corruptors of the young, and even Plato's Socrates did not try to dispel this suspi•cion at his trial, choosing instead to deny that he had ever been a natural philosopher himself. 39 Now in this precarious situation for the study of nature, Aristotle undertook the project of trying to make it a permissible, and even a respectable, activity. And largely for this reason, I think, he exaggerated the extent of his agreement with popular beliefs about the world - such as the popular belief that things happen, in general, for a purpose - and he concealed from his less careful readers much of his deepest thought about nature and the divine. He was, moreover, quite successful in this project of _winning respectability for the study of nature. One measure of his success is the unbroken tradition of commentary on his works that extended for several millennia after �29 his death, a tradition to which we largely owe the little that still survives from the writings of his predecessors in natural philosophy. However, fear of persecution and concern for the respectability of natural science are not the only reasons for Aristotle's willingness to accommodate the expression of his thought to popular opinion. T~'1ere are also educational reasons, which stem from his insight that natural science, unlike mathematics, is necessarily an ascent from what is more familiar to us, in all its confusion, toward what is clearer or more knowable by na40 ture. Given our remoteness from the ultimate causes of things, natural philosophy can not be taught as a deductive science, but must begin, at least, as an ascent from common opinion. Thus, for instance, insight into the truth that natural beings become what they most truly are by attaining their mature form emerges more or less directly as a refinement of the common belief in higher purposes. 41 And one of the surest ways to prevent access to this insight is dogmatically to reject that common belief or dogmatically to pretend that it doesn't matter whether its claims are true. For these reasons as well, then, Aristotle first presents himself as being in fuller agreement with that belief than he really is. In conclusion, let me return briefly to the question of the origin of the world. For although my account of why Aristotle speaks of nature as an end is compatible - as is the bulk of the Physics - with the possibility that our world emerged through chance, the fact remains that the final book of the Physics and the first book of Qn the Heavens contain elaborate arguments for its being eternal. And since Aristotle also claims, as I mentioned earlier, that the highest principle of the world is a divine mind, he holds out �30 the hope that natural motion is somehow, in a way that we may never perhaps be able to understand, activity for a purpose in the strict sense of the word. Yet I do not think that Aristotle himself could have placed much stock in a suggestion that anything other than a self-moving, intelligent agent - which the divine mind of his theology is not - can act for a purpose in the strict sense. 42 And at all events, there is a more importanF reason for his attempt to show that the world as we know it is eternal, and dependent on an intelligence more or less like our own. For if it is not, this does not necessarily mean that it is the product of natural elements that have come together by chance; there is also the possibility that it owes its existence to the will of a mysterious god or gods. And in that case, what we call nature would be at most a subordinate order whose continuance depends on the sufferance of this god or these gods; 43 and so science, or the attempt to understand nature in the light of its intelligible principles, would be a questionable and perhaps even a wholly misguided_pursuit. Accordingly, Aristotle's own theology, and the associated doctrine of the eternity of the world, serves above all as a response to this radical challenge to the scientific enterprise. It is not, however, an adequate response to it, since his arguments for the eternity of the world, at any rate, are inconclusive. Indeed, some of the deficiencies in these arguments are so manifest, it seems to me, that Maimonides must surely be correct to say, in The Guide Qf too Perplexed, that Aristotle himself did not regard them as genuine demonstrations. 44 Aristotle either had some other way, then, of justifying the life of science, and its first premise that the world is a natural one, or else he too must have been perplexed by this fundamental question. �31 ENDNOTES 1. Chance aruf. Necessity. Jacques Monod, translated from the French by Austin Wainhouse (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), p. 21. The claim made in this passage is significantly qualified on p. 41 (which should be read in connection with p. 104, along with the slightly more tentative remarks on pp. 112-113). The original claim is restored, however, on pp. 176-177. Note also the quotation marks around the word "true" on pp. 21 and 176. 2. Ib.e Philosophical Works Qf Descartes. translated by Elizabeth Haldane and G.R.T. Ross, Volume One (London: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. 173; contrast. however, p. 194. 3. Principia. Volume ll, JJN System Qf ~ Wfill.d., Motte's Translation Revised by Florian Cajori (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1934), pp. 543-544. Compare p. 546 and pp. 668-670. 4. Ihe Evolution SJf Physics, Albert Einstein and Leopold lnfeld (New York: Touchstone Books. 1966), p. 31 . 5. See, for instance. Qn ~ Sm!.l 415a22-b21; Qn 1lle. E.ar1s. Qf Animals 641 b23-33; Qn ~ Generation Qf Animals 730b8-32; Physics 199a20-b14. 6. Physics 194a21-22; 199a 15-17. 7. Qn ~ J:.am. of Animals 641b10-12; Qn ~ Heaven 291b13-14, 271a33; Politics 1256b20-22; Posterior Analytics 94b36. I 8. See Qn ~ Eans. Qf Animals 641 b10-23; compare Plato, Philebos 30a9-c8; ~ 885e 7-886a4. • • 9. Physics 196a24-b5. 10. Physics 198a2-4. 11 . Physics 196b21-22; 198a3-6; cf. 197a5-6 and 197b18-22. 12. cf. Aristotle's "Physics" (Books 1aruf.11), translated with introduction and notes by W. Charlton (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 109-110. 13. Physics 198a5-12. 14. Physics 192a34-b1; 198b1-4 (but contrast 224b5-6). �32 15. Physics 194b26; Compare Charles H. Kahn, "The Place of the Prime Mover in Aristotle's Teleology," in Aristotle .Qil Nature and .LMng Things: Philosophical and Historical Studies Presented tQ D.aYid. ~ Balme (Pittsburgh: Mathesis Publications, 1985), pp. 182-205. See also Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I, 0 .2, A.3; 1-11, O.40, A.3. 16. Physics 192a16-19. 17. See, for instance, Metaphysics 1072b13-14; Qn the Heaven 279a22-30. 18. Qn too Heavens 292a14-22; 285a29-30; Qn the Motion Qf Animals 700b25-32; Metaphysics 1072a19-b4; 1073a22-b1. 19. Compare Metaphysics 1018b14-37; Categories 14a26-b8. 20. Compare Wolfgang Wieland, Qie. aristotelische Physik, 2nd edition (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1970), pp. 259-260. 21. Contrast Metaphysics 1051a34-b6 with 1027b18-1028a6. See also Qntb.eSo.ui 426a15-26; 430a19-22; 431a1-4; and compare Physics 223a16-29. 22. Physics 196b21-22; cf. endnote 10. 23. Physics 194a28-30 ff. Translations from the Greek are my own. 24. Physics 194a32-33; 195a23-26; 198b8-9; 198b16-17. 25. Physics 197b18-22; 197b35-37; 196b34-197a2. 26. Physics 192b8-32: 199b14-17; and contrast 197a1-2. 27. Metaphysics 1034b4-7; cf. 1032a25-32; Qn the Generation of Animals 715b25-30; 762a8-763b16; History of Animals 539a21-25; 547b18-23. 28. Consider Posterior Analytics 95a3-6. 29. Cf. David Furley, "The Rainfall Example in Physics ii 8," in Aristotle QD Nature and .Living Things: Philosophical and Historical Studies Presented tQ DaY.k1 ~ Balme (Pittsburgh: Mathesis Publications, 1985), pp. 177-182. 30. Physics 198b34-199a3. 31. John M. Cooper claims that Aristotle's argument is based on the premise of the eternity of our world. See his "Hypothetical Necessity and Natural Teleology," in ebikc sophical Issues in Aristotle's Biology, ed. Gotthelf and Lennox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 243-274, especially pp. 246-253. Compare, however, Meteorology 347a5-6, where Aristotle himself says that the season.al cycle of the rains �-' •,::-_... ~ 33 merely "wishes (emphasis mine) to be perpetual in its order," ... Kat TouT' iv8EAEXES l0EAEL -yt-yvEa0at KaTci 'YE TTJV Tci{tv. 32. Physics 199a3-5. 33. Physics 199b34-200a32. See also 199b5-7. 34. Cf. Qn 1b.e .P.ar:ts. 2f Animals 646a8-647a3. 35. See above pp. 16-18. 36. See above p. 15. Cf. Maimonides, The~ .Qf tw Perplexed, translated by Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), Part II, Chapter 20, pp. 313=314. 37. TTOAA.a µev oov EOLKE TWV 'AptaTOTEAOIJS' ~l~AlWV ELS ETTlKpU!pLV µEµT)xavficr0m ... Themistius, Analyticorum Posteriorum Paraphrasis, in Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, Volume 5, Part 1, ed. M. Wallies (Berlin: 1900), p. 1. 1 38. ALxfj 8€ 8t1JpT)µEVWV airrou TWV crunpaµµciTWV ELS TE Ta E~WTEPLKCl ola TO. 'taTOpLKCl Kal Ta 8taAO)'LKCl Kat CAWS Ta µT) aKpas rucpt~Etas cf>poVTL(OVTa Kai. ElsTa ciKpoaµanKci, wv Kal OVTTJ foTlv ,; rrpayµaTEta, lv To1s dKpoaµaTtKo1S cia<icf>ELaV ETTETT}8EUOE Sta TOUTTJS TOUS p<;t6uµOTEp01JS' QTTOKpouoµEvos-. rrap' ws Simplicius, 1n Aristotelis Physicorum Ubros Quattuor Pciores Commentana, in Commentana in Aristotelem Graeca. Volume 9, ed. H. Diels (Berlin: 1882), p. 8. lKetvots µT)BE -yEyp<icf>0m 8oKE1v. 39. Alfarabi, "Harmonization of the Opinions of Plato and Aristotle," unpublished translation by M. Galston, p. 9. Quoted with permission of the translator. 40. Plato. Apology of Socrates 18b4-c3; 19b2-d7; 26d 1-e2; contrast, however, Phaedo 96a6-99d2 ff. 41 . Physics 184a16-21; cf. Posterior Analytics 71 b33-72a5; Topics 141 a26-142a 16. 42. Compare the relation between Socrates' youthful hopes that he would learn from Anaxagoras how nature as a whole is ordered for the better and his mature effort to understand the beings in the light of their forms; Plato, Phaedo 97b8-1 00a 7. 43. Given the political constraints that I mentioned earlier in the text, and in the light of Aristotle's project to make science respectable, the evidence that he had a genuine concern with this radical alternative is necessarily sketchy. But one might note an astonishing example that he gives in Book One of the Physics to illustrate his response to those philosophers who had denied the possibility of becoming. The difficulty that led to their denial arose on the basis of a premise that Aristotle speaks of as being common to all the students of nature, namely that nothing comes into being from non-being. For •: . . �.,. 34 the only other alternative is coming into being from being, and yet this too seems impossible, since being already is. Aristotle's first response to this argument is that becoming is neither from being nor from non-being, except by concomitance; what comes into being does so from a being, to be sure, but not insofar as that being is a being, but rather insofar as it is not the being that comes from it. This is, of course, a plausible claim. But to illustrate it, he gives the example of a dog coming into being from a horse, and the example is so fantastic that modem editors have surmised, with no manuscript support except for a single variant reported as such by Simplicius, that the text needs to be emended. What I suggest instead is that Aristotle uses the strange example on purpose, in order to hint that this first, or "formal," attempt to show that becoming is possible fails to meet the underlying challenge, which is to show, rather, that becoming is limited to what is possible by nature. At any rate, he goes on to supplement this first argument with a second one, based on the distinction between possibility and actuality, and he adds that he has given a more precise account of this distinction elsewhere. [See Physics 191 a23-b34, ·especially 191 b20-21 , and compare 187a26-b1 and 188a31-34. On the distinction between possibility and actuality, see Metaphysics e.J Another indication of Aristotle's concern with the theoretical challenge that the question of the gods presents for science is found in the first chapter of Book Two of the Posterior Analytics, at the beginning of a long and difficult discussion of how we come to know the first principles of science or demonstration. Aristotle includes in that chapter, seemingly as a mere example of the "what is?" questions that must be answered for there to be science in the strict sense, the question "what is a god?" [See Posterior Analytics 89b23-35.J 44. Ib.e. Guide Qf ~ Perplexed, Part 11, Chapter 15, pp. 289-293. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College at the Santa Fe, NM campus. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. 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Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College at the Santa Fe, NM campus. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. 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Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 22 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Aristotle on the principles of natural beings : Physics, book 1 Description An account of the resource Transcript of a lecture given in 1995 by David Bolotin. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bolotin, David, 1944- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Aristotle. Physics. Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24000280 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/bf1141512bb6534e0dfce68c50fba7d6.pdf dd8731522da0db58e3717aabedd03046 PDF Text Text ��������������������������� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College at the Santa Fe, NM campus. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 26 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The discussion of time in Aristotle's Physics Description An account of the resource Transcript of a lecture given on March 1, 1996 by David Bolotin as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bolotin, David, 1944- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1996-03-01 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Aristotle. Physics. Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24000304 Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/c1ae03052355f66c0c8b35ef9fb75eaa.pdf bf3dd4c34ee36dbfc5a427ff08c81eac PDF Text Text ������������������������������������������ Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College at the Santa Fe, NM campus. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 41 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The life of philosophy and the immortality of the soul : an introduction to Plato Description An account of the resource Transcript of a lecture given in 1997 by David Bolotin. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bolotin, David, 1944- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Plato. Phaedo. Philosophy Immortality (Philosophy) Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24000443 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/cbff1dc40eb7620071b4d21fb16dbdc5.pdf fd9082271c835964f33331154d394dd4 PDF Text Text ������������������������ Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College at the Santa Fe, NM campus. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 23 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource On Aristotle's Parts of animals : book one, chapter one Description An account of the resource Transcript of a lecture given on September 2, 1998 by David Bolotin as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bolotin, David, 1944- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998-09-02 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Aristotle -- Contributions in biology Animal nature Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24000470 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/82bf7a49a6e2285432ad3fe9b8f84a3b.pdf b6b81e467ed3935b6a6cf058ae090bc6 PDF Text Text ���������������������������� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College at the Santa Fe, NM campus. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 27 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The concerns of Odysseus : an introduction to the Odyssey Description An account of the resource Transcript of a lecture given on September 16, 1998 by David Bolotin as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bolotin, David, 1944- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988-09-16 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Homer. Odyssey. Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24000598 Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/5a1db5b2b3c779f6c4783ffb4a8b7575.pdf 4b507e1e87cf48685695181db9181c49 PDF Text Text �������������������������� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College at the Santa Fe, NM campus. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 25 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Is there a right to live as we please? : (So long as we respect the right of others to do the same) Description An account of the resource Transcript of a lecture given on January 25, 2002 by David Bolotin as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bolotin, David, 1944- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2002-01-25 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Kant, Immanuel, 1724-1804 -- Ethics. Locke, John, 1632-1704. Hobbes, Thomas, 1588-1679. Leviathan. Plato. Gorgias. Ethics -- History Liberty Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24000621 Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/d63b02c11c5014993eb4cc18d603d85b.pdf 861d63eba2d554a8184abed01a2057be PDF Text Text ��������������� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College at the Santa Fe, NM campus. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 13 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource On Sophocles' Ajax Description An account of the resource Transcript of a lecture given on January 7, 1977 by David Bolotin as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bolotin, David, 1944- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1977-01-07 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Sophocles. Ajax. Ajax (Greek mythological figure) -- Drama Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24000754 Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/423d873589c3cdcfe4e18fb3be73484c.pdf ef657b8adcde0dc9153d93264df80396 PDF Text Text ������������������������ Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College at the Santa Fe, NM campus. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 23 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Eleatic stranger and Parmenides in Plato's Sophist Description An account of the resource Transcript of a lecture given on January 28, 2004 by David Bolotin as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bolotin, David, 1944- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004-01-28 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Plato. Sophist. Plato Eleatics Philosophy, Ancient Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24000881 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/5f137a68293223dc39a2274aab3c918b.pdf fd8b0d4719762726a82a488d69fba459 PDF Text Text ������������������������������������������������ Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College at the Santa Fe, NM campus. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 47 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The question of place in Aristotle's Physics Description An account of the resource Transcript of a lecture given in 1994 by David Bolotin. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bolotin, David, 1944- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Aristotle. Physics. Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24003315 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/efc4b919a73cb12aad6952c90a54916c.mp3 36031a0a4e9634474cfafba4943b40f7 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Lecture Recordings—Santa Fe Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data wav Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:14:37 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The beauty and complexity of Islamic geometric patterns : historical development and traditional design methodology Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture given on September 29, 2017 by Jay Bonner as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bonner, Jay Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017-09-29 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Subject The topic of the resource Geometry in art Islamic art--Mathematics Polygons Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 20014385 Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/ee669572b4c4ab835ca95175f1cbc9ed.mp3 100c7389adbb04c2f912ea81f6dcf02d Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Lecture Recordings—Santa Fe Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data CD Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:01:37 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Spirited friends : on dogs and friendship Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture given on February 21, 2014 by Gary Borjesson as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Borjesson, Gary Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-02-21 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Subject The topic of the resource Dogs -- Psychology. Dog owners -- Psychology. Human-animal relationships. Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 20014138 Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/f52c75f0b9eaace1cabeec234e90b71c.pdf bb216559fbb3be5f324ee55e843357ff PDF Text Text Colloquy On Creation 1 �2 �Table of Contents 4. Letter from the Editor 6. Poetry 22. Short Stories & Musings 32. Essays 66. Translations 79. An Interview with Associate Dean Brendan Boyle 3 �Letter from the Editor 4 �On Creation and the Value of Themes I think a short explanation of the role of theme within a publication is warranted, given its inclusion in a handful of recent issues of Colloquy. Not only is it useful for you, the reader, but for the contributors, and the editorial team. Without theme, we have nothing to judge against. I’m not speaking of judgements of quality, as we would have a difficult and spirited discussion about how to ascertain a work’s quality. Instead I mean “judge” as in weigh the value of any particular work within the context of its setting. I think the simplest way to explain the importance of a theme is to highlight how prevalent the habit of keeping something “thematic” is. You cannot say something coherently unless a theme renders what you say coherent. I’d first point to books, like the many we read here at St. John’s. If Kant deviated at all from theme then the Critique of Pure Reason would suddenly find itself impure and unreasonable. And what a detriment to the ends of that work such a change would be. A core aspect of our ingrained habit of storytelling is theme. It ties one plot point to the next and allows metaphor to shine in the liminal space between word and interpretation. The role of theme is the same as the role of words, to communicate, but theme on its own can communicate an entire catalogue of interpretations and emotions that words cannot in their isolation. So, let us focus on the theme for this issue of Colloquy: On Creation. Creation is among the most transcendent capabilities of any single thing. It can refer to the creation of new life or new purpose. We talk of artists as creators, and we say the same of gods. The role of creation is that something comes to fruition, and moves from a space purely other, that of the non-existent, to that of the tangible and knowable, materializing reality from concept. In a way, “On Creation” is not a theme that enforces rigid boundaries. Creation as act is available to the entirety of life’s beings, and seems to belong to nature’s fundamental forces. The Universe forges stars as we create an idea. As a theme, “On Creation” does invite the polity of the Graduate Institute to participate in the single most unifying capability of all the Universe. And so I would like to end this musing with what I hope the following submissions create within you, dear reader. I hope they create inspiration, so that some aspect of the style, content, or beauty of what you read here aids you in creating something wholly your own. I hope they create a reaction, as emotional states are a sudden and startling reminder that we are alive. And I hope they create a sense of appreciation for the brilliant, curious, and creative minds that make up the polity of the Graduate Institute, in this time and place. Thank you, and give witness to creation. Stephen Borsum - Editor 5 �Poetry & Musings On Creation Old Dog Forbidden Fruit Children of that World Mimi My Mind’s a Dark Forest Before the Blank Stare 6 �Contributors Austin Suggs Chris MacBride Stacey Rains Louis Petrich Sydney Rowe Sylvie Bernhardt John Harwood 7 �On Creation Austin Suggs What was in that dark Over which the Spirit’s spark hovered? There was water there it seems Though not the water of our streams. This was of a different order Not teeming with life But humming with the power Of a world not yet made But somehow already there. Did you tame primordial chaos Or disturb a primal peace? And what happened on that second day That caused the pen to betray Something was off. For it was not good Nor was it great. It simply was. Did the mass of land amidst the seas Begrudge the Spirit its roaming free A new strife where once there was peace? And tell me, how great was man, really, If you came to regret his progeny? And if he’s an image of you, Well, what are we to do With that? 8 �Somewhere with Warm Waters - Louis Petrich 9 �Old Dog Chris Macbride The click-clicking of four arthritic ankles announce him into the kitchen At 17, he’s still turning up whenever the recipe begins warm olive oil over medium heat, add 2 cloves garlic… We met him at a rescue and were told his first owner was a chef it explains a lot His back is now a long, deep sway between hip and shoulder curved like the mountain valley in Virginia where he was born He shakes his head and the World’s softest ears slap against sunken cheekbones These days, he speaks in low groans as if to say getting older stinks (like dog poop) And yet when the air outside turns chilly darn if he isn’t a pup again Trotting up the driveway eager to sniff out the latest news left by four-legged friends Nose to ground, tail wagging he is happy 10 �Forbidden Fruit Stacey Rains In 9th grade Biology, we dissected lilies; we carefully opened the white petals to access the pale green center, separated the stamen from the pistil, and   learned that even flowers have ovaries to grow life inside of life, inside the deep, protected center, comes the slow swelling and upwelling, ‘til the petals drop away, and all is given to the potential. I have wrestled with the discovery that trees can be dioecious– that plants also are gendered–and, more, that there exists a botanical misogyny. “When used for street plantings, only male trees should be selected, to avoid the nuisance from the seed.” Fertility is so inconvenient. Nevermind the spewing, fertile pollen that now dominates the landscape, causing red eyes and running noses. Nevermind regret. 11 �Children of that World Louis Petrich (Luke 20:34-36) “—they neither marry, nor are given in marriage—” That’s all, perhaps, you need to say to inculcate thy kingdom come and save us bouts of parables: your sower, famed as seeding ground that’s cursed, then straining after roots to clutch at light, next family farms and winter strawberries— all angelically void when wings caress god’s breath and ‘tis enough to harvest songs. Your late-hired field hands, prodigally paid for?-consider angels--any time--for free. The good Samaritan gets even better, stays the night with beaten travelers instead of backing home to wife and stacking nursing on an innkeeper, whose own shrewd wife, though scraping profit from the dirty sheets, with years grows tired of busybody neighbor feats. 12 �There’d be no rigmarole with folks declining t’attend the wedding--no resorting last to uncast idlers outing for a lark— when kingdom come has come, the nights are done that consummate, no made-up faces fine or bodies nipped and tucked to light a spark— O what a load from off the mind!--you lookers, mark. My savior dear, your promised kingdom parabolic could have been a kingdom literal, in words that summon what they mean forthright as prince’s peal: I say there shan’t be children given away from honied skies. For yes, I do remember Paradise-creation, mine to color. Then the pall, for none do slice off married once for all until they deal their evil able parts and die while knowing them inseparable. She, hearing how to swallow serpentine the world, tends him naked taste of inside out desire; henceforth, he’s good no more alone to name things as he will and hear the Lord approve. 13 �If only kingdom come, pie rained from sky, were plated now for simple thanks to still the pulpy verbiage, round it goes: “Now eat at once the astronomical wee apple that lets fall the dominoes.” Along come back pains, raking leaves from tree left-o’er uneaten, cracking truth on fossil fruit pertaining not to peaceful night of sleep ‘til death-with tugging of the limbs and closing in and never deeper getting than this flushing skin. To walk with God in cool breeze of the evening--unafraid of after-hidden, poor performing fool— that’s ever, and forever, bliss. For that, be overcome, O world amiss. 14 �Mimi Sydney Rowe Vertebrate coast. Silent boat. Cusp of tropics, touch pearl. Medicine inside embers. Sails high; flatter. Arcing Inwards to you. The tiny cabin with a bowl of salt. Cut open, pouring. 15 �My Mind’s a Dark Forest Sylvie Bernhardt Escape—run for the trees—evade; Before they mark me freak, No hope flickers warmth I might save. No others will I need learn. Down, down a dark stone cave Goes I, who dares and burns. I’ll claim honors as renegade, Down, down these mountain graves As friend to claw and beak. That shutter, crack, and groan. No good friend have they been to me— Community of Fear— Scratching fang nails on rusty rails, These wretched creatures roam. Conquer my last youthful decree: I’m no Devil nor deity; “I know this dark mirror.” Grisly death wings me home. Under night’s blanket I make haste Away from light, away. To fall in sight would lead to waste; Safety in darkness lay. Know I seek not a Paradise Where those wretched do roam. Those that claw against their stone tombs Wail, weak cretin cries. As I descend, no lights a friend Forever suckling purple blooms, To delve through depths returned. They who lives no more dies. Wicked shadows cling to bright kin, To I, who dares and burns. Brutish heads prevail in disorder, In guise of man though beast. Debased are they, the exploiter, And violence of brutes won’t cease. 16 �I move quietly in shadow But if my flesh be not my end, With sharp claw I unsheathe. Then question not my aim. No hatred I harbor in tow, Makers of form are divine kin, But blood be what we breathe. So worship not to tame. Should I consent to suffer more Tread on, but move most steadily, Or live in sunk despair? Else these shales might splinter, I know in cruelty they’ll restore And break. Striking me readily, A lust for death so fair. As done in past winter. Earth, oh Earth, cries do bury Depths I dove, and air gusts led An evil rot in mind. Through caverns and deluge. Spoken in tongues—restless fury A moonlit grove, past tamed, then freed— Stirs frenzied force blind. Now my living refuge. If only I had strength in hand to rake A melody of crinkling leaves The tremors from my flesh. Invokes safety’s soft glee. From my throat’s rage to the world’s break, Lantern flower blooms now breathes All cries ever languish. A loving warmth through me. Death I keep always in soft heart, Hold I no more despotic dark, That will know endless cold. While rose, mint and oak grows; Love binds us before we depart; Reflecting sanctuary’s mark Of All, this I now hold. Away I from old woes. 17 �Ruins are ripened with dull time. On this bed of oak leaves I sleep; I find the warm glow safe. No company I seek. Lonely lantern’s golden flame climbs My tale always to tell as creep, An ancient etched-stone waif. As friend to claw and beak. Secret garden beneath the falls Spiraling to center. Fire sprouts flame on vine-meshed walls Blooming in November. To stir thoughts of metaphysics I deny mind’s fetters. Alight there glows hieroglyphics— Spells in gold letters. Timber crackles in a dirt pit. Smoke fails to reach the floor. Poems I babble and I spit, So to deepen the lore. Tonight, what dreams will I endure? Be they kind or bleak? While rosy-cheeked dawn will ignore Me so tender and meek. 18 �Puck: Consider it a Dream - Nadine Bucca 19 �Before the Blank Stare John Harwood Here I sit and kneel Before the blank stare Of some little earth, An image, of one I have never seen nor touched. The more thoughts rattle In between my ringing ears, The less I can manage To imagine even the carving Of the one I’ve never seen. A faceless and mangled Homunculus of marble Stands before my penitent’s gaze. In fear, I can not fathom to begin; To set a chisel into the creature, To even gesture to the creator. How can I release anger and dread, Praise and duty, pent up In the veins and muscles Of marble, so finely shaped By the hands of the Almighty? 20 �Would even a painting, A lead etching, A mindless praying, Or even tranced dancing Begin to evoke the Unspeakable, The Ever-Perplexing? So, I sit and scratch lines into letters And letters into the pages of my heart That resembles the stone That patiently awaits Before my artist’s first minding. After a purging time of pondering Before the blank stare Of the One Unfathomed, Who fathoms me gently, I dare begin to finally set a mark. 21 �Short Stories & Musings Dialogue: Meeting with Descartes TRANSLATIONS The First Postulate 22 �Contributors Yonas Ketsela Cynthia Crane 23 �Dialogue: Meeting with Descartes Yonas Ketsela I set out on a journey today to meet with Descartes. He invited me to come and chat with him at his house. I have been anxiously waiting to see him all day. I have his book, Meditations on First Philosophy under my arms. After a long walk, I arrived at the appointed time, and I am now only waiting for his call. This is roughly how our conversations go: Descartes: “Let us for example take the wax; it has only just been removed from the honeycomb; it has not yet lost all the flavour of its honey; it retains some of the scent of the flowers among which it has gathered; its colour, shape, and size are clearly visible; it is hard, cold, easy to touch, and if you tap it with your knuckle, it makes sound. In short, it has all the properties that seem to be required for a given body to be known as distinctly as possible.” Yonas: What you said makes sense to me. This is in fact what I myself experimented on a candle before coming here. If I put it in my own words, what you describe is exactly what I characterise as my conscious sense-experience or sensations: the colour, shape, size of the candle belongs to my vision; it has some cedar flavour which belongs to my sense of smell and taste; its hardiness and coldness to my sense of touch; and its sound to my ear. Thus, all these sensations are distinct to me. Even though I am not sure if I can say that it is clear, nor do I know exactly what this experience means to me. Descartes: “But wait–while I am speaking, it is brought close to the fire. The remains of its flavour evaporate; the smell fades; the colour is changed, the shape is taken away, it grows in size, becomes liquid, becomes warm, it can hardly be touched, and now, if you strike it, it will give off no sound. Does the same wax still remain?” Yonas: It is unclear to me now how I can precisely answer the question whether the same wax remains or not. But one fact is clear to me that it has undergone some changes of appearance. Its previous qualities are not there anymore. My sensations are obviously diminished in reaction to this change. I can barely smell it, its colour is unclear, its shape somewhat deformed or irregular as a result of being in a change of state—from that of solid to liquid; I also cannot grasp it; its sound is not as distinct as before. So, I guess, so far as my sensation is diminished, I can say it is not exactly the same wax as before. In fact, if someone now breaks into the house and senses this wax, he would hardly be able to exactly predict or imagine its previous state. But as for me, I know what happened and I can remember its previous state–however vague it might be. So I don’t see the same wax as before. 24 �Descartes: [I see what you are saying but] “we must admit it does remain: no one would say or think it does not. So what was there in it that was so distinctly grasped? Certainly, none of those qualities I apprehended by the senses: for whatever came under taste, or smell or sight, or touch, or hearing, has now changed: but the wax remains.” Yonas: Ahh, you are right. I hadn’t reflected in this way before. But If I follow your suggestion, it does seem to me that what I distinctly grasped was first its number, namely, there was one wax here which has undergone a change from one state to another. But as you said, for its taste, smell, sight, touch and hearing, they become very obscure and even my imagination can only be a little to no help (given that my imagination is not good enough). My senses may still retain a certain trace of sensations in them, but I am sure they will disappear pretty soon (given that my memory does not always record these sensations accurately). In another extreme case, someone who does not have one of these sense organs may not participate in the same experience at all as I am now. I am now wondering if these qualities are not necessarily what belongs to the essence of this wax, then what is the essence of the wax apart from these qualities? Descartes: [Good], “perhaps the truth of the matter was what I now think it is: namely that the wax itself was not in fact sweetness of the honey, or the fragrance of the flowers or the whiteness, shape, or sonority, but the body which not long ago appeared to me as perceptible in these modes, but now appears in others. But what exactly is this that I am imaging in this way?” Yonas: That is exactly what I am wondering about too. Descartes: [Okay] “let us consider the matter and, thinking away those things that do not belong to the wax, let us see what remains.” Yonas: Ok. Good. Descartes: “Something extended, flexible, mutable: certainly, that is all.” Yonas: I think I can understand that. Descartes: “But in what do this flexibility and mutability consist? Is it in the fact that I can imagine this wax being changed in shape, from a circle to a square, and from a square into a triangle?” Yonas: Well, speaking in clear concepts, I think, that may be what we can understand by terms such as flexibility and mutability. But I am not sure if that is exactly what happens in reality. Descartes: [Okay] “That cannot be right: for I understand that it is capable of innumerable changes of this sort, yet I cannot keep track of all these by using my imagination.” 25 �Yonas: Now, I see what you mean, namely that the limitation of my faculty of imagination would not at all allow me to keep track of all these changes ad infinitum. Descartes: “What about ‘extended’? Surely, I know something about the nature of its extension. For it is greater when the wax is melting, greater still when it is boiling, and greater still when the heat is further increased.” Yonas: Yes, in some vague estimation, I can surely think of changes in its state, that is to say, from a solid state to liquid or further to gas, consequently its extension increases. Yes, I am not sure whether at a certain point, we may want to say that it is dispersed, and not any longer an extension but discrete parts in space. Descartes: [Okay, hold that thought] “And I would not be correctly judging what the wax is if I failed to see that it is capable of receiving more varieties, as regards extension, than I have ever grasped in my imagination.” Yonas: Your meaning is that if I cannot determine what this wax is like as it changes from one state into another in some notion or idea, then it seems that I could not do that by my imagination alone. Descartes: “Now [see] I am left with no alternative, but not to accept that I am not at all imagining what this wax is, I am perceiving it with my mind alone: I say ‘this wax’ in particular, for the point is even clearer about wax in general. So then, what is this wax, which is only perceived by the mind?” Yonas: If I remember correctly, we previously said that if we remove all the qualities from the wax, we will arrive at only flexibility, mutability, and extension. Is that what you mean? I mean that the mind can grasp the wax in these ideas and yet it would be the same wax. Descartes: “Certainly, it is the same wax I see, touch, and imagine, and in short it is the same wax I judged it to be from the beginning. But yet—and this is important—the perception of it is not sight, touch or imagination and never was, although it seemed to be so at first: it is an inspection by the mind alone, which can be either imperfect and confused, as it was before in this case, or clear and distinct, as it now is, depending on the greater or lesser degree of attention I pay to what it consists of.” Yonas: Indeed, that seems to be an interesting and important point. There seems to be much more happening in perception than my simple sensations. But I don’t quite see the problem yet. I do trust my senses that they can give me accurate sensations, but I hadn’t quite reflected in this way before—how my mind can be problematic to this experience or how it would inspect the wax apart from the senses and yet could be in error? Descartes: “...I am amazed by the proneness of my mind to error. For although I am considering this in myself silently and without speech, I am ensnared by words themselves, and all but deceived by the very ways in which we usually put things. For we say that 26 �we ‘see’ the wax itself, if it is present, not that we judge it to be there on the basis of its colour or shape. From this I would have immediately concluded that I therefore knew the wax by the sight of my eyes, not by the inspection of the mind alone.” Yonas: That difference makes sense to me. Descartes: [For example, as I am seeing this wax]..”If I had not happened to glance out of the window at people walking along the street, I have immediately concluded that I knew the wax by the sight of my eyes, not by the inspection of the mind alone but using the customary expression, I say that I ‘see’ them [the people in the street] just say I ‘see’ the wax. But what do I actually see other than hats and coats, which could be covering automata? But I judge that they are people. And therefore, what I thought I saw with my eyes, I in fact grasp only by the faculty of judging that is in my mind.” Yonas: This explanation does make much more sense to me now, especially when I connect it to what you said before about the degree of attention one needs to put in his observation of facts of experience. Thus, my mind’s imperfection and confusion then only consist in that it judges quickly and that is when it errs. Descartes: [Good] “Let us then go on where we left off by considering whether I perceived more perfectly and more evidently what the wax was, when I first encountered it, and believed that I knew it by these external senses, or at least by what they call common sense, that is imaginative power; or whether I perceive it better now, after I have more carefully investigated both what it is and how it is known. Certainly, it would be foolish to doubt that I have a much better grasp of it now. For what, if anything, was distinct in my original perception?” Yonas: I don’t believe we arrived at that yet. Descartes: [That is right] When I distinguish the wax from its external forms, and as if I had stripped off its garments, consider it in all its nakedness, then, indeed, although there may still be error in my judgement. I cannot perceive it in this way except by [my] mind…I have learned now that bodies themselves are perceived not, strictly speaking, by the senses or by the imaginative faculty, but by the intellect alone and that that they are not perceived because they are touched or seen, but only because they are understood, I clearly realise that nothing can be perceived by me more easily and more clearly that by own mind. Yonas: I am amazed by this conclusion. I think I would rather stop our discussion here. I want to go now and come back another day for more discussions. For now, I have enough thoughts to contemplate for the coming days. It is really nice meeting you and talking to you in such a respectful way. 27 �Walking to My House My dialogue with Descartes was very interesting and, on my way back home, I was contemplating deeply the significance of his conclusion. Descartes’s assertion is that in one’s act of thinking, he said, it is possible to strip all external impressions and concentrate a certain degree of attention to the object and receive a correct perception in the mind. This is conceivable. After a long walk, I finally arrived at my house. I was completely lost in contemplation; only when I looked at the flowers at the front door of my house that I was awakened to the facts of this amazing world. I said to myself, ‘that is my house.” I judged it correctly but the question that is still with me is how I did that— is it my mind or my senses that showed me the way here? Note: The Full Treatise of Descartes’s Discussion of the Wax is found in Book II of his Meditations on First Philosophy. 28 �The First Postulate Cynthia Crane A false and scurrilous tale Let it be postulated to draw a straight line from any point to any point. East of the dusty market, under a low dry tree, a girl put an open wooden box at the feet of her little brother. The boy did not notice, but stared at the curling clouds brushing the near-white sky, broken to bits by the branches and leaves of the olive. “Euclid, look,” she said, and tapped the box. Their mother, working the edge of the market, stopped her hawking, saw the children safe in conversation, and turned back to her selling. Nothing would come of it, she knew, and wished the girl would let her brother be. Euclid’s eyes moved slowly off the clouds and his mind moved slowly off the job of assembling them back to wholes from the fragments between the leaves. The box of sand assembled itself at his feet, and then his sister’s face: lips, teeth, sunned freckles, black eyes obscured by curls. “Euclid,” she said, “come back.” So he did. The boy knelt and smoothed the sand And smoothed the sand And smoothed the sand, Grains of glass under his palms Grains of glass under his palms Grains of glass under his palms and fingertips. Mother’s cries, “here, here, sailor,” Cut his ears like Grains of glass under his palms and fingertips. “Don’t listen,” the girl said, and shifted the box around so Euclid would not watch their mother. His tears were leaving tracks in the dust on his face, but she did not wipe them away, would not touch him and set him off. He spit the dirt out of his mouth, and watched it bead then sink into the ground. 29 �No. He smoothed the sand and smoothed the sand and smoothed the sand, grains of glass under his palms and fingertips. “Yes. Look.” His sister’s dirty finger poked a dot in the sand, And by it, another, And by it, another, And by it, another, Snaking a line across the box of sand, Awaking a serpent in his mind, Between his eyes, Behind his nose, Above the taste of salty olives and grape leaves boiled in wine Lingering Annoying On his tongue. He spit again. No. The serpent reared its hooded head, smelling tongue and clouded eyes. It curled around his thoughts and flicked them into disarray. Euclid jabbed his finger into the sand, dragged it straight across the box, connecting one of his sister’s dots to another and abandoning the rest. He pulled his finger out again, and smoothed the sand on either side of the line he’d made. He leaned forward, his face close to the surface of the sand, and then he leaned back. Strange. Sensation. He felt his face with his fingertips and palms. It moved soft as shifting sand or dust and as though and as though and as though . “You’re smiling,” his sister said. 30 “Yes.” �Galaxy in a Flower - Nadine Bucca 31 �Essays Corruption at the Symposium How to Read Well The Galileo Affair The Nature of the Pilgrimage The Creation of the Self 32 �Contributors Sam Hage Siobhán Petersen Shirley Quo Noah Vancina Kyle Reynolds 33 �Corruption at the Symposium Sam Hage At the conclusion of the Symposium’s six speeches about Eros, the drunken Alcibiades interrupts the party with a crowd of attendants in tow. At the conclusion of Alcibiades’ speech, another, drunker crowd of revelers interrupts the party, sending things into confusion and signaling the end of Aristodemus’ narrative. Unlike Alcibiades’ initial entrance, which enables his long and rhapsodic depiction of Socrates—providing key biographical information found in only a handful of places in Plato—this second entrance seems to serve no discernible dramatic purpose. A small detail, however, included almost as an afterthought, may tell us a great deal. The second time around, the intruders find the door to Agathon’s house already open, because “someone had gone out.” We mustn’t suppose this detail is accidental; according to ancient anecdotes, Plato revised individual lines of his dialogues hundreds of times. What’s more, the preposterous custodial chain of the Symposium’s narrative is a clear indication of Plato’s own authorial hand at work. So who has left the party? And why does Plato wish for us to know? Once noticed, the first question is not difficult to answer: Alcibiades is still speaking or has just finished; Phaedrus and Erixymachus are mentioned as leaving right after this; Socrates, Agathon, and Aristophanes stay awake talking all night; Aristodemus is there to witness and narrate it all. Of the seven speakers, plus Aristodemus, Pausanias is the only one not explicitly mentioned. Unless this is a meaningless addition meant to refer to one of the unnamed speakers whom Aristodemus or Apollodorus forgot about, the only possibility is Pausanias. Why Plato should present us with this detail is a much greater question. Pausanias, we are told in the opening pages, is still hungover from last night’s festivities—but no reader will be satisfied to think he has left simply because he isn’t feeling well. More relevant is the fact that he has been witnessing his beloved, Agathon, flirt with the beautiful newcomer Alcibiades—and with Socrates from the very start of the party. Given that it is during Alcibiades’ speech that Pausanias finally storms out, it seems likely that 34 Alcibiades will provide us with the key to Plato’s lesson. �Without undertaking a tedious examination of Pausanias’ and Alcibiades’ speeches, we can at least observe some cursory points. Pausanias’ defense of Eros is highly unerotic; even the “highest” relationships are for him ultimately transactional. In truth, Eros is not defended at all, but instead undergoes a kind of technical scrutiny and classification. Pausanias’ bizarre focus on the jurisprudence of pederasty is especially startling in juxtaposition with Phaedrus’ emphasis on the tragic nobility of a lover’s self-sacrifice and Eryximachus’ rapturous elevation of Eros as the governing principle of the entire cosmos. His focus on the shameful is revealing: he seems rather ashamed of erotic relationships altogether. No character could be further opposed than that of the shameless and bombastic Casanova who delivers the evening’s unexpected epilogue. Whereas Socrates reveals the true nature of Eros properly understood, Alcibiades vividly illustrates the corruption that this philosophic attitude can sometimes leave in its wake. As a youth, Alcibiades has been partially won over by an appeal to wisdom; nonetheless, the conversion has not entirely succeeded. Plato’s dramatic art demonstrates the extreme care Socrates took in choosing to whom, and how, he disclosed his teachings. Socratic education does not admit of half measures, and a little learning is a dangerous thing. No doubt Socrates is not entirely to blame for the schizophrenic political career of a man with such unreformable erotic impulses. Nevertheless, many Athenians would have seen Alcibiades as a prime example of Socratic corruption. However strange his views of pederasty might seem to us, Pausanias, by contrast, is a spokesman for the conventional. His archetypal pederastic relationship exchanges the beauty of the body for the knowledge of a wise teacher. The lover possesses the good that is truth, and desires the beauty he lacks. Socrates recognizes the beauty of his own soul as superior to that of any mere body; he would never participate in this transaction. Socrates’ students instead come to recognize the beauty of his soul, and become his lovers instead. Plato offers us many indications that corruption is a theme of the Symposium. When Apollodorus is first approached by his unnamed companion in the dialogue’s opening lines, he reports that just the other day, Glaucon had asked to “question him closely” about the party where “Socrates, Alcibiades, and the others” made erotic speeches. 35 �The singular focus on Alcibiades is understandable, not only because of his prominent role in Athenian politics throughout the Peloponnesian War, but especially on account of suspicions that Socrates was somehow responsible for Alcibiades’ spectacular downfall. The party depicted in Plato’s dialogue occurred not long before the Sicilian expedition, Alcibiades’ recall, and his subsequent desertion to Sparta; the framing device at the start of the dialogue takes place just over a decade later—only a handful of years before Socrates’ trial. This offhand inclusion of Glaucon as Apollodorus’ interrogator is extremely notable: the evidence of this dialogue, in addition to that of other Platonic works, suggests that of all Socrates’ close associates, Glaucon in particular may have felt himself corrupted by Socrates’ tutelage. At the start of this dialogue we learn that “everything” is more important to Glaucon than philosophy. This might indicate that he now holds a conventional and suspicious view of Socrates’ way of life; moreover, it tells us that his concern with the details of the speeches at the party can’t possibly have been philosophical. How odd, indeed, that if he is so interested in the events of the drinking party, he did not simply consult Socrates himself. Glaucon’s importance is also signaled by similarities between the opening lines of the Symposium and the Republic, in which Glaucon is Socrates’ central interlocutor: both begin with the narrator “going up” to town, before being arrested by a combative acquaintance. In this case, the verb used by Apollodorus in the dialogue’s first line, πυνθάνεσθε (“I am not unprepared for what you ask about”), is in the second person plural—is he now being scrutinized by a group of inquisitors? Xenophon also wrote a dialogue called the Symposium, also with an unmistakable suggestion of the theme of corruption: Socrates is there depicted in the company of the beautiful youth Autolycus and his father, Lycon—one of Socrates’ accusers in his trial for corrupting the young. In general, Xenophon seems more willing than Plato to concede the reality of the corruption charge. He grants in the Memorabilia, first, that Socrates did indeed impart political skill to his associates and, second, that Alcibiades and Critias were among those associates. 36 �(It is often taken for granted that the ruination of these two supreme criminals was the real substance of Socrates’ indictment, but that because of the amnesty of 403, such a charge could not be made explicit.) Commentators have even pointed out that the Greek verb απομνημονεύω, from which the title Memorabilia is derived, can mean, in addition to simply “call to mind,” to “hold something against another”; not just “bear in mind,” but also “bear a grudge.” Just like Plato’s inclusion of the detail of the open door, Xenophon cannot possibly have placed Lycon among the banquet’s attendees by accident. He must wish for us to learn something about what would become Lycon’s motivations for accusing Socrates 23 years later. It is true that in Xenophon’s version of events, just as in Plato’s, Socrates subverts commonly accepted pederastic norms, urging both Callias and Critobulus to avoid sexual entanglements and to care only for the virtue of their young beloveds. But while disagreements like this might explain a frustrated lover’s early departure from a party, they can hardly provide motive for the prosecution of a capital crime. Besides, this chaste exhortation is exactly the kind of thing Lycon, the father of a handsome youth, would most wish to hear. Doubtless far more important, then, is the revelation that Autolycus was killed by the Thirty Tyrants after the Peloponnesian War. Did Lycon hold a particular grudge against Socrates for his role in Critias’ education, or associate him with Thirty’s rise? Did he blame Socrates for Autolycus’ being an “outspoken” member of the insurgent democratic faction, as Diodorus Siculus describes him? Beyond his putative influence on Critias, there is admittedly a strong case against Socrates as an opponent of democracy. Republicanism and the rule of law are presented a number of times in Plato’s dialogues as a “second sailing” to the rule of a wise statesman, and in the Republic, Kallipolis bears certain unmistakable similarities to Sparta and other monarchic or oligarchic regimes. Socrates’ theories about “intellectual despotism”—the belief that the wise alone hold a rightful claim to rule—could easily have been taken by men like Lycon to constitute support for actual despots. It is understandable that an embittered father could attribute some blame to Socrates, the famous political philosopher, for the power and brutality of the oligarchic Thirty 37 �Tyrants. It may not at first make sense that Lycon could also blame him for his son Autolycus’ membership in the coalition that resisted them. But Xenophon once again suggests the connection. Despite the fact that no reader of the dialogues could mistake Callias III of Alopece for a genuine follower of Socrates, the debaucherous grandee presents himself at the beginning of Xenophon’s Symposium as a devoted student of philosophy and a member of the Socratic circle. In Xenophon’s depiction of the party, Socrates exhorts Callias to a career in politics, and tells him the surest way to woo Autolycus is to make him more virtuous. Indeed, the theme of the evening’s conversation is introduced by the question of who can “make Autolycus better.” Socrates quickly warns the others that this is a dangerous topic, and should be put off to another time. It seems he was right: Callias’ unfortunate political career during the Peloponnesian War demonstrates a respect in which Autolycus chose the wrong mentor. Perhaps Lycon sees it thus: a follower of Socrates ensured Autolycus became an outspoken member of the losing side; a follower of Socrates caused the winning side to form a powerful, repressive oligarchy that put Autolycus to death. Socrates’ supposed intellectual despotism, it turns out, is not unconnected to his erotic innovations. In both Symposia, erotic attachment to the beautiful is supplanted by attraction to the good. This reorientation is of a piece with the typical Socratic line about deliberate action and human motivations: everyone is always pursuing what seems good to him, and wrongdoing is thus the result only of mistaken apprehension of the good. Human action, in other words, is to be understood in terms of a kind of self-interest; elevated self-interest perhaps, but self-interest nonetheless. To truly comprehend this outlook is to radically undermine traditional notions of noble virtue. If what it means to act deliberately is to act in accordance with a belief in one’s own good, how could beautiful sacrifice be possible? On this extreme Socratic view of human nature, the brave or noble person really thinks what he’s doing is best. Orpheus, Alcestis, and Phaedrus’ invincible regiment of male lovers would no longer deserve our admiration—not to mention pediatricians, special ed teachers, firemen, and 38 �Nobel Peace laureates. In teaching this doctrine, Socrates did something far more subversive than impugn the city’s religion. Most Athenians, in any case, seem to scorn literal belief in the gods: Euthyphro is openly ridiculed for his unusual fundamentalism. It was corruption of the young that carried the real weight in Socrates’ indictment, for which impiety was mere window dressing. Socrates has done something much worse than simply contravene the city’s religion; he has taken away its idols, and undermined the very basis for noble and heroic deeds. No wonder the city tries to kill him. We would, too. 39 �Nightmare - Nadine Bucca 40 �How to Read Well Siobhán Petersen How is it that I’m able to say that I’m not sure I ever read a book before I started the Program? Close reading – attending deeply to what is said, the way it was said, what it could mean – has never been a weakness of mine. Yet, something was still missing; some crucial engagement beyond merely what the author has put on offer that gets to the vitality of what our labors are all for. How do we facilitate a meaningful conversation with an inanimate object, how do we engage with ideas so renowned they’re practically cliché? If we decide the inexhaustibility we’re seeking in the Great Books actually comes from ourselves, can this teach us how to drink deeper from them? I offer some thoughts on how I’ve met that challenge. I On a pragmatic concern: I am a strong advocate of writing in our books. The best advice I ever got on annotation – after it was too late to help with my first semester, incidentally – was to not to try to make insights or observations in the margins, but rather to be indexing them for things I found interesting about it as I read. My margins are full of notes that just describe the action, like “Patroclus’ ghost;” running motifs specific to the text, like “synthetic judgment” or “The Moment;” and big ideas it might speak to, like “fate” or “death” or “divine justice.” i This makes it easy to find quotes in discussion, and come paper season, it’s so helpful to know what I was thinking about and where. I’ve turned my copy into a bespoke reference for textual evidence on every line of inquiry that matters to me. But more to the point, it helps me read deeper because it helps me return to the text as I think about it later on; it is perhaps only half of the experience to actually read and discuss, the other half is how you turn it over in your mind after. ii Beyond the practical value, I’d also advocate for an aesthetic value to the practice. Books are strange, fourth dimensional objects – they carry our thoughts forward in time. A thought is ephemeral; a body of them preserved against the passage of time is a text, and that can be as true for the reader as it is for the writer. Further, I am creating a shelf of artifacts of my life at St. John’s. What starts as a two-way conversation between the reader and the author becomes a trialogue, with the version of myself as a Master’s student participating too. Just as I feel privileged to see inside the head of people I care about when I read their annotated books, someone is likely to value these thoughts from this particular stretch of time of my life at some point in the future, even if that someone is only me. 41 �II I think what separates a lay reading and a close reading is a decision: to take nothing within a text as incidental. Every word was deliberately chosen for a particular effect; every tangent, every metaphor was considered in light of the whole. I take as axiom that no one writes anything because they want to say something – they do it because they need to say something. Whatever the author set out to express lies in the background of every small detail, so it pays to attend them with care. How do we attend to details that will enhance the discussion? I think that anything that sticks out to you is interesting. A particular use of language, a mention of something else you read, the way some pet interest of yours appears in a reading: I’ve seen some of the most profitable inquiries come out of someone’s peculiar observation. Someone offering their idiosyncratic take opens up vistas of thought that, definitionally, I could never have hoped to imagine myself. Ultimately (or with an eye to the Good Life, let’s say penultimately), we read to come ready to share; to me, this is what we call the “learning community.” No one else can give your perspective, and it’s our function as classmates in-community to offer it. i In trying to sort out the big picture, I think it’s valuable to remind myself – as anyone who’s written anything can probably relate to – I’ve never gotten to the end of any writing project and felt like I’d fully said everything I set out to. I try to leave space in the text for what the author perhaps couldn’t write. I think this is different from simply granting a charitable reading; I’m perhaps suggesting we can sometimes glimpse past the text if we look hard enough at the totality as well as the particularity: can see the forest and the trees. Whether we’re impressed with the picture we see is up to us, but given the choice between two readings, I try to default to the one that is most nuanced, human, interesting. ii Counterintuitively, what I’m not suggesting is a devotion to the author, nor their intended message. What I’ve found reading so many Great Texts birthed from Great Minds is that somewhere along the way I stopped reading to find out what Plato, or Descartes, or Dostoevsky thought; I only read to find out what I think. We talk about ourselves as “in conversation” with the books. Part of being a good conversationalist is to hold up your end of the discussion. Have your own thoughts! There’s a bit of a pressure-relief in realizing I can be nearly certain I can’t have a wholly original idea about texts so widely read, but that doesn’t mean we have to rely on cliché, or pre-made understandings. What does a text mean to you, right now? III In that spirit of the “now,” I’ll even go so far as to say it is okay to disinterpret a text to the end of creating the most interesting possible reading. “Disinterpretation” implies willfulness; we are free to develop accounts of the reading that run contrary to good sense, so long as we can support it with textual evidence. Put a quote in another context! Take one out of context! 42 �Are you unsatisfied with the answer the author provides, can you develop a more elegant account with what else they’ve said? i Even if you end up spiraling out or spinning the wheels; experimenting by analyzing, combining and recombining ideas from all over the canon, from your classmates, from your favorite novel will be a worthwhile skill to build in its own right. I try not to worry myself with the products of any of these experiments, nor do I try to disguise my experiments in-seminar as completed positions; the idea is to push every idea to its limits. I only ever want to be a better scientist. ii Partly, my decision to close-read is built on this disinterpretation; I can’t know for sure what was in the mind of the author when they selected any element, but I choose to read it otherwise, even if I’m wrong. I joyfully forfeit any spurious claim on the Necessary for a ground in the realm of the Aesthetic. If something seems to come out of nowhere based on everything you’ve previously understood about the work, it’s easy enough to disregard it as incidental, but far more worthwhile to examine it as vital, integral. Why might this be here? There’s no ambition to exactitude in “might,” only pliable openness. It is my firm opinion we are not here to be right about anything; we’re here to be wrong in interesting ways. 43 �Galileo and the Interaction between Religion and Science Shirley Quo Introduction Galileo’s Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican (Dialogue) is one of the most important texts of the Copernican and Scientific revolution. It started the transition from the geocentric to a geokinetic worldview by means of interdisciplinary considerations based on Galileo’s new physics, observational evidence stemming from his telescopic discoveries and methodological principles including critical reasoning. The Dialogue is also noteworthy because it led to Galileo’s trial by the Roman Catholic Inquisition in 1633. His book was banned and he was found guilty of ‘vehement suspicion of heresy’. This was because the Catholic Church believed that the Holy Scriptures supported the geocentric worldview i.e. that the sun revolved around the earth. To support a geokinetic worldview was therefore an act of heresy. These developments are known as the Galileo Affair. The purpose of this article is to examine the conflict between science and religion in the context of the Dialogue, the Galileo Affair and its aftermath. What, if any, is the role of religious authority and the Bible in scientific inquiry? The Geostatic Worldview The geostatic worldview assumed that the earth is spherical, motionless and that it is located at the center of the universe i.e. geocentric theory. Aristotle and Ptolemy were the two main contributors to this view of the universe. The old view considered that there was a fundamental division in the universe between the earthly and the heavenly regions and each region consisted of bodies with different properties and behavior. This is called the heaven-earth dichotomy. Terrestrial bodies occupied the central region of the universe below the moon, whereas heavenly bodies occupied the outer region from the lunar to the stellar sphere (the highest heaven or the firmament). Earthly bodies moved naturally straight toward (downward for earth and water) or away from the center of the universe (upward for air and fire), whereas celestial bodies (aether) moved circularly around the same center. 44 �Geometrically there were only two lines with the property that all parts are congruent with any other part – the circle and the straight line. Motion could be simple or mixed. Simple motion was motion along a straight line. Thus there were only two types of simple motion – straight and circular. Mixed motion was motion which is neither straight nor circular. There was a theoretical reason why upward and downward natural motions could belong to the same fundamental region of the universe but were essentially different from natural circular motion. This is the theory of change as contrariety according to which all change derives from contrariety and no change can exist where there is no contrariety. Contrarierty means opposites such as hot and cold, dry and humid. So up and down is a fundamental contrariety. This applies to terrestrial bodies which is full of qualitative changes e.g. birth, growth, generation, destruction etc. Circular natural motion of heavenly bodies by contrast have no contrary therefore it lacked an essential condition for the existence of change. Because no physical or organic or chemical changes were detected or observed in the heavens, it was claimed that the heavenly realm, unlike the terrestrial realm, was unchangeable, ingenerable, incorruptible etc. This provided the basis for the heaven-earth dichotomy. The Copernican System Copernicus published ‘On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres’ (Revolutions) in 1543. Unlike the old view, the stellar sphere was motionless and did not revolve around the earth with westward diurnal rotation. Instead, the diurnal rotation belonged to the earth, though its direction was eastward in order to result in the observational appearance of the whole universe rotating westward. This is called a geokinetic worldview. The earth was given a second motion, an orbital revolution around the sun with a period of one year, and also in an eastward direction. The annual motion was shifted from the sun to the earth thus making the earth a planet rather than the sun. This terrestrial orbital revolution meant that the earth was located off-center, the center being instead the sun. This is called a heliocentric worldview. 45 �Copernicus’s view was based on an idea proposed by the Pythagoreans in ancient Greece which had been rejected in favour of the Ptolemaic worldview. In Copernicus’s worldview, the earth moves by rotating on its own axis daily and by revolving around the sun once a year. It was a simpler and more coherent theory if the sun rather than the earth is assumed to be at the center and the earth is taken to be the third planet circling the sun yearly and spinning daily on its own axis. It had fewer moving parts than the geokinetic system because the apparent daily motion of all heavenly bodies around the earth is explained by the earth’s axial rotation and thus there is only one thing moving daily (the earth) rather than thousands of stars. There were also theological and religious objections. The biblical objection claimed that the idea of the earth moving is heretical because it contradicts many biblical passages stating or implying that the earth stands still.1 For example, Psalm 104:5 provides that the Lord “laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not be removed for ever”. In Ecclesiastes 1:5, it provides that “the sun also riseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he ariseth” which seems to attribute motion to the sun and support the geostatic system. Another theological objection was based on the idea that God is all powerful – this may be called the divine omnipotence argument.2 This was endorsed by Pope Urban VIII during whose reign Galileo was tried and condemned. One version of this argument was that since God is all powerful, He could have created any one of a number of worlds e.g. one in which the earth is motionless. It was religiously heretical because it conflicted with Holy Scripture and the biblical interpretations of the Church Fathers and therefore undermined belief in an omnipotent God. The Galileo Affair In 1615, the Holy Office, or Roman Inquisition, asked its Inquisitors for an opinion on two propositions based on some formal complaints filed against Galileo in relation to the Copernican system:3 (1) the Sun is the centre of the world and completely immovable by local motion; and (2) the Earth is not the centre of the world nor immovable, but moves as a whole and also with a diurnal motion. 46 �The Inquisitors returned a unanimous opinion: (1) The first proposition was declared unanimously to be foolish and absurd in philosophy and formally heretical inasmuch as it expressly contradicts the doctrine of Holy Scripture in many passages, both in their literal meaning and according to the interpretation of the Fathers and learned theologians. (2) All were agreed that this proposition merits the same censure in philosophy and that, from a theological point of view, it is at least erroneous in the faith. In 1616, the Congregation of the Index issued a Decree declaring that the doctrine of the earth’s motion was physically false and contrary to Scripture; condemning and permanently banning Foscarini’s book, Letter on the Pythagorean Opinion, which had argued that the earth’s motion was probable and not contrary to Scripture; and temporarily prohibiting Copernicus’s Revolutions until and unless it was revised.5 Although Galileo was not mentioned at all in the Decree, he was given a warning in private. This warning exists in two versions. One is written on a certificate given to Galileo and signed by Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, who was an authoritative member of both the Congregation of the Index and of the Inquisition; it stated that Bellarmine had informed Galileo that the earth’s motion could not be held or defended. The second version is in an unsigned note written by a clerk and found in the file of Inquisition trial proceedings; it stated that the Commissary-General of the Inquisition gave Galileo the special injunction that he must not hold, defend, or discuss in any way the earth’s motion. Galileo claimed that he had never received the second version.6 Despite the warning given to him by the Catholic Church, Galileo published the Dialogue in 1632. The book was a discussion of the earth’s motion but took the form of a critical examination of all the arguments for and against the idea; the arguments on both sides were presented, analysed, and evaluated. The arguments for the earth’s motion turned out to be much stronger than those against it. This was an implicit defence of Copernicanism. However, Galileo believed that he had acted within the spirit of Bellarmine’s warning because it was only a hypothesis. 47 �In 1633, Galileo was brought to trial by the Inquisition on the charge that in his Dialogue, published in the previous year, he had disobeyed the injunction of 1616 and had defended the Copernican system, knowing it to be heretical. In the course of their judgment the Inquisitors twice reaffirmed that the system was heretical, in two slightly different forms. In the first place they recalled and quoted the judgment of 1616, citing it as evidence that it had already been duly examined and condemned. The Inquisitors then delivered their own verdict:7 “We say, pronounce, sentence and declare that you, the said Galileo... have rendered yourself, in the judgment of this Holy Office, vehemently suspected of heresy, namely of having believed and held the doctrine, which is false and contrary to the Sacred and Divine Scripture, that the Sun is the centre of the Earth and does not move from east to west, and that the Earth moves and is not the centre of the world, and that an opinion may be defended and held as probable after it has been declared and defined contrary to Holy Scripture.” According to one commentator, there is an interesting difference between the two statements.8 The Inquisitors in 1616 condemned as heretical the proposition that the Sun is the centre of the world (centro del mondo) and immovable; in 1633 they condemned as heretical the proposition that the Sun is the centre of the Earth (centro della terra) and does not move from east to west (i.e. does not move in a diurnal orbit around the Earth). What does this mean? Surely it cannot be taken to mean literally that the Sun is the centre of the Earth? Perhaps it means that it is the centre of the Earth’s orbit or, as in Copernicus’s own theory, the centre of the celestial sphere in which the Earth is embedded (which might be called ‘the Earth’ in an extended sense).9 As time went on, however, the situation changed. In the new theory, the fixed stars did not rotate and hence, it was no longer necessary for them to be held together in a rigid sphere. The whole system of rigid spheres could be abandoned. The universe need not be spherical, it could be any shape or even infinite. Even if it was a sphere there was no need for the Sun to be at its centre or immovable (for the whole planetary system might be in motion). 48 �Galileo was aware of this theory. In the Dialogue, Salviati, the advocate of the Copernican centre of the universe; if any centre may be assigned to the universe, we shall rather find the sun to be placed there, as you will understand in due course’.10 Galileo added this marginal note “The sun more probably at the centre of the universe than the earth.” In 1633, the Inquisition found Galileo “vehemently suspect of heresy” for holding and defending the thesis that the earth revolves around the sun and for thinking “that one may hold and defend as probable an opinion after it has been declared and defined contrary to the Holy Scripture”. The content of Galileo’s suspected heresy was two-fold. The first was an astronomical or cosmological claim about physical reality, which Galileo had supported and defended in the Dialogue. The second was a methodological principle or rule about how to proceed in the search for physical truth or the acquisition of natural knowledge i.e. the principle that Scripture is not an authority and may be disregarded as irrelevant in astronomy and natural philosophy. Galileo’s new telescopic evidence removed most of the observational-astronomical objections against the earth’s motion and added new evidence in its favor. Galileo believed not only that the geokinetic theory had greater explanatory coherence than the geostatic theory (as Copernicus had shown) and that it was physically and mechanically more adequate (as Galileo’s new physics suggested) but also that it was empirically and observationally more accurate in astronomy (as the telescope now revealed). His assessment was that the arguments for the earth’s motion were stronger than those for the earth being at rest; that Copernicanism was more likely to be true than the geostatic worldview. According to one argument, the view was developed during the Enlightenment that Galileo’s trial embodied the inherent incompatibility between science and religion, and later this view became widely accepted. The case of Galileo may be one of those where science and religion happened to be in conflict. Galileo’s trial does exhibit such a conflict if science is interpreted in that context as Copernicanism and religion as Scripture; for although Galileo believed and argued that Copernicanism is compatible with Scripture, the Catholic Church (through Bellarmine, Pope Urban VIII, the Index, and the Inquisition) claimed that Copernicanism is contrary to Holy Scripture. 49 �The conflict between science and religion is a striking feature of both the original and the subsequent Galileo affair: in the original episode in 1616, it takes the form of Copernicanism versus Holy Scripture; in the subsequent controversy in 1633, it takes the form that Galileo’s trial was widely perceived to epitomise the conflict between science and religion. Aftermath of the Galileo Affair The Catechism of the Catholic Church states: Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth. Consequently, methodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same God. The humble and preserving investigator of the secrets of nature is being led, as it were, by the hand of God in spite of himself, for it is God, the conserver of all things, who made them what they are. By 1939, Pope Pius XII was praising Galileo for being among the “most audacious heroes of research … not afraid of the stumbling blocks and the risks on the way, nor fearful of the funereal monuments.” Galileo was again mentioned with approval by Pope Pius XII in an address to the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union in 1952, where he concluded his remarks saying: As so, friends, above and beyond the deep respect which we entertain for all the sciences and for yours in particular, this is yet another reason why we are moved to pray: may the science of astronomy, founded on the highest and most universal horizons, the ideal of so many great men in the past such as Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, continue to bear the fruit of marvellous progress and, through to the heartfelt collaborations promoted by such groups as the International Astronomical Union, bring the astronomical vision of the Universe to an ever deeper perfection. 50 In 1979, at a meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences commemorating the centen �nial of Einstein’s birth, Pope John Paul II gave a speech in which he talked about the Galileo affair. The Pope admitted errors on the part of ecclesiastic individuals and institutions and acknowledged some wrongdoing on their part. He spoke of Galileo having been caused “suffering,” of his treatment as an instance of unwarranted interference into the autonomy of scientific research, and of the fact that the Second Vatican Council had “deplored” such interferences. From the point of view of the principles Galileo held regarding the relationship between science, religion and the Bible, Pope John Paul II spoke with unprecedented clarity and remarkable accuracy. In the 1979 Einstein centennial speech, the Pope said:17 He who is rightly called the founder of modern physics declared explicitly that the two truths, of faith and of science, can never contradict each other . . . The Second Vatican Council does not express itself otherwise. Pope John Paul II also issued a call for further studies of the Galileo affair that would be guided by three goals: bipartisan collaboration between the Galilean scientific side and the ecclesiastic religious side; open-mindedness to the wrongs of one side and the merits of the other side; and validation of the harmony between science and religion. Although the third goal was in some tension with the other two, it was the one closest to the Pope’s heart. For he argued that Galileo believed that science and religion are harmonious and that Galileo conducted his scientific research in the spirit of religious service and worship. Galileo also elaborated important epistemological principles about Scriptural interpretation, which correspond to the correct ones later clarified and formulated by the Catholic Church. The Pope wanted to reverse the traditional interpretation of Galileo’s trial as epitomising the conflict between science and religion. For Pope John Paul II, a key lesson from the Galileo affair is the need and importance of methodological pluralism i.e. the rule that different branches of knowledge call for different methods. This is what Galileo himself had advocated. In contrast, his theological opponents were committed to a misplaced cultural unitarianism that led them to fail to distinguish scriptural interpretation from scientific investigation and so to illegitimately transpose one domain into the other. 51 �Some commentators argue that the Inquisition was wrong to condemn Galileo since he preached and practiced the principle that scriptural passages should not be used in astronomical investigation, but only when dealing with questions of faith and morals. The Inquisition found this principle intolerable and abominably erroneous, and wanted to uphold the opposite principle that Scripture is a scientific authority, as well as a moral and religious one. On this question of theological and epistemological principle, Galileo was ultimately exculpated. In regard to the biblical issue, the main point of Galileo’s letters to Castelli and to Christina is that the literal interpretation of the Bible is binding only for questions of faith and morals and not for physical questions.18 Although in a sense this proposition can be accepted as true, it was regarded and was in fact singularly dangerous at that time. The most detailed description of how the Church views the interaction between religion and science can be found in a 1987 letter written by Pope John Paul II to Fr. George Coyne SJ, director of the Vatican Observatory. In this letter, he insisted on the equal value of science and religion:19 … both religion and science must preserve their autonomy and their distinctiveness. Religion is not founded on science nor is science an extension of religion. Each should possess its own principles, its pattern of procedures, its diversities of interpretation and its own conclusions. Science can purify religion from superstition; religion can purify science from false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish. The Pope also argued that this dialogue was essential to progress within science itself, a theme which Pope Francis would later develop in Laudato Si’:20 … science develops best when its concepts and conclusions are integrated into the broader human culture and its concerns for ultimate meaning and value. Scientists … can also come to appreciate for themselves that these discoveries cannot be a genuine substitute for knowledge of the truly ultimate. And in 1992, at the conclusion of his inquiry, the Pope had not changed his mind in this regard but reaffirmed the point with these words: 52 �“Paradoxically, Galileo, a sincere believer, showed himself to be more perceptive in this regard than the theologians who opposed him . . . The majority of theologians did not recognize the formal distinction between Sacred Scripture and its interpretation, and this led them unduly to transpose into the realm of the doctrine of the faith a question that in fact pertained to scientific investigation. Moreover, from the Galileo affair . . . another lesson we can draw is that the different branches of knowledge call for different methods . . . The error of the theologians of the time when they maintained the centrality of the earth was to think that our understanding of the physical world’s structure was in some way imposed by the literal sense of Sacred Scripture.” The Galileo myth claims that Galileo was not condemned for his astronomical conclusion that the earth moves, but for his theologically unsound practice of supporting an astronomical view with biblical passages.22 This explanation is untrue because Galileo preached and practiced the opposite principle that Holy Scripture should not be used to support physical propositions. This myth seems to have acted as a catalyst for the subsequent Galileo affair to become the cause celebre it is today. Commentary As Galileo put it, quoting Cardinal Baronius, “The intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how the heavens go.” Galileo added the following note in the preliminary leaves of his own copy of the Dialogue: “Take note, theologians, that in your desire to make matters of faith out of propositions relating to the fixity of sun and earth you run the risk of eventually having to condemn as heretics those who would declare the earth to stand still and the sun to change position – eventually, I say, at such time as it might be physically or logically proved that the earth moves and the sun stands still.” Galileo rejected the conception of the center of the universe which deprived the justi 53 �fication for the idea of the immovable earth. Following Copernicus, Galileo set forth the advantages of assuming the sun to be at rest. It is simpler to assume a rotation of the earth around its axis than a common revolution of all fixed starts around the earth. The assumption of a revolution of the earth around the sun makes the motions of the inner and outer planets appear similar and does away with the troublesome retrograde motions of the outer planets, or rather explains them by the motion of the earth around the sun.These arguments are convincing but are only of a qualitative nature i.e. since humans are tied to the earth, our observations will never directly reveal to us the “true” planetary motions but only the intersections of the lines of sight (earth-planet) with the fixed star sphere. Galileo demonstrated that the hypothesis of the rotation and revolution of the earth is not refuted by the fact that we do not observe any mechanical effects of these motions. However, this misled him into formulating a wrong theory of the tides. Galileo’s work represents the passionate fight against any kind of dogma based on authority. Only experience and careful reflection are accepted by him as criteria of truth. In Galileo’s time, this was a revolutionary concept. Merely to doubt the truth of opinions which had no basis but authority was considered a capital crime and punished accordingly. This is one of the reasons that Galileo is considered to be the father of modern science. The Dialogue is the book which historically did the most toward breaking down the religious and academic barriers against free scientific thought. As Einstein said, ‘the leitmotif which I recognise in Galileo’s work is the passionate fight against any kind of dogma based on authority’. Galileo’s works were not removed from the Catholic Church’s prohibited list until 1741 by Pope Benedict XIV. The Inquisitions of Galileo Galilei between 1615 and 1633 highlighted the Catholic Church’s interpretation of the role of tradition. In that time, the Church was facing the fact that Copernican heliocentrism was better able to predict planetary motion than biblical tradition. Galileo has also been celebrated as a figure of valor to the scientific community because the Dialogue pulled no punches in mocking the then Pope Urban VIII. Galileo allegedly used direct quotes in the Dialogue and attributed them to a character called Simplicio. What is less appreciated however, is that Galileo agreed that the natural world could not be in contradiction with the faith that he maintained his whole life. 54 �Conclusion The moon is 40 million years older than we thought, according to a new analysis of lunar samples collected by Apollo astronauts a half-century ago. This research looked at moon dust brought back by the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, the last time humans set foot on the surface. The results, published in the journal Geochemical Perspectives Letters, suggest it must be at least 4.46 billion years old and that it could have formed as long as 4.51 billion years ago. “It’s important to know when the moon formed”, Professor Philipp Heck of the Field Museum in Chicago, senior author of the study, said, “(because) the moon is an important partner in our planetary system – it stabilises the Earth’s rotational axis, it’s the reason there are 24 hours in a day, it’s the reason we have tides. Without the moon, life on Earth would look different. In the Dialogue, Galileo argued that the tides are caused by the compounding motion of the earth as a conclusive proof of heliocentrism. Despite this error, the Dialogue remains one of the most important texts of the Scientific revolution. The Galileo affair illustrates that changing scientific paradigms caused increasing problems for religious doctrines that had been reconstructed according to the scientific knowledge of earlier times. It has been claimed that science and religion constitute “non-overlapping magisteria” whereby science pertains to the empirical realm of facts and religion to ultimate meaning and moral value.28 From the late nineteenth century, free inquiry came to encompass the study of religion itself. Emile Durkheim, a prominent social scientist, defined religion as “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden.” This assumes conflict whenever scientists attempt to study sacred things “set apart and forbidden” and in so doing, challenge religious prohibitions. Today, stem cell research invokes some of the same deep-seated religious prohibitions as heliocentrism once did. 55 �Mind in a Fog - Nadine Bucca 56 �The Nature of the Pilgrimage: The Meaning of Springtime in The Canterbury Tales Noah Vancina “Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages” (12)—why now, and whence the longing? Before he even arrives at the human subjects of his tale of pilgrimage, all described in the General Prologue, Chaucer, as an “introduction” to the General Prologue, gives the sweetest description of springtime, which evokes already in the hearer the longing for the peaceful time he describes. Let us go on our own pilgrimage to seek how Chaucer awakes this longing, and how we might then be ready to join the pilgrims as “to Caunterbury they wende.” Chaucer begins by providing a context for pilgrimages: “whan” (1). “When” is a temporal description that is precise or imprecise, depending on what follows. What follows must be some event, identifiable such that the time, the “when” of the sought-after occurrence, appears. Yet, Chaucer draws out his “whan” for eleven lines, one great dependent clause, in which he lists multiple conditions before the long-desired “thanne” arrives. Even these conditions, though, remain imprecise: “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote/The droughte of March hath perced to the roote/And bathed every veyne in swich licour/Of which vertu engendred is the flour” (1-4); at what moment have all these things come to pass? Rain falls gradually, only in drops, and slowly it soaks into the earth, uprooting the drought that preceded. So likewise the blowing of the zephyr until it reaches and warms end of every damp wood. Thus, the awaited fulfillment is an atmosphere, not a moment, in which pilgrimages begin. With these descriptions, Chaucer evokes a dawning awareness, a longing that does not come all at once and overwhelm but that grows like the fitful entrance of springtime and the growth of young shoots, like the passing away of sickness and the coming of full health. Chaucer presents meteorological events not exactly as personified, but yet as intentional and moving towards a goal. April, with “his” sweet showers, as if the showers belonged to April (as opposed to “April’s” showers, which feels more distant), who brought them with the intention of ending the drought and bringing the moisture needed for the flowers. The zephyr and the sun, too, play a part with “sweete breethe” and a “cours” to run. This almost personification suggests that natural phenomena act in the world as more than dumb happenings. 57 �Each verb, too, is loaded with intentions. April’s showers pierce the drought of March (2). Not a simple statement of cause and effect in nature, “pierce” suggests attack, an intentional breaking through as if much depends on not being repelled. The next line reveals the goal: to “bathe[] every veyne in . . . licour” (3), that life be not hindered. The zephyr then inspires the “tendre croppes” (5-7) as if it had breath to share, or the shoots could receive spirit. When Chaucer arrives at the birds, no change of language is necessary. One might even say that the verbs applied to the birds, “maken” and “slepen,” are the least suggestive of life, although birds are the most obviously conscious of the characters so far. Curious also is the peacefulness suggested by Chaucer’s diction. The showers are “soote” (1), the zephyr’s breath is “sweete” (3), the shoots are “tendre” (7), and the birds are “smale” (9). Everything in this springtime bespeaks gentleness and peace. Only against the intruder is any harsh word said, for the “droughte of March” is “perced” to the root (2): the drought being an unwelcome condition that would forestall the coming of spring and, perhaps, also of pilgrimage. It is in this verdant time, teeming with life, that men long to go on pilgrimages. Now why at a time when everything seems so right with the world would men desire change rather than rest? We find a suggestion in a line that sits right between the dependent clause description of springtime and the independent clause discussion of pilgrimage: “So priketh hem nature in hir corages” (11). Of whose hearts is Chaucer speaking? It may seem natural, as the immediate antecedent, to think that the birds are meant, who make melody and sleep with open eyes due to nature’s influence. But could it not be looking ahead as well, to the folk who long to go on pilgrimages? Even the rhyme scheme would couple “hir corages” with “pilgrimages.” Line 11, situated close to the midpoint of this introduction to the General Prologue and at the meeting of the dependent and independent clauses, joins weather, plants, animals, and humans in the influence of nature on their thoughts and actions. What kind of nature incites men to longing? Two meanings of “nature” seem possible: the inherent constitution of a creature or the creation itself. But perhaps neither meaning is really distinctive. If nature is understood the first way, Chaucer is saying that something within man stirs him up in the springtime, in reaction to what it perceives around it. If the second way, creation in springtime moves man to longing. 58 �Chaucer points to the importance of the natural world in either case, leading us to wonder why springtime would cause such feelings in human beings. There is, first, a correspondence between the creation emerging from winter and a man recovering from sickness. Chaucer lavished attention on explicating the blooming flowers, the tender shoots, and the centrality of the sun, but these conditions or incitements for longing are only linked to humans with a “thanne,” the termination of the dependent clause. Nevertheless, the pilgrims on the road to Canterbury are seeking a saint who helped them recover from sickness. The parallel is evident, though human convalescence is not described so lyrically. It has already been described through springtime. But more darkly seen is a lack in men out of which rises this longing. Before nature, with its wholeness and life, man is disturbed. The showers do not enliven him; the wind does not warm him. Or not primarily. Man stands across from a natural world that seems as conscious as he. He longs, and so he leaves his familiar home, sometimes to go to foreign lands. Still, what is the lack, the source of longing? As has been said, those pilgrims that go to Canterbury have been healed from sickness. Wholeness there; so we would have to say those pilgrims are responding to wholeness, not to want. Thus, man at his best state would still not possess something of which he is made aware by springtime. The conceit behind Chaucer’s tales suggests that this want is filled by fellowship. Plurality is present throughout the introduction: “every” vein is bathed by the rain, “every” wood and field is inspired by the zephyr, and multiple “foweles” sing. As emphasized to by the loading of all these plurals into a dependent clause, these plurals are bound together, as if joining one another in a festival of spring. Thus, people who recover out of the loneliness of sickness (or whatever separates them from others) find in springtime the inspiration to join fellowship on pilgrimages. The newness of spring incites men to seek new acquaintances, new sights, and new experiences. We see how Chaucer (or whoever the narrator may be) embarks on his pilgrimages alone but quickly seeks out, and is accepted into, the company of other pilgrims (19-34). Men desire to mirror the character of the season around them. They participate in this way not solely with creation, but with each other, each individual being drawn out of himself and into a community. 59 �Of course, we should not force Chaucer to say that he has described all people in springtime or even all who go on pilgrimages, just as not every springtime is as consistently idyllic as the one represented in the General Prologue. What Chaucer does offer is insight into human nature, seasons, and pilgrimage. The wholeness found in a beautiful springtime does incite longing in the human heart, but not a longing of despair or unrequited passion. Instead, it draws people together into communities of thanks—for to this end Chaucer’s pilgrims wend to Canterbury. While it may be less common now to make a pilgrimage of the kind Chaucer describes, springtime can still create longing in our hearts and, now that we better understand what it means, we are better prepared to meet our own longing “to goon on pilgrimages.” 60 �The Creation of the Self: Shakespeare and Aristotle Kyle Reynolds It might seem self-evident that Prince Hal undergoes a significant change in character throughout Shakespeare’s Henry IV. His character is first introduced as a drunken degenerate ne’er-do-well. Yet, by the end of Part One, Hal has redeemed himself in the eyes of his father and is hailed as a hero. This does not necessarily signify a change in character though, only a change in his conduct. One does not need to be virtuous to act virtuously. As Plato’s Ring of Gyges allegory demonstrates, the utilitarian benefits of acting justly are often enough to compel just behavior. Still, perhaps a change in conduct is enough to result in a genuine change in character, even if this result is unintended. This begs the question, does Hal’s character truly change and does he become a more virtuous man? Hal’s first soliloquy, spoken to the audience after the prince agrees to join his comrade Poins in a plot to embarrass their friend, Falstaff, provides some critical insight on this question. Shakespeare uses this soliloquy to help elucidate Hal’s intentions and provide an explanation for his behavior. The prince tells us he is seeking to “imitate the sun / Who doth permit the base contagious clouds / To smother up his beauty from the world, / That, when he please again to be himself, / Being wanted, he may be more wond’red at” (Shakespeare 15). If the prince is to be believed then, his juvenile and dishonorable behavior is all in service to a grand façade. By shirking his duties and ensuring he is perceived as worthless and reprehensible throughout the kingdom, Hal is tempering the expectations of his subjects, his father, and his peers. So, when he does finally cast off this façade, his redemption and reformation “shall show more goodly and attract more eyes”. However, it’s not clear that Hal’s behavior is merely a façade. He seems to thoroughly enjoy taking part in the debauchery perpetrated by his dishonorable cohort. Take the dialogue directly preceding Hal’s soliloquy for example. Hal is at first weary of Poins’s scheme to prank the unsuspecting Falstaff. To convince the prince, Poins offers the prophetic argument, “[t]he virtue of this jest will be the incomprehensible lies that this same fat rogue will tell us when we meet for supper: how thirty, at least, he fought with; what wards, what blows, what extremities he endured; and in the reproof of this lives the jest”. 61 �Hal, now convinced, responds, “[w]ell, I’ll go with thee. Provide us all things necessary and meet me tomorrow night in Eastcheap. There I’ll sup. Farewell” (Shakespeare 14). It is the prospect of humiliating Falstaff and catching him in his lies and exaggerations that finally compels Hal to join Poins’s plan. There does not appear to be any utilitarian benefit for Hal in joining Poins. His willingness to go along with the prank seems best explained by a genuine and wholly ignoble desire to humiliate Falstaff. Hal’s reactions to Falstaff’s all too predictable lies concerning the prank only a few scenes later serve to further illustrate this point. Falstaff begins to eagerly, and inaccurately, recount his ordeal to Hal and Poins, telling them of the men who robbed him of his stolen gold, entirely unaware of the fact that those men were in fact Hal and Poins. Almost immediately, Falstaff begins to, in a rather obvious manner, increase the number of his attackers, for which Hal derides him, saying, “O monstrous! Eleven buckram men grown out of two!” (Shakespeare 47). Falstaff, surprisingly unphased by the prince’s derisions, continues with his fictional account of the “battle” and Hal continues with his mockeries. Finally, after Falstaff becomes wholly indignant due to Hal picking apart every aspect of his tale, the prince tells Falstaff the truth, stating: “We two set on you four and, with a word, outfaced you from your prize, and have it; yea, and can show it you here in the house. And, Falstaff, you carried your guts away as nimbly, with as quick dexterity and roared for mercy, and still run and roared, as ever I heard a bullcalf. What a slave art though to hack thy sword as though hast done, and then say it was in a fight! What trick, what starting hole canst thou now find out to hide thee from this open and apparent shame?” Every action Hal has taken and every word he has spoken in this scene seems to have been aimed at maximizing Falstaff’s embarrassment. If this is simply a part Hal is playing, such intricate scheming would be unnecessary. However, if Hal truly is morally degenerate and elicits genuine joy from poking fun at and participating in the schemes of his corrupt and contemptible crew, then his behavior makes a great deal more sense. Hal’s so called “reformation” begins in earnest when he confronts his father and pledges to fulfill his duties as a prince of the realm. 62 �He tells the king, “So please your Majesty, I would I could / Quit all offenses with as clear excuse / As well as doubtless I can purge / Myself of many I am charged withal” . The king rejoices at this news, but is, at first, skeptical. Hal reassures him, promising to “[b]e more”. Hal appears to honor his commitment, marching off to battle against a rebel force, to the astonishment of his enemies. Percy Hotspur, the leader of the rebels, inquires as to the statues of Hal and his forces, asking, “Where is … [t]he nimble-footed madcap Prince of Wales”. His cousin, Vernon, replies: “All furnished, all in arms; / All plumed like estridges that with the wind / Bated like eagles having lately bathed; / Glittering in golden coats like images; / As full of spirit as the month of May / And gorgeous as the sun at midsummer; / Wanton as youthful goats, wild as young bulls. / I saw young Harry with his beaver on, / His crushes on his thighs, gallantly armed, / Rise from the ground like feathered Mercury, And vaulted with such ease into his seat / As if an angel dropped down from the clouds / To turn and wind a fiery Pegasus / And witch the world with noble horsemanship”. Hal has, at least in the eyes of his enemy, become an entirely different person. He is no longer seen as the “madcap Prince of Wales,” but is instead viewed as a gallant warrior. Hal has done little except show up to the battle, yet, Vernon offers him some of the most striking and sincere praise seen throughout the play. At this point, the reformation Hal prophesized seems to be coming to pass. Hal is executing his plan and those around him are taking note. However, Hal’s plan is to simply feign virtue so as to be better looked upon by those in his kingdom. He is only interested in the utilitarian benefits of being perceived as virtuous. Yet, after the conclusion of the battle with Hotspur’s forces, Hal takes an action which appears entirely inconsistent with this philosophy. Falstaff falsely tells Hal and his brother, John, that he had killed Hotspur. Hal responds, truthfully, “[w]hy, Percy I killed myself”. This, of course, does not stop the invariably deceitful Falstaff from arguing that his account of Hotspur’s death is accurate, going so far as to threaten to make anyone who doubts him “eat a piece of [his] sword” (Shakespeare 114). Hal, despite knowing the falsehood of Falstaff’s claims, agrees to allow him to take credit for the killing of Hotspur, saying, “if a lie may do thee grace, / I’ll gild it with the happiest terms I have”. 63 �While it’s not entirely clear why Hal chooses to let Falstaff persist in his lie, it seems to come from a genuine desire to see Falstaff improve himself and his circumstances, which Falstaff commits to do only a few lines later. There doesn’t appear to be any benefit to Hal in allowing Falstaff to claim the glory and honor associated with killing Hotspur. Hal’s motivations are instead altruistic in nature and demonstrative of true virtue. Despite deciding to reform himself in the eyes of those around him, Hal is unable to entirely forgo his old ways. Much to the dismay of his father, Hal continues to associate with Poins, Falstaff, and his other sinful companions. When the king learns that Hal is back in London with his band of scoundrels, he laments; “Most subject is the fattest soil to weeds, / And he, the noble image of my youth, / Is overspread with them. Therefore my grief / Stretches itself beyond the hour of death. / The blood weeps from my heart when I do shape / In forms imaginary th’ unguided days / And rotten times that you shall look upon / When I am sleeping with my ancestors. / For when headstrong rage and hot blood are his counselors, / When means and lavish manners meet together, / O, with what wings shall affections fly / Towards fronting peril and opposed decay!” The king is deeply afraid that Hal cannot truly reform and will ultimately succumb to his rage and other vices which will destroy him. Finally, at the conclusion of Part Two, Hal ultimately casts of his old habits and comrades. In a cutting and markedly harsh speech directed at Falstaff, the prince announces: “I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers. / How ill white hairs becomes a fool and jester! / I have long dreamt of such a kind of man, / So surfeit-swelled, so old, and so profane, / But, being awaked, I do despise my dream. / Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace. / Leave gormandizing. Know the grave doth gape / For thee thrice wider than other men. / Reply not to me with a fool-born jest. / Presume not that I am the thing I was, / For God doth know, so shall the world perceive, / That I have turned away my former self. / So will I those that kept me company”. The way Hal speaks of his transformation makes it sound not as if he is simply put 64 �ting on a different mask but as if he has truly undergone a metamorphosis of spirit. He likens his reformation to wakening from a bad dream, a dream he now despises. So, although Hal may not have meant to undergo a genuine change in character, he did. His actions make clear that he was a morally corrupt degenerate that enjoyed taking part in the activities of his London gang. Then, he undergoes a reformation, which may have at first simply been an act, but ultimately results in a changed character capable of committing acts of altruism. Hal does seem to waver in his new convictions, returning to the London tavern to fraternize with Poins and Falstaff, but finally lets his old wayward acquaintances go. But why does Hal undergo this change in character? Perhaps Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics can provide some insight. Aristotle tells us: “oral virtue comes about as a result of habit, whence also its name (ethike) is one that is formed by a slight variation from the word ethos (habit). From this it is also plain that none of the moral virtues arises in us by nature; for nothing that exists by nature can form a habit contrary to its nature. … Neither by, then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit”. Hal lived a life of vice and did not create a habit of virtue. He thus became sinful and devoid of moral integrity. Hal then began to act virtuously. Eventually, acting ethically became habitual. However, habits are engrained on the soul and Hal struggled to overcome his past transgressions. Though, finally, a new, virtuous Hal was created through the prince’s actions. For, the self is formed by our habits, and Hal is no different. 65 �Translation On the Creation of Man 66 �Contributor Stephen Cunha 67 �On the Creation of Man By Wolfgang Musculus Translation by Stephen Cunha Now, accordingly, in proper order, we proceed to consider the work of God in the creation of man: which consideration must be understood, not only to be next after those things which we have noted concerning God the maker of all things, but also to especially concern man. For what is more properly suitable for man than, after his creator, to understand himself? We are drawn to this knowledge not only by that which Lactantius somewhere puts into words, “Great is the power of man, great his reason, great his mystery, so that not undeservedly Plato gave thanks to nature, because he was born a human being”—yes indeed, because next to God nothing is more sublime than man, nothing more excellent has been made;3 but also because no small portion of our salvation requires this, that we know ourselves, wherein even those who have everywhere inculcated the saying γνωθε σεαυτόν, that is, “know thyself,” as if it had dropped down from heaven, have admonished that the greatest part of wisdom is found. But who does not know that it is especially required for the knowledge of man, that we should not be ignorant of the origin and making of mankind? And the Holy Spirit has described the creation of man with singular care and greater diligence than all other created things in the Sacred Scriptures, undoubtedly for this purpose, that even from the origin of our race, we might be reminded that when God made man, he wanted to create a certain remarkable work, which would be much more outstanding, and would much more closely approach the glory of his divinity, than the rest of creation; and in the next place, that the knowledge of our beginning might be very much conducive to the consideration of divine wisdom, goodness, and power, and contain, as it were, some principles of heavenly philosophy. And I also think that some parameters of knowledge are required, so that we do not extend our consideration beyond those things that are able to advance Christian godliness. What should be thought by the godly person concerning the creation of man cannot be better determined than from the instruction of the Holy Spirit, which Sacred Scripture sets forth to us. For the mind of man has been so darkened, that he is able to judge rightly neither of his maker nor of himself. For this reason, man must take care to search for the things that ought to be known, and held with certainty, not only concerning man himself but also concerning God his creator, from the Sacred Scriptures rather than from human opinion. And those things which have been handed down in the Sacred Scriptures, having rejected all curiousness, are so composed, that they are adapted to both our capacity and our benefit. They are moderate, but solid, certain, profitable, necessary, and harmonious. Therefore, concerning the creation of man, this is related to us in few words in Genesis chapters one and two. First, that man is a work, just as all other created things. He was made in time; he did not exist before time. Indeed, if we consider the time of our beginning, which Sacred Scripture also reveals, every creature is more ancient than man. Now everything which has been made does not exist on account of itself, but by reason of another source. And just as 68 it does not exist from itself, so whatever it has, it does not have from itself, but from the one by �69 �whom it was made. Nor when it was made, was it able to cause itself to be made different, either better or worse, than what it was made according to the will of its maker. On the contrary, it has not even contributed in the smallest degree to become what it has been made. Accordingly, it should be observed concerning man, that since he also, just like the rest of creation, was made, all that he is and all that he has (in terms of natural abilities), depended on the will, wisdom, and power of his maker. Second, since the very consideration that we have been made immediately leads us forward to become acquainted with our maker, we next inquire about the maker and creator of man. Sacred Scripture attributes the creation of man to the same One by whom all other things were made. It says, “God created man.”The books of the Gentiles say concerning a certain Prometheus, the father of Deucalion, that he first formed man. And he did not form man, but the image of man from clay: for which reason he is also the author of the art of molding. We acknowledge that the maker of our race is the only and true God, who made heaven and earth, and all the things which are in them, visible and invisible, and so we confess that whatever we are and whatever we have is from him. Moreover, it is properly required that in all things we depend on him alone, as the creature on his creator. Israel is reproached in the Mosaic and prophetic books because it abandoned its maker. And God himself cries out, saying: “I made you.” Wherein it is sufficiently demonstrated how perverse the heart of man is, to such an extent that he forsakes his own maker, God. Furthermore, we are admonished by this knowledge, since we all have the same creator and maker, lest any man find fault with his work, either in himself or in others, saying: “Why did he make me like this?” In Isaiah chapter forty-five we read as follows: “Woe to him who speaks against his maker, a potsherd among the potsherds of the earth. Shall the clay say to its potter, ‘What are you making?’” And in Proverbs chapter fourteen we read: “He who finds fault with a poor man, reproaches his maker.”Therefore, that faith by which we believe that we have been created by God, will work these three things in our hearts. First, that in all things we depend with our whole heart on God our creator. Second, that each man is content with how he has been created, and even embraces it with thanksgiving, for which he has been made by God the creator. Third, that no one looks down on how his neighbor has been made, however base and lowly, lest he dishonors in him their common creator. In the third place, the Sacred Scriptures are not silent about this, of what man was made. In Genesis chapter two we read the following, “Therefore, the Lord God formed man from the dust of the earth, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living creature.” In Hebrew it is, ‫המדאה ןמ רפע‬. Notice the material from which man was made. And what is baser, what is poorer and more unstable, than the dust of the ground, from which not even bricks can properly be made? He could at least have been made from solid earth. This origin of our race warns us all, that in consideration of it we maintain modesty, lest it be said to us: “Why are you prideful, O earth and ashes?” For what other assessment is to be made of that, which is made from dust? The Holy Spirit could have said, “The Lord God formed man from the ground,” or “from the dust”: but in order to inculcate the lowliness of man, he called man, made from dust, “the dust of the earth.” And what did God say to Adam? “Dust you are, and to dust you will return.” He did not simply say, “you are 70 �71 �from dust,” but “you are dust.” Lest the flesh should say, “So what that I am from dust? Whatever I came from, I am now a human being, and am not dust”; the sentence of God our maker comes to us, saying: “And from dust you are, and dust you still are, and to dust you will return,” just as if you were to say to a magnificent glacier: “And water you were, and water you are, and to water you will return.” In the fourth place, the way in which the first man was made is read in the Sacred Scriptures. We read the following in Genesis chapter two: “Therefore, the Lord God formed man, from the dust of the earth, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living creature.”11 By the verb “formed,” the Holy Spirit expresses the singular diligence put into the creation of man. Second, in order to describe what material God formed, when he built man, he adds: “dust of the earth.” Third, he adds, “and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life,” by which words he teaches us how the figure of the human body, first formed from the dust, and still inanimate, was made animate and living. His maker poured into him spirit and breath (for in the Hebrew it is ‫ )םייח תמשנ‬from which he would live, and so he was made into a living soul: that is, he began to live, a man now animated, who before was dust and inanimate. Thus, the things concerning the first man Adam. And how Eve was subsequently made, is in the same chapter read in this way: “The Lord God sent a deep sleep on Adam. And while he slept, he took out one of his ribs, and replaced the flesh over it. And the Lord God built the rib, which he had taken from Adam, into a woman, and brought her to Adam. And Adam said, ‘This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. She is called woman, since she was taken out of man.’” In both cases, the singular purpose and care that God used in the creation of man is sufficiently intimated. And yet, in like manner, we are permitted to see how the Holy Spirit describes in three words the wonderful way man was formed—wherein the body together with its members, both internal and external, such as bones, veins, cartilage, vertebrae, muscles, joints, and limbs were most harmoniously fashioned, put together, and adorned, and then vivified by the infusion of the soul—when he says, “he formed,” “he built,” and “he breathed [inspired].” And in this way, he restrains our curiosity, which is itching to know each of these things, how, by what industry, by what strength, and in what space of time it was accomplished, admonishing us to reverently hold fast to those things imparted in few words, and to acknowledge and honor God our maker. In the fifth place, it is also taught in the Sacred Scriptures, what kind of man was made. With respect to the figure of the body of both, male and female, its stature, and the fitting together of the body and soul, it is in itself plain, of what constitution we have been made. But as for clearly perceiving the nature and dignity of man, since both have been corrupted, and deprived of their original quality, of what kind both were in the first man, we are not able to know, unless the Holy Spirit speaks of and teaches it to us. And I do not understand in this place by quality of nature the bodily necessities and affections, in which we are still subjected, but that original quality of rectitude, which it is read that God imparted to the first man in Ecclesiastes chapter seven. For Ecclesiastes says the following, “I have found this only, that God made man ‫[ רשי‬that is, upright].” This is not to be un 72 �73 �derstood of the uprightness of the body, but of the soul, which men call original righteousness, and which comprises the knowledge of God the creator, obedience, faith, love toward both God and one’s neighbor, and the freedom of an upright will, together with other adornments of that nature. Therefore, when the first man by nature was made such—namely, upright, not only in body, but also in soul—he possessed free will in such a way, that he was able to obey God, if he wanted: and, on the other hand, he was able to sin, if he wanted. For however upright and free to do good he was made, nevertheless, at the same time, he differed from the angels in this, that he was able to be tempted by inordinate affections, and consent to them, and be led away from the rectitude of original righteousness. This does not have a place in those angels who, since the fall of the reprobate spirits, have remained in the truth of God. The Sacred Scriptures also testify concerning the dignity of the first man, when they teach that he was made in the likeness and image of God. God says in Genesis chapter one, “Let us make man in our own image and likeness, and let him rule over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over every living creature on the earth, and over every creeping thing that moves on the earth. And God created man in his image and in his likeness, in the image of God he created him,” and the things which follow in that place. Most ancient and contemporary authors expound the dignity of man as uprightness of nature, of which we have made mention, so that the image of God was what separated man from the beasts, by reason and by the internal integrity of man which more nearly resembled the divine nature, wisdom, and righteousness. But although that exposition is not to be altogether discarded, it is nevertheless clear from the very words of Sacred Scripture that man was so made in the image of God, that he should be like God on the earth, and have all things placed under his feet. For what else is being said where it reads, “And God created man in his image and likeness,” than what follows, “in the image of God he created him”? In Hebrew it is ‫םלצב‬ ‫םיהלא‬. And to be created in the image of God, is to be constituted like a certain God. Whence, magistrates and rulers are in the Scriptures called ‫םיהלא‬: that is, “gods” and “mighty ones.” And this image of God granted to man does not exclude the internal uprightness of man, which is so necessary for the former to be retained, that without it a ruler differs nothing from a savage beast, except perhaps that he employs more subtlety and cunning in carrying out the malice of his tyranny. This understanding of human dignity, according to which man is made in the image of God, was plainly set forth by Chrysostom in his exposition of Genesis chapter one, and occasionally by Augustine in his dispute with the Manicheans. And when the apostle says in First Corinthians chapter eleven that “a man indeed ought not cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God, but the woman is the glory of man,” he thus plainly makes a distinction between the man and the woman, saying that the man is indeed made in the image of God, but the woman in the image of man. This cannot be understood only of internal human rectitude and righteousness, of which the woman is a partaker together with the man in the Lord, but is wholly to be understood of the authority of rule, which, as is well known, was granted at once to the man at the beginning, but denied to the woman. 74 The putting of Adam in a paradise of pleasure after he was made, a place more excellent and exceptional in comparison with all other habitations on the whole earth, and that he put names �75 �upon all the living creatures, also relate to this dignity of the image of God. For what else do these things prove than that he was the lord and ruler of the whole earth? Many other things are disputed concerning the status that our first parents had in paradise, and what they would have had if they had not sinned, but these things from Sacred Scripture are more certain and more profitable to students of theology: briefly, to hold, first, that man was made; second, that he was made by God; third, that he was made from the dust of the earth; fourth, that he was built with the special care of God; and fifth, that he was made in and elevated to the image of God, so that he is more outstanding in both nature and worth than all other creatures. If properly considered, these things contain most ample subject matter of Christian philosophy, and are conducive to this, that through the consideration of our origin we are restored to modesty, and through the knowledge of the uprightness and dignity of our first parents, we understand more deeply what we have lost in them, and what we have recovered, and not without great gain, in Christ our second Adam, and the author of our regeneration. 76 �77 �Bad Dreams - Nadine Bucca 78 �“Creating a Community” An Inter view with Associate Dean Brendan Boyle A vision for building community at the St. John’s College Graduate Institute. By Stephen Borsum 79 �It was what I would call the first cold day of the year when I came to the BBC to meet Mr. Boyle for an interview. It was cold only in that the rain falling that day was a chilling one, one lacking the distinct warmth that rain has in summer and early fall here in Annapolis. As I entered, I approached Mr. Boyle’s office to see it closed. Unexpected, given I was just on time for our scheduled meeting. But he called to me from within the GI Conference room where he had been taking some calls for the day, and after some polite banter and the brewing of some green tea, we began our discussion. What follows has been edited for clarity, and is ultimately a poor reflection of just how engaging a face-to-face conversation with Mr. Boyle can be. Stephen: I’m really curious to hear your thoughts on the role you play as dean. You know, you’re a liaison to the college. You are a tutor. You’re a family man. You have all of these responsibilities and so, where does worrying about the health of the GI community fall in the list of priorities? Mr. Boyle: I think my top priority is the GI as a community. One thing I realized when I was thinking about this interview this morning is that I’m probably going to be borrowing a lot of formulations that I heard from Walter Sterling yesterday. And I’m happy to credit him and you can credit him in whatever way you think is necessary, but I hadn’t really even, until yesterday, begun to notice that the first statement of the program is that St. John’s College is a community of learning, and that even if I hadn’t noticed that, I don’t think I had caught what he drew attention to. Which is that sentence, at least on his construction, is meant to distinguish St. John’s qua community from St. John’s qua institution like in the first instance. At the same time it might well be an institution. But if it’s an institution, that description is somehow much lower than the description of St. John’s as a community. So I do feel like my first responsibility is to the community of learning and more particularly to the community of learning that is the Graduate Institute now. And that there’s a new aspect to that community given the fact that the community now includes persons who are not physically located here, namely low-residency students. And so, in some sense, I’m the first Associate Dean to inherit this. To walk into a community or to have responsibility of shepherding the community that is not physically in the same place. It is true that Emily Langston also had that in the latter part of her term, 80 �and maybe I’m the first to come into a term for a community of this sort. And that will present, you know, new different challenges, but those are very much on my mind. How does one hold together a community that includes a not small number of persons who are not residents of this place? I’m trying to do some things, reading groups, for example, that in the past, I think, would be unheard of for an associate dean to have a reading group that was held online by design. But for me, in having the dean’s reading group be part of the weekend, I made it online by design because I was trying to be responsive to the nature or shape of the community now. To return to to the formulation of your question, I really do think that my job is as the steward of the community and its intellectual health, but intellectual health understood in the most capacious term. I also want people to be flourishing affectively and interpersonally because, in so doing, their intellectual flourishing will be still greater. Not to go on too long — I do want to make this conversation — but I will say one thing that I really liked about some of the things [Walter Sterling] said yesterday is that it’s very important for the person in a position of leadership to be physically present. And I’m trying to keep that at the center of my own mind. Now, I think I can actually do a much better job of being at ASG on Thursday nights — things like that. I could, in fact — and should, in fact, do a better job of that. So one of the things that’s important to me is to acknowledge the importance of the associate dean being physically present here as much as possible. Stephen: I will say, I think the impact of that is already palpable. You and Ms. Langston both have prioritized that, and I think it’s noted. I will give you the pass on being there at ASG. You’re here at, you know, eight or nine in the morning. I don’t think we need you there at 10 p.m. at night. That’s not on you. Mr. Boyle: That’s kind of you to say. Stephen: That splits off into two things, and feel free to go either direction with these questions. I do think the gap between the in-person students and the low-residency students is a very tough one to address and some things are being done like low residency weekends and I think everyone really enjoys those and it’s hard to require them to come to us 81 �more. So I think that solutions like online reading groups are excellent. The other thing is the relationship between tutors and students seems so vital and, as much as I know, certain tutors really enjoy the GI but I don’t see them present in some of those additional events. So I think the two main questions there are: Are there other things you are considering to bridge the gap between in-person and low-residency? And how do we keep the tutors involved at a greater level? Mr. Boyle: Yeah, two hard and great questions. I have some ideas for bridging this gap, and I’m not sure even if the ideas were put in place and they were successful, I’m still not sure how much the gap would be bridged. One of the things that I’d like to do and want to start doing in the near future is just doing something like a spotlight on a low-residency student, weekly or biweekly, or something like that, and maybe having a little interview and then putting it up on the board or sending it around. Just as a way to get the in-person students to know about the low-residency students who are out there. Would that make intellectual connections? I don’t know. I’m hopeful that something like that, and I don’t know what their exact right form is, could go some way. Now, to me, it’s still an open question. What would the best possible outcome look like? How much of a divide would there be in the best of all possible worlds between the low-residency students and the in-person students? I don’t think that the answer would be none. But maybe it would be rather little and I think that’s a perfect question. How do you achieve that “rather little.” The question about tutors is also a good and hard one. And I think that one of the things that Emily Langston did really well is integrate the Graduate Institute into the larger life of the college, and I think that she would say that that was an important part of her own work. I think that she would also say that it’s probably not yet finished, and it’s my job to, if not finish it, then hopefully advance it. But it’s also true that we haven’t really found a way to bring more tutors to the GI. I feel like there’s a somewhat small subset of tutors, and the faculty who are teaching in the GI and we haven’t yet found a way to broaden that subset. There are some restrictions, like untenured faculty can’t teach in the GI seminar. OK, leave that to the side. I would like to find a way, and I’ve begun to speak with [Annapolis Dean] Susan Paalman about this to find a way to bring in mid-career tutors beyond the current subset of regulars into the GI, because I feel like that problem is related to the problem that you’ve said of getting tutors to just be at other co-curricular or curricular-adjacent events. 82 �They seemed like separate problems, but I think they’re related in that if people think of the GI as a regular part of the academic life of the college tutors, that is, they will see GI events — be they ASG or (Campus) Convening weekend or what have you — as much more of a piece with homecoming weekend or just general college events that they go to with some regularity, even if they’re not teaching in the GI in that particular semester. So, that’s an aim of mine, and I think it would be good for the GI to have greater circulation of the faculty through it. And I think that some of the GI students even like the fact that there a subset of tutors who are especially dedicated to GI. I think there is something to be said for that, but it would be nice for that subset to be larger, and then I think we would have that circulation which would be good for all parties. Stephen: I think all of that addresses another question I have. It seems that It’s hard to build a community with busy adults when you only have four segments to do so. And I know that’s how the program is built and marketed, but do you see that as a hindrance to a sustaining a community? Are there inclinations you have on how to address that other than GIs coming back to do precepts and audit classes later? Mr. Boyle: Can I first ask a question in response? Is it somehow a corollary of that question that the MALA could or should be longer than four segments? Stephen: It certainly could be. And I’m thinking of the four semesters and particularly how I hear it marketed in some ways where you could do summer or fall, spring, summer and be done in a year, and you can hardly form a friendship in a year regardless of your lifelong relationships. Mr. Boyle: That seems that seems fairly said. On the one hand, I think that the MALA is by most Master’s standards long. Most other programs speak in the language of credit hours. This Master’s program, seeing as it takes, let’s say, two academic years, generally is more time for students to form community than I think a lot of other Master’s programs have. I’m not entirely sure that the time component is works against us. I do agree that 83 �when the program is marketed, or at least described, as a program that you could finish in a year — summer, academic year, following summer — then the question of how to put that frame together with the emphasis on community is a hard one, and maybe even might sound a little bit disingenuous. As in, how can you promise the creation of community in one calendar year? I would respect that criticism. I don’t actively talk about the program as one that should be done in a single calendar year. When people ask if they can do this, I tell them that of course they can, and I recognize that some people have a year off of their job or a sabbatical that is just the calendar year, and we want them to be able to do this in that in that single calendar year and I guess we’re in some sense crossing our fingers that the intensity of the program will generate some sort of community and lasting friendship that is typically brought about by time. It might be important for me to think about those persons who have done the program in a year and calendar year and whether they as a distinct group feel connected or not to the college now. One other open question for me is: does this segment structure itself work against community? That wasn’t precisely your formulation, but I wonder if you might endorse it? And I say that because it’s not as if students move through the program together. You’re in a segment with somebody one semester and then they’re in segment X in the spring semester, but you’re in segment Y spring semester and you just don’t see each other or aren’t reading the same texts any longer. Does that work against community? Maybe it does. It’s certainly true that the undergraduates, you know, don’t have that experience. So that’s something I may have to give some more thought to, but maybe I could just pause for a second and ask you, do you think that segment structure works against community? Insofar as the person with whom you are forging a deep friendship now this fall very well will not be in the same class with you next semester, let alone in the same segment. Stephen: I do think this type of thing plays out in ASG. And I haven’t seen enough evidence to say that it’s positive or negative, but it is interesting to see the... I want don’t use the term “clique” because it’s often so loaded, but it’s the most apt word. Cliques will form in ASG often, and if they’re not people who are already established friends they will form because of the shared texts. And those are bright and vibrant conversations, but 84 �at the same time, there is such a genuine interest in what everyone else is experiencing that I think it overcomes itself, so I don’t think the segment structure is necessarily a hindrance. I would be curious to know, and this is more of a general question, if there is a perceived issue, how even flexible is the structure of the GI? It doesn’t seem like it’s something that can change on a whim. Mr. Boyle: Definitely not something that could change on a whim. But the GI structure has changed a lot, even in the short time that I’ve been at the college. For example, the decoupling of the preceptorials from the segments. At one point, not during Emily Langston’s associate deanship but back in Jeff Black’s deanship, it used to be the case that the preceptorials were in a pretty strong sense pegged to the segments offered that term. So, if you take this term for an example, Math and Natural Science, and Literature. The preceptorials offered would be two Literature preceptorials and two Math and Natural Science preceptorials. Instead, what we actually have this fall is Canterbury tales, Galileo, three modern poets, the Greek, and Plato. And yes some of those may fit the themes of the current segments, but that seems to be circumstance, not designed. I think in years past one might have said that Plato’s Republic somehow belongs to Philosophy and Theology. So I do think that there is some kind of openness for the structure of the GI to change, and you might hear people around the halls talk about other paths to degree that the GI might pursue. Maybe we decouple — and I’m not endorsing this, I’m just reporting things that I’ve heard — decouple the seminars and tutorials. And it’s no longer the case that one needs to take four seminar-tutorial pairs plus four preceptorials, but one needs to take four seminars, four tutorials and four preceptorials. And they can be somehow mixed and matched. That could not be changed on a whim and I’m not sure that that’s even a good idea. I would say I do think that the relationship between seminar and tutorial in the GI is unique and it’s not like the relationship between seminar and tutorial in the undergraduate program. Insofar as it’s unique, I can imagine people in the future thinking about different ways forward to the degree that may not abandon the segment structure, but might actually in some sense alter it because one would be no longer bound to these seminar-tutorial pairs. Again I’m not endorsing this. I’m just speculating on things that I have heard, and I’m of two minds. As you might recall yesterday, Walter Sterling talked about the GI as be 85 �ing a place for experiments, and I think that there’s definitely some truth to that. Now, one needs to be cautious about imagining the GI as just some kind of laboratory where one can try a bunch of different things, because that’s a deep disservice to the Institute, as an institution with its own coherent program. It’s true that it’s more amenable to experimentation, new offerings, new MALA segments than with the undergraduate. Well, obviously it might be amenable to new offerings than undergraduate programming is, but one needs to be very measured about how one goes about doing such a thing. Stephen: I think this discussion of the structure of the GI program raises a question that ties the conversation back to the relationship between the GI and the broader college community. I think the first thing I want to just hear your input on is, there is such a difference in how the GI and the undergrad programs are built — and this might get at the heart of the issue — do you think GIs and undergrads graduate from their programs prepared to have the same conversation with each other? Is there something inherently true about the structure either way that creates that unity? Mr. Boyle: I think there’s enough overlap between the texts that are at the center of the GI. I want to say that at the center of the GI are the books and at the center of the undergraduate program are the books. It just so happens that we have kind of carved them up into segments for reasons that might be related to the unique position that a number of persons who are coming to the GI find themselves in. That they’re organized by segments to me will always remain a secondary fact about the about the Graduate Institute, and the books on the lists will always remain the absolute center, and insofar as there is great overlap between those lists and the list for the undergraduate program. I do think that the two sets of graduates, GI and undergraduates, go out ready to talk to one another, and the places in which they differ, it’s probably the case that undergraduates know about and wish that they could have read things that are in the GI program and vice versa. For example, the entire history segment. GI’s have ready ears to hear about things that are in the graduate program but not in the undergraduate one, and seem genuinely curious about the undergraduate experience and what it offers that they may not see in the GI. Labs are a terrific example there. Music, by and large. But yeah, there’s a nice amount of overlap. But with the possibility for growth because the overlap is not total. 86 �Stephen: Absolutely. Well, I only have two more quick questions for you. I’m curious to hear your take on what it is that makes the GI community so unique amongst the polity or even in the world. And then the last question is just a question on your background and what got you here. So I guess you if you want to take the GI community question first and then we can jump into the other one. Mr Boyle: This is where I’m definitely going to steal from Walter yesterday because I thought it was so moving of him to have said that. In some sense, the GI is most reflective of what it is that is at the heart of St. John’s College. Insofar as, people come to the graduate program, people do not drift into the Graduate Institute in the way that 18-year-olds can drift into the undergraduate program or be helped along by their parents into the undergraduate program, directed by their parents say, into the undergraduate program. It’s not a knock on anybody, it’s just a recognition of that’s how life is. One at 18 is still not quite in charge of one’s own life. But when one decides at the age of 25, 55, 75 to give of oneself one’s time and one’s finances to intellectual inquiry, that is a demonstration of the true choice-worthiness of the undertaking that we do here. That characterizes the work of the college. And yes, it will always be the case that the undergraduate program is at the center of St. John’s. No one, no one is doubting that. But I thought that Walter really highlighted a way in which something about the presence of persons who have made a very considered and deliberate choice, in something like the middle of their lives, to undertake this mode of inquiry through conversation is the best possible endorsement of it. So, I found that very, very moving. And in some sense wish all GIs could have heard that. It helps me even think about what I find so moving about seeing a 25-year-old, a 55-year-old, a 75-year-old here together learning from one another. I see in them hunger for a life of learning with others and in community with others but also, recognition that that hunger is one that can be met by this distinct community, the institution of St. John’s College. So, their presence here in the Graduate Institute is in some sense the greatest endorsement of the institution as a whole. Now, how did I get here? Again, I’m going to borrow a little bit from something that I heard Walter say in a different meeting. I’ve been a tutor for 10 years, more or less. And at some point along the way, I think I felt some sort of calling to take on a role in the college over and above my work and the working of the classroom, which is, I believe, the most important work at the college. But I thought that I might have had one or two administrative talents that are in some sense very minor virtues like staying on top of 87 �things or keeping some things organized, that I felt like I could put in the college’s service. I Won’t be in this position forever and look forward to returning to the classroom, but as I felt like I had these minor virtues I wanted to share them with the college. And so when they asked me to do this, I was very glad to do it. And I came into the role with the GI in a great position and hope to leave it in a still better one. Stephen: Building on your journey to this position I have one last question is and then we’ll get you out of here. I saw in your background in classics is what led you into this world of inquiry. But clearly, just even having a couple of brief intro or Campus Convening Weekend seminars with you, there’s a vibrancy in you about educating itself. So I’m curious, does that drive to be an educator come before the passion of the classics, or did the passion of the classics inspire the drive to be an educator? Mr. Boyle: Can I do the thing that interviewers hate and just reject the terms of question? Stephen: Be my guest. Mr Boyle: I think I might have at one time thought of myself as an educator, but I’m very grateful to St. John’s because I don’t any longer really think of myself as an educator. But I feel like I can passionately model being a student, like I just love learning and I love learning with others and I think I’m not bad at it. I think I know how it goes well, and what in what conditions it goes well, and what conditions it goes somewhat poorly. And I think I can model that for people. If I’m educating them in that regard, I’m happy to, but I’m definitely not filling their minds with any theories. 88 I’m grateful to St. John’s because to be perfectly honest, before I came to St. John’s I did just want to be filled with facts that I could report, but not really own as my own. St. John’s, as I think it’s true for many tutors, marked a real new beginning in my own intellectual life. What I could say if I have to start again from nothing and say, almost all of what I take myself to know I know in only the most attenuated sense because it’s so mediated. It’s been handed to me by so many other persons that I have never really taken any ownership of my own education, and I think I was able to do that when I �became a tutor and I hope I’m showing people that they can do that, too. And you can start at any time. It’s available to anybody to just take ownership of their education. And insofar as I’m showing people what that might look like, I may consider myself an educator, but in the main, I’m just a student. Stephen: Well, it’s certainly palpable and thank you for taking some time with me today Mr. Boyle: It was a pleasure, glad to. 89 �Thank you to all our contributors 90 Austin Suggs On Creation Chris Macbride Old Dog Cynthia Crane The First Postulate John Harwood Before the Blank Stare Kyle Reynolds The Creation of the Self Louis Petrich Children of That World Nadine Bucca Visual Art Noah Vancina The Nature of the Pilgramage Sam Hage Corruption at the Symposium Shirley Quo The Galileo Affair Siobhán Petersen How to Read Well Stacey Rains Forbidden Fruit Stephen Cunha On the Creation of Man Sydney Rowe Mimi Sylvie Bernhardt My Mind’s a Dark Forest Yonas Ketsela A Dialogue with Descartes �COLLOQUY St. John’s College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, Maryland Volume 13: Fall 2023 Editor Stephen Borsum Editorial board: Sarah Ritchie, Paul Harland-White, Shirley Quo, Stuart Williams, Kyle Reynolds, Sylvie Bernhardt With thanks to: Kashya Boretsky, Associate Dean Brendan Boyle, and the Graduate Student Council ..... Colloquy is a biannual publication of the Graduate Student Council and St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. The journal is free of charge. Address correspondence to Colloquy, The Graduate Institute at St. John’s College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, Maryland, 21401. Or email to colloquy@sjc.edu. Students, tutors, and alumni of St. John’s College and the Graduate Institute are encouraged to submit their manuscripts in PDF or Word format by email to colloquy@sjc.edu . The journal also accepts submissions of poetry, original art, and photography. Please include your name, contact information, and the title of your work with your submission. Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in the journal do not necessarily reflect those St. John’s College, the Graduate Council, or Colloquy. 91 �92 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Colloquy Description An account of the resource A student-run journal for the Graduate Institute community of St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland. The issues feature essays, art, poetry, interviews, and more. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data pdf Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 92 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Colloquy, Fall 2023 Description An account of the resource Volume 13 of Colloquy, published in Fall 2023. The theme of the issue is On Creation. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Borsum, Stephen (Editor) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024-02 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived English Subject The topic of the resource St. John's College (Annapolis, Md.)--Periodicals Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Colloquy_Fall2023_Online-Copy Graduate Institute https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/1da4f37f3af85ffe54d77fd01943ae1c.pdf 76dfa75faf84d097137df4fab9e32949 PDF Text Text Colloquy SPRING 2024 On Character �Cover art: Achilles 1&2 - Paul Harland-White �Table of Contents 4. Poetry 10. Short Stories & Musings 32. Essays 54. Translations 65. Toasts & Prize Essays 74. Year in Review: Growing & Flourishing �Poetry & Musings Oblivion Sorrow 4 �Contributors Austin Suggs Stacey Rains 5 �Oblivion Austin Suggs I walk down shaded city streets, eyes low To miss the gaze of a man who begs for Just enough to eat, or not feel. Hungry? Or nothing at all. Who am I to judge The one who wishes for oblivion When my gaze betrays I’ve long lived there too? They say the rich and the poor inhabit Different worlds. I think they just enter Through separate doors to find the same bleak Nothingness they sought, or stumbled into Or were forced down. It’s all so hard to say. But soon enough, in life as in their deaths They sink down into the deep, dark, dank ground Having lived life chasing, but never found. 6 �Poet’s Nature Trail - Nadine Bucca 7 �Sorrow Stacey Rains There is a reason that hollow and hallowed echo the same. The word you mean to say is not quirk or coincidence but rather power, providence. Like a hole made ready for planting Like a pestle in mortar preparing the flavor Like a discordance that yearns for the melody Good redounds to good and the painful echo makes space for the necessary silence. Now I can hear “I am here.” 8 �Ripples - Paul Harland-White 9 �Short Stories & Musings Reading TRANSLATIONS Enkidu’s Dwelling Lady Sagredo The Mode of Pi I am. Working? 10 �Contributors Martha Franks Nadine Bucca Cynthia Crane Stephen Borsum Melissa Hicinbothem 11 �Reading Martha Franks It was three o’clock in the morning, and Alison’s mother sighed as she got up to go to Alison’s room. Alison’s father stirred and groaned at being woken untimely on yet another night. Again, again, again. Every night when she should have been sleeping and letting her parents sleep, Alison read books. Every night one of Alison’s parents would come into her room at eleven or so, turn off the light and tell Alison to sleep. Alison would wait for her mother or father to leave, wait an extra few minutes for the coast to be all the way clear, and then turn the light on to read some more. Hours later one of her parents would get up again to turn off the light, hoping that by this time Alison had fallen asleep over her book and would not start the weary round again. Punishment did not help. Alison submitted to whatever her parents imposed as if to a piece of bad luck unconnected to any cause and kept on reading. Once her exasperated parents tried removing the light entirely, but Alison found an answer to that. After waiting for the household to quiet down that night, she got up to curl in a nest behind the orange chair in the living room to read with the crystal glass lamp lowered to the floor. After Alison’s mother had found her asleep behind the chair a few mornings running, the reading light was restored. Her parents decided that it was better to hope that Alison would eventually fall asleep in bed rather than behind the chair. They could see that there would be no surrender in this war. Maybe war was the wrong word, as there was no malice in it. Alison needed to read and night was the time she had to do it in. She had no wish to battle or defeat her parents, it was just that reading was essential. Reading made the world livable. It made the world wide enough to dream of being somewhere else and someone else. The characters in books did not judge her or ask anything of her or shout at each other; they rescued her from the things that were hard about her life. She could ride along on their shoulders and feel with them as if she was experimenting with being them, making their mistakes and being proud of their successes in worlds that she could not have imagined on her own. Both of her parents understood all that, really, having 12 �themselves loved to read as children. The battle among the three of them also united them. On Christmas Alison found in her stocking a book with a French name, Les Miserables. It was fat and long, but it had amazing pictures and the first page drew her in immediately. Her mother, rushing around to arrange for Christmas dinner and celebrations, sighed as she always sighed at her own conflicting feelings about Alison’s reading. She could have used some help with the cooking and table-setting, but her heart was glad when she saw Alison settle into a corner with her new book, the book that Alison’s mother had loved most as a child. Alison did not hear the bustle around her. She was in France, with Jean Valjean, stealing bread for his sister’s children, being sent to be a galley slave as punishment, escaping and on the run from the police, the whole world against him. Then he was brought up short when, after he stole some silver candlesticks from a Bishop, the Bishop forgave him, and told him to keep them. Jean Valjean was paralyzed by this incomprehensible generosity just at the moment when Alison’s father called her for Christmas dinner. She startled, looking up groggily into her suburban American home, nearly paralyzed herself by the contrast with her book. It took a while to remember who she was and what was expected of her. Her imagination began to clear, though, after which it was fun to be with her aunts and her cousins. Alison spent the first part of dinner staring at the silver candlesticks on the table, lighted and glowing for the celebration. She watched the family’s reflections moving and changing in the candlesticks’ polished, elegant contours. No wonder Jean Valjean had tried to steal them— the images in them were beautiful, no matter how hard the life that they reflected. No wonder he had been paralyzed when the Bishop had given them as a gift—it’s a world-changing thing to own something that can make a hard life beautiful, like books. The Bishop’s gift was part of a bargain, Alison suddenly remembered, that Jean Valjean would no longer steal but become a part of society. She shook herself out of her reverie and joined the laughter of her family around the Christmas table. School was out, so Alison could read all the next day. Jean Valjean began the 13 �new life that the Bishop had demanded, disguising himself from the police. He did well for a while until the honesty he had promised to the Bishop forced him to reveal himself and return to his punishment in the galleys. Alison marked her place in the book and closed it in order to think about this dramatic moment of self-revelation. Her mother was cooking and Alison noticed for the first time how tired her mother looked. She put down the book entirely—she wanted to stretch it out and savor it anyway—and set the table for dinner without even being nagged. She was obeying the Bishop’s bargain. That night Alison and her parents slept undisturbed. In the morning Alison went eagerly back to the story to read about Jean Valjean running away from the galleys a second time. Having escaped, he went to find a little girl, the daughter of a woman to whom he had made a promise. The little girl was having a hard time where she was living. She had no books to help her, Alison thought, with pity. Jean Valjean rescued her and became her foster father, finding refuge in the shelter of a convent, in which she grew up. Reading about those thick convent walls with the quiet garden inside, Alison felt the enclosure of the book protecting her, too. Her parents had given her this world for Christmas. There was a lot that Alison did not understand about the rest of the book. It centered around characters who rebelled from their parents and their country and fought for better, freer lives. She felt the power of it but it frightened her, as she was too young to imagine breaking with her own parents, no matter what their conflicts. It was not important, though, that she did not understand. The bargain struck between Jean Valjean and the Bishop held fast whether it was understood or not. On the night that she finished the book she wept over the death of Jean Valjean, reunited with his child at last in a poor, barren room graced and lit only by the flames of the silver candlesticks on the mantle. Her mother found her asleep, the tears on her face, and turned off the light. 14 �Forbidden Fruit - Nadine Bucca 15 �Enkidu’s Dwelling Nadine Bucca After they slew the forest demon, Enkidu and Gilgamesh celebrated their victory with great shouts and cries. They kissed each other. “What great glory we have received,” said Gilgamesh. “Tomorrow we shall cut seven cedars, but for now let us wash in the river and rest.” So, Gilgamesh and Enkidu bathed in the cool clear river at dusk, the sun’s warm colors shining in the waters before disappearing with it behind the horizon. Under the stars, they rested. They found a spot with few roots, a small clearing, and laid their cloaks there. The sky was bright with all its little lights. There were many cedars in the forest, tall and dark, reaching up to the heavens. They found a space between them, settled among them for the night. In Humbaba’s forest, there lived a great many creatures. Owls made their nighttime calls. They could hear a twig break, with a loud snap, as a fox roamed about. It was not quiet like how the rest of the world seemed to still when they first wrestled each other or when Enkidu first laid his hand on Gilgamesh’s heart. Enkidu spoke. “Gilgamesh, my dear friend whose love is better than the love of Inanna, the goddess of love, we have slayed the forest demon. As he fell, so one day we must all fall. Do you fear death?” “I have never known death.” Gilgamesh looked up at the many stars, more than he had seen in the city. The dark sky seemed an endless river, with many small drops of sunlight sparkling on its surface. “Before I was only a thought, a small seed of a being,” he said. “Were you dead?” Enkidu asked. 16 �“Yes, but I was waiting.” “What if you had not become yourself? What if you had become a rock or a tree?” “Then that’s what I would have been.” They listened as another owl called and after, in the stillness that followed, there was the sound of the flowing river. Gilgamesh thought better of his answer. “I do not know if I was dead before or if my mind was merely dormant. But Enkidu you came from clay, from the earth. Aruru shaped you. Were you content when you ate and drank with the gazelles? Were you alive?” “My mind was wild but I was free. The priestess—she clothed me.” “The priestess—she made you human.” Enkidu turned from the stars to gaze at Gilgamesh, to see the dark rounds of his eyes. “No,” he said, taking his hand. “You did.” “I didn’t feed you bread or give you drink. I didn’t pour forth knowledge for you.” “Do you wish you had?” Enkidu whispered. “I’m not jealous of a priestess.” Gilgamesh’s voice held firm. Enkidu turned his gaze back to the stars, back to the slow moving clouds, covering and uncovering the light of the moon. “I am,” he said, at last. “She is wiser than me.” “I wish I’d done those things for you, but you have already gained all the knowledge you need.” 17 �“Yet, I am ignorant,” said Enkidu. Gilgamesh said nothing, but brought his hand to caress his lover’s knuckles, the grooves between his fingers, interlacing them with his own. Gilgamesh and Enkidu slept under the stars, resting in each other’s arms. “Make me more human,” Enkidu said. “Make me more human than I am.” Gilgamesh spoke, “What knowledge can we share together? We may hold each other, and you may kiss me, but what can two men hope to create?” Enkidu replied, “We shall make what it is in our power to make.” “Very well then. You are my companion formed from the earth. I cannot tame you.” The next morning brought a chill over the water, a light fog. They gathered wood for a fire, ate the bread they had. The bread was still soft in the middle. It tasted to Enkidu like sweet grain, and nothing like the grass of the gazelles which now he hardly recalled. “Do you understand,” Enkidu said. “The goddess made me because of the outcry against you—she made me to fight against you, to be your equal. You were a tyrant.” “I know.” “You were the worst tyrant. This pitcher wants water. The city down to its earth wants restitution.” “I’ll make a monument then, build a wall. Maybe I’ll even make it to you,” Gilgamesh laughed and Enkidu followed. “I expect more from someone who is one-third god.” “Two-thirds actually.” 18 “Let me be your other third.” �“Why not half?” “You must be careful, for then I may overtake you. You’re mostly god; I am completely man. I do not wish to be divine, but only as I am. Here, I have collected the seeds of a cedar,” Enkidu said. “Before we build, let’s plant.” Enkidu held out in his palm, the small seed cones. “I wouldn’t take the hand of a lesser man,” replied Gilgamesh. He took the cedar seeds, then Enkidu’s hand, and they embraced. “You have a great many questions and observations Enkidu,” said Gilgamesh. “We will cut down seven trees and build a raft, but first let this earth grow and nourish these little cedar trees to be, you who were born of clay.” Enkidu blessed the earth. For seven days the two friends planted cedars placing each seed in the earth, and covering them, digging with their hands, washing in the stream. Both men found rest in their planting, a sweetness like honey, as strong as fermented grain, as potent as death. And at the end of seven days, Gilgamesh dreamed. He saw the beginning, the separation of deep waters, the making of the gods. The world became dark to Gilgamesh’s eyes. Then Gilgamesh said, “I must run through a tunnel to catch the sun.” And Enkidu responded, “Our days are numbered. Let me be your sun.” As he said this the leaves above him glittered with light. “If only you were my sun,” Gilgamesh said. In that garden, Gilgamesh and Enkidu lived. 19 �Lady Sagredo Cynthia Crane Giovanni Francesco Sagredo (1571 – 1620) was a mathematician and scientist, and a friend of Galileo, who immortalized him as one of the interlocuters in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. He attempted to solve the problem of measuring longitude with magnetics, and the English physicist William Gilbert called him the “great Magneticall man.” I imagine that like many know-it-all Renaissance men, he might have been diff icult, if charming, to live with. Since he never married, I thought a bit of a romp with a nonexistent wife might serve us all to remember that even in the midst of greatness, we still want wine and chocolate for dessert, and we still want Galileo to talk about the stars. “He’s coming tonight!” “Who’s coming tonight?” “Him!” “Oh . . . him . . . ,” Lady Sagredo said, and laughed at her husband the same way their son would laugh at Cook panicking about nothing. “Stop that,” Sagredo said. His wife said, “Stop what, darling Marito?” “Stop smiling like that.” “You want me to be sour?” “I do,” he said, “I want you to be sour and rushed and hurry about and send Cook to market for f ish and make the evening magnif icent.” “He wrote me last week,” she said. 20 �“Last week?” Sagredo ran his f ingers across his bald head as though his curls were still there. “Hmmm,” she said, remembering his hair. “Last week?” Sagredo repeated. “You didn’t tell me?” “I assumed, darling, I assumed,” she said, pulling him close and interrupting his words with a long kiss. Don’t worry, she explained, the menu is set, we’re having the cheese you like from town, and the peppered olives, as though cheese and peppered olives would put his mind at ease. “And the Asti,” she added. He looked alarmed. “ The Asti? Are you sure?” “Not with dinner,” she explained with some exasperation. He had stopped listening to her and was playing with the lace at her neck. He missed the pretty way the old ruff had framed her face when they f irst met, but he had to admit, the view behind the soft lace was lovely, enticing, suggestive. “Stop, Marito, stop,” she said with a completely different laugh, and pushed his hand away, though not quickly and not with much force. “ The Asti will be perfect,” she reprimanded, “I got chocolate.” “You didn’t.” “I did.” Sagredo stopped himself from asking about the money. “It’s going to rain tonight,” he added. “I know,” she said, “I know everything.” She kissed him again. 21 �“ Therefore, chocolate,” she added. “And Asti.” He wanted to know if that was the dress she was wearing. No, she assured him, she had worn this dress last time they met in Venice, Galileo would remember it, and Maria Celeste would want to hear about something new. Sagredo objected, “but she’s at San Matteo,” meaning the convent where Galileo’s daughter had taken orders. “Precisely,” said his wife. Ms. Sagredo turned to go but the locket at the end of her long necklace was stuck to one of the buttons of her husband’s vest. She pulled it away, though it was more than a little stuck. Sagredo reddened. “It’s magnetic,” she said indignantly. “You told me this was gold.” She held the locket up to him. “I did,” he said, “say that. I did say that it was gold, and it is gold, kind of.” “Plate?” “Not plate, better than that, but yes,” his voice petered out. Making a disgusted sound, she turned away and left for the kitchen, not really angry, but also not ready to let him see her smile. She thought how Galileo would flirt and drink too much Asti and she would be able to get him to talk about the wandering stars and the rugged moon, and then it would be worth all the time and money she’d spent for an evening out of the kitchen and away from her books, dreaming of, well, she wasn’t sure what. 22 �Tea at Laterna - Nadine Bucca 23 �The Mode of Pi Stephen Borsum The air in the courtroom was stifling. So much so that it would choke the sturdiest of lungs, drying the trachea like the deep desert under a hot sun; save for the fact that the entire congregation was holding their breath. No breath, no air to choke on. A fly nipped at my ear, that droning driving the hair on my neck to stand at attention. Perhaps in my ignorance I should have slowed my mind to listen to its secret. But I neglected this opportunity, not recognizing it for what it could have been, for the prosecutor approached the bench, and seven pairs of eyes from the jury, confused, angry, concerned, watched every twitch of my face. “Is it not true, that you are here on trial for the pursuance of fundamental truths of the Universe?” It was a misdirecting question from the prosecutor, delicately crafted, but asked too early to have the impact he clearly intended. “It is true, that is what I’m on trial for.” I reply. The cold, procedural questioning was meant to envelop the emotions surrounding my case. Be they wonder or terror. And to discard that envelope, tossing it into the ever-burning fire of principle and logic. “And you maintain your innocence?” “Clearly.” His wry grin flashed. The chase was on. He turned now to the jury, his audience. “Please, if you’d answer this question for the jury, we might continue, all sharing an understanding of certain facts.” The prosecutor paused. This was a simple trick, one that school children learn when they share stories. The congregation would strain forward, pointing ears towards the forthcoming question. Each moment would raise the tension, increasing the stakes of my answer. No question in the trial until now bore such weight nor may any after, if handled deftly by the prosecutor. “Would you deny,” another pause, delicately placed, precise, “that 24 �your research and subsequent applications thereof, contain the possibility, no... the probability,” a self-correction wielded like a dagger, concealed within the sleeve, “of altering the human soul, perhaps irrevocably?” I did not hear the myriad of reactions from the room, but my heart sensed them. As if the jury and congregation had been shown irrefutable evidence, the murder weapon in my hand moments after using it, the bated breath was released and the heat of the room grew sticky with humidity. As if the capillaries of the lungs saturated the exhalation more deeply with moisture. In fact this was only a baited question. My biting of this lure would open a new line of questioning from which I would be unable to return. To deny such a grandiose suggestion was to deny what my work had yielded, a fate worse than conviction, and death. To assent to this question was to guarantee such a conviction and to never see my work flourish as it could. As it must. My defense attorney caught my eye. His were welling with tears as this was the question we had always prepared for. The undeniable question. And in no retort we had crafted had there ever been a convincing way through. When your attorney becomes an ally, beyond litigator, there must be power in what you’ve done. Even he denied me at first. Suggested that pleading guilty and discontinuing the work would be the only certain path to safety. But now he sees. He knows. Damn safety. “Do you feel I have altered your soul, prosecutor?” The judge spat at me, sharply, without a patience that was never granted in the first place. “You will answer the question in a statement. A dialectical maneuver will not suffice.” The prosecutor smiled a venomous grin. “Yes, your honor.” My turn to pause. To breathe. Perhaps this was my last free heartbeat and I would soak in the moment as if it could be stripped away. The room grew dry again, but I was careful to not let it linger so long as the prosecutor. His pension for showmanship was my only saving grace. “Not just the human soul, but that of the Universal.” It was certainly nonsense to most of the people in attendance. And the prosecutor recoiled. It was this essence of power that had faced the 25 �least ridicule, for it was the least sensical to their ears. But the prosecutor recovered, too quickly for my liking. “There we have it. Admission, and delusions of grandiosity. This, man, ladies and gentlemen here assembled, wishes himself a god!” This drew chuckles, as the prosecutor turned to address the crowd, encouraging their pity and scorn for my contemptuous delusions. “Not wishes. Wills.” I said, partially to myself but with enough volume to my baritone that the ears nearest me keyed in on it. In this moment my mind returned to a series of memories that lay coiled in my conscience. There were first the resonances that established held a sacred balance akin to that of the celestial orbits. Inalterable, it was said they were. Yet a thoughtful nudge might disrupt such balance. Thoughtful, or reckless, I was warned on occasion. But who might undue the orbits of the planets themselves save the hand of God? And was I to supersede him? Or was I an act myself? Flashing forward to two frequencies, one and the other containing a balance of sameness and difference together, threads of unison passing between both that would wax and wane as dissonant undertones built. “It’s beautiful” she said. She had been the most apprehensive, and her skepticism was at first my only source of apprehension. Now her skepticism was not that it couldn’t be done, but what may happen if it worked? The nuclear age ushered in the power for mankind to undo itself, but this? The power to ascend, decay, evolve, dissolve, many possible paths that the frequencies alone would be the arbiter of. The slightest miscalculation meant a causal chain, the results of which could not be anticipated. Why had I pressed forth in the face of such potentialities? “What remains in flux is how this emanates throughout the heavens.” The philosopher asked. And I returned a question that had not come to my mind until this moment. “Is God’s soul that of the cosmos, or something beyond? What is the part and what is the whole?” 26 The smile he turned to me with was one of pensive reflection, apprehension and anticipation mixed in a swirl of emotion. “That is the �question, isn’t it? Would that we could know the wholeness of creation. I fear you may learn the truths as you change them, if the Universe is constructed in one way rather than the other.” And then the final experiment. A tone slowly bending up, the tri-tone filling the resonant chamber, and the overtone singing the voice of heaven. But from which direction would the wave pattern collapse? Inwardly or outwardly, both were possibilities, with drastically different consequences. The overtone peaked as the rising tone angled back down, through the tri-tone, down past unison of the second and third octaves below the overtone, into something new. The undertone, and the ground began to tremble. What my calculations never determined is how long the tone would have to sink and how far the undertone might fluctuate. I had never expected it to take days, even weeks. And then I was arrested. I was out on the street going to buy bread and a bottle of wine to distract myself for an evening because I had nothing to do but wait. And waiting seemed like a prison unto itself. But I had seen the signs, there would be a result that no one could control, and yet would alter everything. It was something that could not be resisted by stopping it, resonant waves expanded. I was shaken from this reflection by realization. The courtroom around me had swelled to an uproar. Cries of heretic, blasphemer, and heathen rang of the walls of this stone room. The prosecutor even reeled for a moment before seeing the opportunity to deal the finishing blow. “You see, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, he confesses! This is no mere tinkerer but one who’d assume you can supplant the will of God!” The judge pounded at his desk with the gavel, crying for an order that he could not wrest from the crowd, not until the prosecutor, now firmly in control of the narrative, raised his hands. “What I cannot be certain of,” he turned to the judge, “your honor, is whether or not the defendant is insane.” I hereby request that the trial be paused until such a time as we’ve had him evaluated both spiritually and psychologically, to allow the jury to fully assess the qualities of the defendant before delivering a verdict.” It was a smart move on his part. It showed a touch of sympathy, whether feigned or not. And it would lend credibility to the sentence the prosecution had originally sought, death by ostracization. A volun- 27 �tary sentence that would cast me out and let me die how I pleased, removed from civilization so as to inflict no further harm upon it. The judge was quick to acquiesce. In mere minutes I was once again chained and thrown into the back of a transport. Feeling the rumble of the road beneath me as it passed the waiting miles to the prison. I can’t feel the rumble of a vehicle any longer without remembering the undertone. And they threw me back into my cramped cell. There I had several books, at this point nearly memorized and only used to pass the time. I felt I had milked all their secrets long ago, and every time I opened them now was just for a hit of nostalgia or to notice some hidden quirk of translation. Plato’s Timaeus, Einstein’s Relativity, The World as Will and Representation, and Marie Shelley’s Frankenstein. It was a short list, but they all offered a kind of creature comfort. Days passed. Then weeks. And I endured a barrage of tests designed for no other purpose than to assure I was as condemnable as it appeared. All the while I had only the ability to wonder about my experiment. The calculations supported a theory that even if they found it, destroyed it, sundered the equipment and stopped the tones, they had already emanated. But how long before I knew some sign of the impact was impossible to tell. Localization of experiment does not correlate to localization of phenomena, and a question the Philosopher once asked me was, “We know the speed of light, and the speed of sound. It remains to be seen if the speed of truth is beholden to such obstacles.” 28 �I am. Working? Melissa Hicinbothem When I considered what it meant “to be” I was unable to discover anything tangible. I could not grasp anything intrinsic to myself that revealed what it was to be. Considered another way “to be” might mean “I am”. Well, the problem emerges, I am, what exactly? How can I know what I am without something external? What condition tells me what I am in any given moment? In this awkward position I began to consider my personal circumstances. Following seven months of unemployment I began a new job. My question took on a new cast. What does it mean “to be” working? What does it mean “to be” not working? Now, I found myself at a convenient demarcation point to consider my inquiry about being. What did it mean to be working when previously I had not? Was my time more engaged? Was I less idle? The short answer is no. My new employment did not mean any greater engagement. It did not mean less idleness. I had a job now, but I spent a large amount of my working hours engaged in nothing purposeful. Certainly nothing urgent. Indeed, for the first time that I can recall, my new employers urged me to “relax” to “take it easy”. What does this mean? It seems to mean that “to be” working involved or required no change internal to me. Nothing inside of me needed to change. So, nothing inside of me changed. Here I was, working again after a long hiatus, and I found no evidence that any change in my state had produced a change internal to me. I was not required to be more purposeful or serious. By the measure of my internal life “I am” working was just as intangible as “I am”. Still, I was at a demarcation point and I knew that some change had taken place. “To be” working was indeed different from not working. If my internal life was unchanged by the demands of employment perhaps, I should look to more external factors. “To be” working meant that my time was no longer unstructured. Any given time of the day could no longer see me anywhere. Even if I had nothing important to do at work I still needed to be there. Did “to be” working mean that I was physically present at times dictated to me by my employer? Was this the absence of idleness? Even though I was doing very little, I was 29 �structuring my presence around someone else’s demands. There was nothing substantially different with me, but I was sharing external conditions with someone else. Another possible answer for what it meant “to be” working was that I was earning money. Admittedly, this might be the best example. Money does seem to be an important distinction between gainful employment and unemployment. I had no sense of vocation integral to me, but as the result of meeting my employer’s conditions I could expect to receive a paycheck. An agreed upon amount of money would be exchanged for my presence at dictated times. Is this what it means “to be” working, the shared understanding of external conditions between my employer and me? If I cannot discover what it means “to be” working independent of any external conditions, have I established a phenomenological account of myself? It seems to be Hegel’s conjecture that the Greeks possessed shared external conditions similar to those between my employer and me. In the case of the Greeks, they had a shared aesthetic sense. A shared understanding of what was beautiful. My employer and I only come together for the expectations of work, and the Greeks lived in separate city-states that were bound only by a shared aesthetic. I know virtually nothing of my employer beyond what it is necessary to meet the shared conditions of work. Yet, we are able to work together because of that shared understanding. Is the unity of Spirit a shared understanding of external conditions? I do not think so. Hegel believes the Greek unity was fragile. That it was undone by Thought. Does this mean that a shared understanding of beauty could not hold the Greeks together in the face intellectualism? If a culture cannot be held together by a set of shared external conditions what is necessary for prolonged survival? If not, what role does intellectualism play in building the unity of spirit? If the Greeks did not have unity of Spirit, were they the first step in a long historical journey to find the unity? 30 Let me assume that the Greeks do not have unity of Spirit. They are indeed missing something. The Greeks see beauty as I see my employment. A set of shared external conditions. Am I missing something too? I have already remarked that upon commencing my new job I felt no internal change. When I perform my duties, I know neither what �I am doing in a meaningful sense, nor why I am doing them. I know I am working, but I do not know why. I suppose I am in the same position I was in when I began this essay. And now I am running out of time to reach a conclusion. Like Hegel’s reading of the Greeks, I have observed phenomena in my life. The phenomena (presence and compensation) occur as the result of my shared understanding with my employer. But, does this shared understanding prove any unity of Spirit in my life? Will I come undone at the emergence of Thought? 31 �Essays A Bug’s Life Kar ña in the Round The Ultimate Desire of Le Misanthrope Intertextuality and the Elixer of Character Is Odette Odile? 32 �Contributors Johnathan Wright Jay Gold Kelly Kwon Gus Kraus Cynthia Crane 33 �A Bug’s Life The Brothers Karamazov’s Dimitri as Fallen Man Johnathan Wright In Dostoevsky’s masterwork, The Brothers Karamazov, it quickly becomes clear to the imagination that the pious, innocent Alyosha is an “angel,” and that the secretive, cold Ivan is a “grave,” but the characterization of Dimitri, the eldest Karamazov brother, requires a subtler analysis. Dostoevsky himself names him a vile insect. Indeed, it is true that Dimitri has many dehumanizing vices; he is, in his own words, “just a brute of an officer who drinks cognac and goes whoring”. Nonetheless, the author’s label of “insect” is not meant to be a revocation of his humanity, but an emphatic affirmation of it. This becomes apparent over the course of several poems which Dimitri recites to Alyosha during their dialogue in Fyodor Pavlovich’s neighbors’ backyard. The first excerpt that Mitya recites is from Schiller’s “Eleusinian Festival;” it narrates Ceres’ coming to earth and finding the world hostile, barren, and desolate due to “man’s universal fall” (pp. 106). With all of his unholy revelry and rampant womanizing, Mitka himself presents 34 the reader with the picture of a man who has been utterly enthralled by his base desires, a true product of the Fall. Nevertheless, he is still a man. By way of Aristotelian example, he is not so controlled by his base desires that he becomes a beast, who does not know and want the good; he is a torn human being who knows what is good, but simply lacks the self-control to bring that good about. Despite his brutishness, Mitenka preserves a strong sense of honor and propriety. Mitya’s heart is tormented by this internal conflict between good and evil: “Let me be cursed, let me be base and vile, but let me also kiss the hem of that garment in which my God is clothed; let me be following the devil at the same time, but still I am also your son, Lord,” (pp.107). Is this not the very struggle which we all, imperfect yet noble as we are, undergo in the silence of our own hearts? As Mitka’s third excerpt, from Schiller’s “To Joy,” asserts, our tendency toward earthly pleasures renders us “insects”— but also makes us human. Dimitri, then, is indeed an insect, but according to Dostoevsky, so are we. Dimitri’s relationship with Katerina reflects such human complexity. It begins because of his ever-present pride and lust; he seeks to blackmail her into intercourse, simply because she spurns him. When the moment �comes, however, something about her character breaks his wicked resolve. Her defiance and strength penetrates past his base sensuality and touches something more noble, something even akin to reverence in his dark heart. It makes him uncomfortable, and for that he even hates her for a moment, with “the kind of hatred that is only a hair’s breadth from love” — it causes him to let her go free. This act of mercy in turn moves her, and for that she falls madly in love with him. Baffled by this unexpected reaction, Dimitri sinks into an acute self- consciousness that wavers between humility and pride. He is keenly aware of his faults, and feels as if he is not worthy to marry someone as noble and virtuous as Katerina. It would be easier to call his insecurity “humility” if he were willing to accept mercy and reform for the sake of love, but even in the face of Katya’s tender forgiveness of his faults and trespasses, he refuses to besmirch her reputation by wedding her, protesting that he cannot change. In this way, Dimitri is more self-destructive than humble; he is too unwilling, too cowardly to turn and face his vices, even if it means the loss not only of Katerina, but ultimately, of his soul. Katerina herself is not without some self-destructive tendencies of her own; her brazen confidence and proactiveness errs on the side of excess, and leads to her allowance of the ruthless Grushenka into her home, a decision which ends in disaster. Though Dimitri is considered “the insect,” his complex character and relationships teach more about the plight of fallen man than either his brother “the angel,” or his brother “the grave.” 35 �Karña in the Round Jay Gold INTRODUCTION E. M. Forster once distinguished between two different kinds of literary characters. Flat characters are simple and two-dimensional, frequently a single quality writ large. Round characters, on the other hand, are complex and harder to characterize briefly. Forster offers Dickens’s Mrs. Micawber as an example of a flat character, and Thackeray’s Becky Sharp as an example of a round one. To this reader, there is no rounder character in the Mahābhārata than Karña. While he is portrayed as a coherent personality, it is difficult to assert anything about his character without qualifying that assertion in important respects. There is no need to demonstrate Karña’s roundness; that will be obvious to every reader. My intention in this paper is to answer the question, What is it about Karña that makes him so obviously round? KARÑA’S CASTE AND FAMILY STATUS ARE EXTREMELY COMPLICATED Karña, while he admits that Kŗşņa has stated the law correctly, rejects this interpretation for himself. For Karña, Kunti’s having abandoned him destroyed any parental claim she 36 might have on him, and the love with which Râdhâ and Adhiratha raised him established such a claim in his eyes. Thus Karña is by history and by inclination the son of a sûta, and by heredity and by law a kṣatriya. But there is another way in which he can be said to be a kşatriya: in his physical capabilities, particularly his ability to withstand pain. After he gives Indra his earrings and accepts from him the Never-failing Spear, Karña flays his entire body, “mov[ing] no muscle in spite of the pain.” That such fortitude demonstrates his kṣatriya-ness may be seen in the following story: Karña had asked to study with Drona, but Drona turned him down, saying he would teach only “[a] brahmin who has correctly performed the right vow” or “a kṣatriya who has performed asceticism.” So Karña betook himself to Râma Jâmadagnya and made the same request, this time purporting to be a brahmin. Some time later a fearsome insect bit Karña, who “stifled the intolerable pain with his fortitude,…not moving in the least.” Râma, when he became aware of this, was angry enough to curse Karña: “No brahmin could endure this extreme pain. Your fortitude could only be a kṣatriya’s.” In other words, Karña’s physical characteristics, as well as his heredity and the law, show him to be a kṣatriya. �I add that frequently in the Mahābhārata we see characters who are the sons of gods, but who also are considered the sons of their mother’s husbands. This is true in particular of Karña’s Pandava brothers. Karña is unique in that there are three male characters who could be said to be his father: the sun, Adhiratha, and Pandu. KARÑA IS COMMITTED TO CARRYING OUT THE OBLIGATIONS TO OTHERS THAT HE HAS TAKEN ON On the face of it, Karña looks utterly principled, committed to truth, to loyalty, and to generosity. Yet at different points he takes actions that arguably violate these commitments. 1. Truth Karña says, speaking to Kṛṣṇa, “[N]either joy nor fear, nor all of earth nor piles of gold can make me a traitor to my word.” This seems to be Karña’s fundamental principle, as it includes his vows involving the loyalty and generosity that also characterize him. This is the principal reason Karña gives Kṛṣṇa for rejecting Kṛṣṇa s directive to assume his position as the eldest Pandava. One would think Kṛṣṇa’s charge would be compelling to Karña for several reasons. Karña would become king, in a ceremony at which Kṛṣṇa himself would officiate. By this act he would bring about peace between the Kauravas and the Pandavas. His acknowledging his place in the Pandava family would be entirely consistent with the law, even more than the path he does take. (He tells his mother Kunti, who urges him to follow Kṛṣṇa’s directive, that he does not “deny that for me the gateway to the Law is to carry out your behest.”) And he would be obeying the instructions of the supreme lord Kṛṣṇa. Yet, he says, his obligations to Râdhâ and Adhiratha and to Duryodhana keep him from doing so. I do not see where Karña actually pronounces a vow of loyalty to Râdhâ and Adiratha; his obligations to them seem to come from love and felt loyalty. To Duryodhana, on the other hand, he does take a vow . Even before he has gotten to know Duryodhana, Karña tells him, “I choose to be friends with you.” And again, when Duyyodhana asks for his eternal friendship, Karña responds, “So it shall be.” Afterwards, his felt loyalty plays a prominent if not a predominant part in his devotion to Duryodhana. Another example of a vow that Karña refuses to break is his gifting to Indra the earrings with which he was born that make him invulnerable in battle. Both Karña and his father the sun say that “all the world knows” his vow to refuse nothing to the brahmins. So when Indra appears to him in the guise of a brahmin, Karña, even knowing it is a god and not a brahmin, grants his request for the earrings. (One might think he does so because 37 �it is a god who asks, but Karña has no problem defying Kṛṣṇa and the sun god.) This despite his knowledge that giving up the earrings will make him vulnerable on the battlefield. He does receive in return the Never-failing Spear, but with the restriction that he can use it only once. So the spear’s protection is rather less reliable than the earrings’. And, as discussed infra, as it turns out he uses the spear on somebody other than Arjuna, whom he had planned to be its target and whom he knew would otherwise kill him. Hence Karña’s keeping of this vow leads directly to his death on the battlefield. Sometimes Karña proclaims his absolute devotion to truth. “I do not fear death as I fear the lie,” he tells Kṛṣṇa. Vaiśampāyana calls him “truthful,” and at one point says, “Karña’s mind did not falter, for he stood fast by the truth.” But Karña is not above employing deception to obtain what he wants. We see this in the story of his apprenticeship to Râma. In order to study with Râma, he lies to him about his origin. In this willingness to deceive when he thinks the ends justify the deception, Karña is no different from Yudhiṣṭhira or Kṛṣṇa, who do the same despite their own reputations for honesty. Furthermore, such devotion to truth as Karña possesses does not include a devotion to transparency. After Kṛṣṇa tells him of his true legal status, he asks that Kṛṣṇa “suppress word of our taking counsel here,” as Yudhiṣṭhira 38 would not accept the kingdom if he knew Karña was his elder brother. While secrecy may not be as great a violation of commitment to truth as deception is, it is some distance from the total honesty that Karña claims to represent. 2. Loyalty Apart from his vows of loyalty, Karña claims that his actions derive from feelings of loyalty based upon how other characters have and have not acted towards him. The loyalty is pronounced in the case of Râdhâ and Adhiratha, Karña’s foster parents. When we first meet Adhiritha, Karña had just “hung his head in shame” when asked about his lineage. But Karña treats Adhiratha with reverence, despite likely knowing that acknowledging this sûta as his father would elicit scorn from such as Bhîma. In explaining to Kṛṣṇa why he will not assume his position as a Pandava, Karña speaks of his adoptive parents’ love for him – Râdhâ breastfeeding him and dealing with his body wastes, Adhiratha’s having his birth rites performed, marrying him to wives with whom he has “sons and grandsons” with whom his heart has bonds of love. “How,” Karña asks, “could a man like me deny [Râdhâ] the ancestral offering?” The obverse of his loyalty to Râdhâ and Adhisthira is his antipathy to his biological mother, Kunti, who, he �tells Kṛṣṇa “cast me out as though I had been stillborn.” Karña speaks of “the irreparable wrong” she has done him, and goes on, “Born a kṣatriya, I have not yet received the respect due a baron. What enemy could have done me greater harm than you have? When there was time to act you did not show me your present compassion. And now you have laid orders on me, the son to whom you denied the sacraments. You never acted in my interest like a mother, and now here you are, enlightening me solely in your own interest.” It might be thought that the fact of parentage would be enough to garner a child’s loyalty. But this is not Karña’s way. His loyalty derives from how he has been treated. This also is true of Karña’s loyalty to Duryodhana. The latter begins their relationship by giving Karña a kingdom so he can fight a duel with Arjuna, and defends him against Bhîma’s taunts. Karña tells Kṛṣṇa. “For thirteen years I have enjoyed unrivaled royal power in Dhṛtarāṣṭra’s lineage by relying on Duryodhana…[who] has raised arms and prepared for war with the Pandavas, because he relies on me,…Therefore he has confidently chosen me to be the main opponent of the Left-handed Archer in a chariot duel in the war.”1 Karña gives all these as reasons not to break his vow to Duryodhana. And when Karña’s father, the sun, tells him to do as Kunti says, Karña responds: “The Dhārtarāṣṭras have let me share in all their comforts and honored me much at all times: how could I, I betray them now? Now that they are embroiled in a feud with the others, they attend to me at all times and honor me as much as the Vasus honor Vāsava? How could I shatter their hopes now, if they think that with my prowess they can engage their enemies? How could I desert them now when they see in me the boat they need to cross over this impassable battle and find the farther shore of this shoreless ocean. Now the hour has struck for all the men who have lived off the Dhārtarāṣṭra, and I have to discharge my duty heedless of my life. Those evil men who, after having been well supported to their heart’s content, pay no heed to what has been done for them and fecklessly undo past benefactions when the time of duty arrives, wicked despoiler of their kings and thieves of their masters’ riceball, gain neither this world nor the next.” It might be countered that Duryodhana is a villain, unworthy of Karña’s loyalty.2 And, indeed, Karña may be accused of being loyal to a fault in the way he treats Draupadi, calling her a whore and a slave wench. He tells Kṛṣṇa that he regrets insulting the Pandavas, a very “round” thing to do. The reason he gives for his behavior is that he wanted to please Duryodhana. 39 �Finally, this section presents an opportunity to raise a question. When Kṛṣṇa issues his directive to Karña, the latter replies, “If I…were to obtain this large, prosperous kingdom, I would hand it over to Duryodhana.” Well, then, why doesn’t he do just that? There would be no war, and his friend would obtain the kingdom he desires. The text provides no explanation. 3. Generosity As we have discussed, Karña gives up his earrings of invulnerability to Indra disguised as a brahmin. He claims he does so because of his vow never to refuse anything to a brahmin, a vow taken on the basis of reverence and generosity. A later incident is if anything an even stronger example of that generosity. It will be recalled that in exchange for the earrings, Indra gave Karña a Never-failing Spear that would unerringly kill anybody, with the proviso that it could be used only once. Karña had planned to use it to kill Arjuna, the one warrior capable of killing him. But at one point during the war with the Pandavas, Bhîma’s demon son Ghaṭotkaca terrorized the Kaurava army: “The Kaurava warriors pleaded with the Suta’s son, “O Karna, kill the Rakshasa soon before he destroys the whole army. Use your Shakti weapon given to you by Indra, the King of Heaven…. Karna decided to use his 40 Shakti weapon. …[He] remembered how…he had exchanged it for his natural golden armor and earrings. It was meant to kill Arjuna. Not finding any other way to save the army from extermination, Karna picked up that dart and readied himself to release it. It could only be used once, and after being released, it would again return to Indra. Karna then released the mighty weapon.…That dart soared through the sky, and… struck Ghaṭotkaca in the chest depriving him of his life… Lord Krishna was joyous on the occasion…. ‘I know that Karna can now be killed, because he no longer has possession of that celestial dart.’” So Karña, out of his generosity and loyalty, and knowing of the consequences to himself, uses his weapon to save the Kaurava army. This exemplifies the reasons that both Dhṛtarāṣṭra and Vaiśampāyana call him “compassionate.” Karña’s use of the Never-failing Spear against Ghaṭotkaca has practical reasons as well: had he not used it, his side would have been defeated, and he never would have had the chance to use the spear against Arjuna. WITH ALL THAT, KARNA’S OVERRIDING MOTIVATION IS HIS DESIRE FOR FAME Karña says on any number of occasions that he hungers for fame even more than for life.3 In turning down the sun’s directive to refuse Indra his earrings, he says, “I shall give him �my earrings…, and my superb armor, lest my fame vanish.” He goes on, “I choose fame on earth, sun, even at the cost of my life.. [T]he famous man attains to heaven, the inglorious man perishes. For in the world fame gives life to a man like a mother, while infamy kills life be the soul alive.” He then cites a verse from “the Placer himself”: “In the world hereafter is fame The highest estate of a man; In this world fame if pure Increases that man’s life.” Karña then says that by giving away his earrings and armor, by offering up his body in war and vanquishing his foes, and by protecting others, he will “win supreme fame in the world….I have vowed to protect my fame with my very life.” Karña brushes off without comment the sun’s advice that “[o]nly the fame of a living man is good….what use is fame to a dead person who has been reduced to ashes?...The fame of a dead mortal is like a garland on a corpse.” could have had.” He goes on, “In killing Arjuna on the battlefield I shall find my reward, or reap fame if the Left-handed Archer kills me.” CONCLUSION I began this paper with the following question: What is it about Karña that makes him such a round character? I have analyzed aspects of his character and his story in order to provide an answer to this question. A characteristic of round characters is that even after they have been discussed at length there is more to be said about them, and there are elements of Karña’s personality – like his self-confidence or his braggadocio – upon which I have not touched here. Like other round characters in literature, Karña combines two seemingly opposed characteristics: he has a complexity we would expect to find in those we encounter in real life, and there is no one else – in life or in literature – quite like him. One of Karña’s reasons for not accepting Kṛṣṇa’s directive is that if he were to avoid combat with Arjuna it would bring disgrace to both of them, and he tells Kunti that he is concerned about “being called a coward” and “what…the baronage [will] call me.” He blames Kunti for having “destroyed the name and fame I 41 �The Ultimate Desire of Le Misanthrope Kelly Kwon What does Alceste ultimately want? It is nothing but commitment that Alceste demands from his friend Philinte and his partner Célimène. He yells at Philinte: “Monbleu! Vous n’êtes pas pou être de mes gens. L’ami du genre humain n’est point du tout mon fait.”. He detests that his friend Philinte is everybody’s friend. Also, he shrieks at Célimène when she opens the door for Basque without hesitation: “Quoi! L’on ne peut jamais vous parler tête à tête? A recevoir le monde on vous voit toujours prête?” He is extremely unhappy about his partner welcoming other people. Célimène grumbles: “Mais de tout l’univers vous devenz jaloux.” Alceste counters: “C’est que tout l’univers est bien reçu de vous.” It is true. Alceste feels jealousy of the whole world. Why? He is both unwilling to and unable to fawn over other people, whereas Philinte and Célimène are capable of acting gregariously. They seem to have a lot of options to choose their friends, but Alceste cannot hang out with people other than these two, who he has carefully selected. And, as such Alceste is such a misanthrope—what makes Philinte and Célimène exceptional enough to qualify for his circle? Are Philinte and Célimène as genuine as Alceste? 42 Definitely not. They do know how to be diplomatic: to flatter, to smile and to conceal. For instance, Philinte is far from being squeamish to butter up Oronte as “La chute en est jolie, amoureuse, admirable!” Célimène is kind to everybody; not only their potential ally, Basque, who will be helpful in the court, but also to her unwanted suitor, Oronte. Furthermore, to her enemy, Arsinoé, Célimène seems soft on her on the surface— even though these two women were delivering malicious messages in a passive-aggressive form. “Si l’on était sage, ces avis mutuels seraient mis en usage.”, Célimène fools her with a gentle tone—this adroitness is impossible for Alceste, who unintentionally provokes Oronte to file a lawsuit against him. Philinte and Célimène are two of the handful of people capable of appreciating the beauty of Alceste’s candidness, and regardless of Alceste’s anti-social character, they adore and trust his straightforwardness. We can see Philinte holding his laughter while Alceste gives an acerbic critique of Oronte’s sonnets. Célimène introduces annoying Arsinoé to Alceste, because she trusts Alceste to be faithful to her. Perhaps she had figured out that Alceste would see Arsinoé’s hypocrisy, and Alceste does point out Arsinoé’s shady intentions, of course. He asks in askance: “Mais, en disant cela, songez-vous, je vous prie, que cette personne est, Madame, votre amie?” He also refuses her flatteries. He begins to disavow �his thoughts so that he can avoid any involvement with Arsinoé, by humbly saying: “Le ciel ne m’a point fait, en me donnant le jour, une âme compatible avec l’air de la Cour.” Nevertheless, it is worth remarking that Alceste acquiesces to the possibility of Arsione’s false accusation: Célimène could be unfaithful to him. Alceste keeps petitioning Célimène not to hang out with other guys.—“Perdez votre proces, Madame, avec constance, et ne menagez point un rival qui m’offense.”, he says; but he begs to declare that Alceste is the one who she chooses: “Mais plus d’amusement, et plus d’incertitude: Il faut vous expliquer nettement la-dessus. (...) Je saurai, de ma part, expliquer ce silence, et me tiendrai pour dit tout le mal que j’en pense.” This distinguishes the simmering jealousy of Alceste. He merely scoffs at Philinte’s flattery—showing just an allergic reaction to Philinte’s false compliments. Although Alceste expresses his strong irritation at Philinte’s excessive philanthropy, he is not as anxious at seeing Célimène’s affection for other men. Perhaps Alceste is afraid of losing her. He asks for exclusivity as her romantic partner, while he does not, or cannot actively do so to his friend, because he is a friend. And thankfully, according to her letter, it turns out that Célimène’s inclination has always been toward Alceste, while she put in a lot of effort to conceal her disgust toward Oronte. She has been faithful, indeed. It is, therefore, shocking that Alceste announces that “Mon coeur a present vous detesté(,)” right after he confirms her faithfulness. He breaks up the relationship with the last word: “Allez, je vous refuse, et ce sensible outrage de vos indignes fers pour jamais me degagé.” How can his abandonment be juxtaposed with her affectionate confession? Isn’t this confirmation what he wanted ? What does he want? First of all, Alceste seems to make a dichotomy between those who value him and those who do not. He despises Oronte’s incapability of accepting his true judgment; He despises the world full of sycophants. Whereas he loves Célimène because she loves him, and we can infer from his contrapositive statement: “Je ne l’aimerais pas, si je ne croyais [être donc aimé d’elle].” Even if his love “ne ferme point mes yeux aux défauts qu’on lui trouve”, it does not hinder him from loving her. Even if he finds a piece of (false) evidence that Célimène loves Oronte, he cannot help loving her, and fails to avenge her by using Eliante. He deplores himself: “O ciel! De mes transports puis-je être ici le maître?” This insinuates that Alceste desperately needs her while Célimène seems to have a variety of options among her suitors. Unfortunately, Célimène frustrates Alceste by being continuously ambiguous. She blames his jealousy and doubt, but she never explains or elu43 �cidates. This can explain why Alceste becomes bizarrely credulous enough to believe Célimène’s affectionate letter is for Oronte. He has been made ill by his doubts, and now he gets a tangible piece of evidence that can validate his cumulative jealousy. He takes an opportunity to vent his rancor. “Moi, je veux me facher.”; He wants to be angry, and he becomes a little bit satisfied, just as we might become happy to figure out the nomenclature of illness long after suffering from its unknown symptoms. Before long, though, he realizes that “C’est [lui-même] qui [il] viens plaindre, et c’est [lui-même] qu’on querelle!”; (and?) Célimène turns out to be innocent. Instead of apologizing, now he pretends to be angry, labeling her reaction a brazen excuse. He tenaciously probes her as to how the expression of the problematic letter could be written without romantic connotations. All he wants is her assurement—to express how much she is devoted to him and how aloof she actually is from other men—but he receives no answer. She is not willing to enter his game. Later on, he tenaciously asks if she will choose him or Oronte. She procrastinates in giving him an answer; instead, it is other people, Acaste and Clitandre, who confess her mind instead. She did not have to hesitate when deciding whom. She just had to speak up and say, ‘I will choose Alceste, and Oronte is not even on my list,’ but she does not—she does not want to hurt Oronte’s feelings. However, to 44 what extent does she take care of Alceste? The longer she weighs those two on the scale,—unnecessarily—the more Alceste turns weary and is made miserable. When he figures out he has won this love competition, instead of rapture, he feels a deep disappointment. He thinks it is meaningless for him to feel anxious due to Célimène’s courtesy, and he is not willing to endure this anymore. “Et s’il faut qu’à mes feux votre flamme réponde, que vous doit importer tout le reste du monde? Vos désirs avec moi ne sontils pas contents?”, he questions. Most of all, when Célimène hesitantly offers him marriage by saying “Si le don de ma main peut contenter vos voeux, je pourrai me résoudre à serre de tels nœuds; Et l’hymen…”, Alceste finally explodes in anger, crying out that he detests her, and he therefore refuses her. He then turns to Eliante, confessing that he finds that she is the only one who he finds sincere. However he acknowledges that he himself is too unworthy of her love, and that he does not fit with marriage by nature. This indicates he is now too traumatized to pursue his desire for commitment. Now he begins to seek freedom instead: “Je vais sortir d’un gouffre où triomphent les vices, et chercher sur la terre un endroit écarté où d’etre homme d’honneur on ait la liberté.” (1808) This is the very moment that he changes the orientation of his aspirations: from commitment to freedom. �London Mer - Nadine Bucca 45 �Intertextuality and The “Elixir” of Character Gus Kraus Through his counsel to Arjuna, Kṛṣṇa weaves together plentiful references to other Sanskrit texts. But in the tenth chapter of the Bhagavadgītā, he uses these allusions to teach yoga to Arjuna, providing him a litany of magnanimous characters - Gods, sages, heroes, astrological bodies, scriptures, syllables and more. Kṛṣṇa does not simply present Arjuna with an array of moral exemplars. He avoids giving a straightforward Plutarchian exposition of heroes that Arjuna ought to emulate in acting according to dharma; the ethical purport of “I am the a among syllables”1 is not immediately apparent. Instead, Kṛṣṇa declares himself the seed (bījaṃ2) of the greatness of each character he lists. In tying the quality of each character to himself, Kṛṣṇa’s ‘who’s who’ of excellence in Sanskrit literature transforms reading - or, in this historical context, “listening” - into a meditative and devotional practice itself. The Gītā’s intertextual warp and weft of characters becomes a meditative focus for the yogic sādhaka. In the middle of their dialogue, after covering numerous philosophical topics and yogic practices, Arjuna asks of Kṛṣṇa, 46 “Pray tell me of all your divine ubiquities (vibhūti), by means of which you permeate these worlds. How may I know you, yogin, in my constant meditations? In what various modes of being may I meditate on you, my lord? Tell me again fully of your yoga and your ubiquity, Janārdana, for I am not sated of listening to your Elixir (‘mṛtam)” Arjuna seeks in these “ubiquities” to relish the amṛtam - the “Elixir” in context, but in the word’s literal meaning, that which is “immortal”4. Kṛṣṇa’s response affirms within each character an undying aspect, of which he is the source. He hears the unsated Arjuna, and graciously pours the sweetest mixture, made from the most resplendent characters of Sanskrit literature. The verses which follow use a formulaic structure, the genitive plural and either written or implied asmi in each metrical foot, ‘among the x, I am y’. The earliest identifications among the vibhūti center on retinues of divine beings, their vehicles and weapons, and mythical beasts. Kṛṣṇa yokes together in himself figures from both Vedic and Purāṇic mythology: “Of the Ādityas I am Viṣṇu, of the celestial lights the shining sun, of the Maruts I am Marīci, to the constellations I am the moon … [o]f the Rudras I am Śaṃkara, the God of Riches I am to Yakṣas and Rākṣasas … of marshals Skanda … I am Vāsuki among the Snakes. I am Ananta among the Serpents (nāgānāṃ), Varuṇa among sea creatures, Aryaman �among the Fathers, Yama among those who tame...Garuḍa among birds.” Kṛṣṇa affirms in himself a diverse cast of divine characters. Many of these references are crucial to the historical development of Vaiṣṇavism, notably the theonym Viṣṇu, meaning “all-pervader”, among the children of Aditi. In the same vein, Ananta (also called Śeṣa) among the Nāgas and Garuḍa among the birds both serve as Vedic ‘vehicles’ (vāhana) of Viṣṇu. Equally noteworthy, however, is how references to Śiva are interwoven with them: Śaṃkara being one of the Rudras (a host of Vedic deities which, in later Śaiva reception, are identified as avatars of Śiva), Vāsuki being depicted as a snake around Śiva’s neck, and Skanda being the offspring of Śiva and Pārvati (the story on which Kālidāsa based his Kumārasaṃbhava). Others still have no direct connection to the post-Vedic bhakti movements. The Yakṣas and Yama do make important appearances in the Kena and Katha Upaniṣad, respectively, while a devatā like Aryaman is largely absent in post-Vedic religious developments. Each of these divine references functions metonymically: they connect Kṛṣṇa through with a larger text or body of texts, including a broad range of Vedic hymns, Purāṇic storylines and bhakti-cults outside of his own. Each of these identified characters then transform into a new, meditative focus for the bhakta. The four sages (Nārada and Kapila, Vyāsa and Kavi Uśanas) Kṛṣṇa assumes are each significant characters in their own right, but in vibhūti tie together three important bodies of Sanskrit literature: the Vedas, the Sāṃkhya philosophical school and the Itihāsa (chiefly, Mahābhārata). The latter of these marks the beginning of increasing self-referential attitude to the Gītā by Kṛṣṇa. Uśanas was a Vedic sage, while Nārada features prominently in the Purāṇas. The founding of the Sāṃkhya school is traditionally attributed to Kapila; with this identification Kṛṣṇa retroactively deepens Arjuna’s choice to become his student by bringing him directly into the Sāṃkhya lineage (returning ad fontem). But most significantly, Kṛṣṇa takes on the traditional authorship of the entire Mahābhārata, within which the Gītā is embedded. Through the character of Vyāsa, Kṛṣṇa speaks obliquely to the audience of the Gītā, declaring himself the source even of this very text. Through the characters of these sages, Kṛṣṇa’s intertextual cosmos expands in a similar metonymic manner as was done with divine identifications. He stitches together Vedic metaphysical speculation, the heroic pursuit of dharma in the Mahābhārata, and the unity of metaphysical and practical discourse in Sāṃkhya-Yoga as having one source for their greatness and a single purport. Kṛṣṇa lists three heroic characters (Prahlāda, Vāsudeva and Arjuna) which deepen the self-referential 47 �commentary on the Gītā and further interlace it in an intertextual matrix. Naming Vāsudeva is the most directly self-reflexive moment in the vibhūti, as it is the specific character of Kṛṣṇa in the Mahābhārata. But by declaring himself to be Arjuna, Kṛṣṇa takes on both personae in this (self-)dialogue. But he displays an important contrast to Arjuna with a third character; Prahlāda’s story, told in full by the sage Nārada in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa as well as the Viṣṇu Purāṇa, shows him to be a character marked by natural and authentic bhakti. Despite an onslaught by his asura father, Hiraṇyakaśipu, he always maintains his devotion to Viṣṇu: put to death by Viṣṇu in the form of the man-lion (Narasimha), Prahlāda became the sovereign of the Daityas”. By interweaving Prahlāda into the vibhūti, Kṛṣṇa allows this Purāṇic tale to foil the Gītā. Arjuna, a reluctant warrior who must turn back to his dharma, contrasts strongly from Prahlāda’s status as an unwavering devotee both by nature and in spite of his nature. But between these juxtaposed heroes within the vibhūti, Kṛṣṇa reaffirms himself as cause. The contrast of Arjuna and Prahlāda highlights Kṛṣṇa’s final conclusions in the chapter, that he is the universal essence behind the qualities which make each hero great. “Prahlāda who was the worshiper of the Exalted Being was preeminent amongst [Hiraṇyakaśipu’s sons] by his virtues. … In dangers and calamities, his mind (always) remained unruffled. He cherished no desire for enjoyments, heard (as obtainable in the next world) or seen (in this world), as he regarded them to be unreal. He had controlled his senses, vital airs (the life-breath), body and intellect. He completely controlled his desires and kept his mind calm and serene. Though he was a demon by birth, he was devoid of demonic characteristics. [He] had a natural love and devotion to the glorious Lord Vāsudeva.” Kṛṣṇa’s vibhūti recount a cosmogonic act on two levels. Firstly, with respect to Arjuna’s world, it equivocates in essence (their “transcending power, luster and might”) the Gods of the Vedas and Purāṇas, Sages of various lineages, heroic characters from the Mahābhārata and elsewhere, syllables, the Gayatri meter, and elements of the human person (mind, consciousness) by including among the vibhūti. He reminds Arjuna to “know that each and every one of [the vibhūti] has its source in a particle of my splendor”; ascribes to himself the causal role of their greatness as their “seed”. Everything which is great is an effect of Kṛṣṇa’s own greatness: “I support this entire universe with but a single portion of mine”. Secondly, it creates an intertextual cosmos across diverse genres, by including within the vibhūti the Vedic Samhitas, the After many attempts to kill his virtuous son, this episode concludes with Viṣṇu taking an incarnate form as Narasimha to vanquish the asura-king: “After his father had been 48 �Upaniṣads, the Purāṇas and Itihāsas, and more. Kṛṣṇa links each of these, through the “splendor” or “Elixir” of their respective metonymic characters, in his own person. and as the support the entire literary universe as such. In this textual universe, Kṛṣṇa details ‘characters’ which are not only literary persons, but also elements of the Sanskrit language. These reveal another layer at which Kṛṣṇa has planted the ‘seed’ of his greatness. He states that “I am the a among syllables”, referring to the Devanagari script, wherein each consonant character in fact represents a syllable with an implied a unless otherwise accented (to indicate other vowels). The ubiquitous a vowel links each character within a word, mirroring on the morphological level what occurs at the narrative level. Not only are the divine, sagely and heroic figures rooted in the Kṛṣṇa, but even the words by which their tales are told are composed of Kṛṣṇa. Kṛṣṇa teaches a meditative, practical approach to literature: recognizing and savoring the greatness of a character - literary, linguistic, or otherwise - as having their source in the supreme being. Each character within the infinite vibhūti becomes a new ‘mode of being’ on which the devotee may meditate. Further, these characters each represent a single point of intersection in a vast cosmos of Sanskrit literature. Kṛṣṇa stresses that through this meditation, the bhakta comes to know him as the seed of each characters’ particular greatness 49 �Is Odette Odile? Ambiguity and Inference in Proust’s Names Cynthia Crane One of the blessings of being a St. Johns student, sticking to the text, is also one of the greatest frustrations. This semester, I read Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way (1913), which is the first volume of his magnum opus, In Search of Lost Time. While the average reader, or even the devoted reader on an average day, lacks the patience to get through Proust on their own, reading the book in preceptorial has been a joy thick with ambiguity, reflection, revelation, and more ambiguity, the “arbitrary joys” of imagination. Since I found myself languishing in free time at the end of the semester--in other words, frustrated with my preceptorial paper and cramped for time--I decided to distract myself / undertake the foolish, and take Proust to the internet. Following his lead in Part 3 of Swann’s Way, “Place-Names: The Name,” where he freestyles about the meanings of names of places, I started to dig into the names of the characters in the book and do a little freestyling of my own. I do not imagine I have made an exhaustive survey, but I can offer you a quick glance into the thick density of Proust’s language. Many references to French history, particularly military history, appear in the names of characters, evoking an embattled and historical context for this story, so social and psycholog50 ical on the surface. In Part One, “Combray,” we meet Leonie. The name Leonie refers to a lion, a diminutive one. The lion was the symbol of England during the One Hundred Years War between England and France (13371453). A gossip and hypochondriac, Leonie is waited on by her servant, the vigorous and small-minded Francoise. The two, named England and France, engage in increasingly petty unending and unresolvable battles. References to the history of England and France, as well as the class conflict embodied in the Leonie-Francoise relationship, continue as the book goes on. We can add Germany and Türkiye to the mix as well, and throw in some cultural references. Charles Swann, the main character of Part 2, “Swann in Love,” is richly named. • Charles is a common name, but one with royalist connotations. From Charlemagne to Charles X to the Ultraroyalist Prince Charles, Count of Artois, the Charles’s make up a substantial number of the kings of France. Through his friendship with the Prince of Wales, Swann is further associated with European royalty. I am put in mind of the idea that in many ways royalty is more loyal to the people than to the landed aristocracy, with whom it is in many ways in competition. The son of a successful financier, Swann is likewise both accepted and rejected by the aristocracy. Are we to believe he is of a new brand of royalty? �• Swann engages his friend, Charlus (same name), in his efforts to spy on his lover, Odette, while the reader broadly understands that Charlus is having an affair with her. Swann considers Charlus an honest man, perhaps the good doppelgänger to Swann’s evil? Or the reverse? • Swann is a bastardization of the German name Schwann, which means “swan.” We can legitimately make the leap from Swann to swan. When I picture a swan I picture an elegant bird floating on the water, “paddling like hell underneath.” This is the picture of Swann, the psychologically tortured urbane sophisticate, moving smoothly through Parisian social circles while worrying constantly about who Odette is sleeping with when they are apart and whether she is lying to him. • Odette cheats on Swann with another woman while at a picnic in the Bois du Boulogne. Odette and the other woman kiss behind a rock at the Île des Cygnes, the Island of the Swans. There is an Île aux Cygnes in the Seine, but no Île des Cygnes in the Bois. Proust moved an island for his convenience to get the swans where he wanted them. • Swann and Odette’s first sexual encounter happens in his carriage as they kiss over the cattleya orchids she has tucked into the bodice of her dress. I don’t want to carry this too far, but I guess I do . . . the cattleya orchid was first bred in Europe by an Englishman named Cattley. The original flowers were sent to him from Brazil by a man named Swainson. Odette de Crécy, Swann’s lover and the subject of his obsession: • In the German folk tale and the Tchaikovsky ballet Swan Lake (first produced in Moscow, 1877), the virginal white swan is named Odette while the conniving black swan is named Odile. I do not know that Swan Lake was performed in Paris during the decade Proust was active there around the turn of the century. I feel sure he knew the story, through the ballet or the folk tale. According to the tale, the royal Prince Siegfried loves Odette. Siegfried is a German name meaning peace-victory. We will see the name Odette is associated with its opposite, violence and loss in battle, implicating that she is innately bad for Swann. Also in the story Odette is enchanted by the evil sorcerer, Baron von Rothbart—Charles Swann’s supposed friend Charlus is also a baron. • Odette is the diminutive of Otto, a name which in two ways evokes the brutality of French wars in the late 19th century as breech-loaded guns replaced cavalry and muzzle-loaded guns. • In the Crimean War (1853-56), France fought alongside Germany and England against Russia and the Otto-man Empire. France suffered terrible losses during the war. Modern Türkiye was the heart of the Ottoman Empire. It appears again as a place Odette cruises to when she leaves Swann to spend a year away from him with his 51 �former friends, then it reappears in the final unhappy dream sequence which leads to the end of his love affair with Odette, embodied by a young man in a fez. • Otto von Bismarck was the chancellor of Prussia then German emperor who defeated France in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, ending the hegemony of France in Europe as well as ending monarchic rule in France. Proust was born three months after the war ended. Although the Prussians won and the war led to the unification of Germany, they suffered brutal losses at the hands of the superior contemporary French artillery. • Odette’s last name, deCrécy, is derived from a decisive battle in the One Hundred Years War between England and France. At Crécy, or Cressy in English, the English with their long bows soundly defeated the French (1346), who used the older crossbow. Like the battles above, it was a slaughter. Finally: • Forcheville, one of Odette’s other lovers, bears a name invented by Proust. It appears to be Anglicized from the French, fourche, which means pitchfork, as in a tool of the common farmer, while ville means city. A fork is a fourchette. A snake’s forked tongue is la langue fourche. The verb translated “to have a forked tongue,” in English, means to lie, or to deceive, although the connotation of “having” rather than “speaking with” seems to me to be even more damning of the liar. Here’s 52 a bit of trivia that could only have appeared in this day and age: a Google scan of published works shows the French phrase avoir la langue forchue was basically unused between the middle of the 19th and the middle of the 20th centuries. It did have a small blip of usage between 1908 and 1917, when the book was being written. Forcheville and Odette both lie to Swann about their affair. The connections among these words cannot be systematically rationalized. It is enough to know that Odette’s name elicits historical battles based on technological defeats, and those on more than one front. It is enough to know that questions of France’s place on the European stage concerned Proust, as did the morality of the various classes. I am not educated enough to completely decode the many ways Proust uses the names of the characters in Swann’s Way to tell his story, but I get the gist. Sometimes with Proust that is the most you can hope for. After all, le cygne, swan, in French is pronounced the same as le signe, sign. Is Proust invoking the new study of semiotics? Maybe, maybe not. He is at least embracing the ambiguities of modernity. �Swann - Stuart Kenny & Cynthia Crane 53 �Translation The Steppenwolf - Herman Hesse 54 �Contributor Charles Chapin 55 �The Steppenwolf By Herman Hesse Translation by Charles Chapin I found myself again in a circular hallway, excited by the adventure of the hunt. And everywhere, on countless doors, lured inscriptions: ———————————————————————————————— | “Mutabor” | | Metamorphosis into Random Animals and Plants | ———————————————————————————————— ———————————————————————————————— | | | Kamasutram | Instruction in the Indian Art of Love | Beginners’ Course: 42 Different Techniques | for Sexercise | | ———————————————————————————————— ———————————————————————————————— | Delightful Suicide! | | You’ll Laugh Yourself to Death | ———————————————————————————————— ———————————————————————————————— | Want to Sublimate? | | Wisdom of the East | ———————————————————————————————— ———————————————————————————————— | Oh, to Have a Thousand Tongues! | 56 Only for Men | | �57 �———————————————————————————————— ———————————————————————————————— | Downfall of the Occident | | Discounted Price. Still Unbeatable | ———————————————————————————————— ———————————————————————————————— | | Embodiment of Art | The Transformation of Time into Space | through Music | | ———————————————————————————————— ———————————————————————————————— | The Laughing Tear | | Humor Chamber | ———————————————————————————————— ———————————————————————————————— | Hermit Games | | Full-Fledged Substitute for Any Social Interaction | ———————————————————————————————— The row of inscriptions ran endlessly. One hailed: ———————————————————————————————— | Personality Building Tutorial | Success Guaranteed | | ———————————————————————————————— That seemed attention-worthy to me, and I stepped into the doorway. I was welcomed into a dim, silent space, in which a man sat on the floor without a chair, in the Oriental style, something like to a giant chessboard standing before him. He appeared to me, at first glance, to be my friend Pablo, at least he wore a similarly colorful silk jacket and had the same dark, gleaming eyes. 58 �59 �“Are you Pablo?” I asked. “I am no one,” he said warmly. “Here we carry no names, here we are no persons. I am a chess player. Would you like a personality building lesson?” “Yes, please.” “Then please, kindly provide me with a few dozen of your figurines for teaching material.” “My figurines…?” “The personas, into which you’ve seen your so-called personality disintegrate. Without figurines, I simply cannot play.” He held a mirror up to me, and I saw, again, the unity of my person disintegrated into many selves, many “Me”s, their number seeming to have grown even more than before. But the figures were now very small, about the size of handy chess pieces, and the player took, with silent, sure grips of his fingers, about a dozen of them and placed them next to the chessboard on the floor. Monotonously, he spoke on his subject, like a man repeating a frequently given talk or lecture: “You’re familiar with the flawed and doomed notion that a human should be in permanent unity, a permanent unit. You’re also familiar with a human being made up of a host of souls, of many, many egos. To split the ostensible unity of the person into these many figures, separating them from one other, is regarded as mad, that’s why science invented the name schizophrenia for it. Science is, in this respect, correct, as naturally no multiplicity, no plurality, is tamed without leadership, without a certain order and grouping. Science is wrong, however, in believing that only one unique, binding, lifelong order of the sub-ego, the sub-Me, should be possible. This error of science has some unpleasant consequences, its worth lies merely therein, that the state-sanctioned teacher and educator see their work simplified, and that thinking and experimentation are put aside. Because of that mistake, many incurable nutjobs are validated as “normal” and socially desirable, and conversely, many geniuses are viewed as a mad. We are supplementing science’s patchy doctrine of the soul with a concept we call ‘building’. To those who have experienced the disintegration of their ego, we show that, any time, they can put the pieces back together anew, in any given order, and in doing so, that they can achieve infinite variation in the game of life. Just as the poet, with a handful of figures, makes a drama, so do we build, unceasingly, from the figures of our fragmented ego, new groups, with new games and excitements, with ever newer situations. Behold!” 60 �61 �With quiet, clever fingers, he snatched my figurines, all the aged ones, the youths, the children, the women, all the cheerful and sad, strong and tender, nimble and clumsy figures, and arranged them swiftly on his board for a game, where at once they set themselves up into groups, families, for play and battle, for friendships and enmities, forming a small world. Before my enrapt eyes, he let the bustling yet well-ordered little world move a while, playing and fighting, closing alliances and fighting battles, courting one another, marrying, propagating; it was, in fact, a multi-character, moving and exciting drama. Then he swept over the board with a carefree gesture, overturned all the figurines gently, thrust them into a pile and built, thoughtfully, a selective artist, a completely new game out of the same figurines, with completely different groupings, relationships and interdependencies. The second game was related to the first: it was the same world, the same material, from which he had built it, but the key had changed, the tempo altered, the motifs accented differently, the situations posed differently. And so built the clever builder from forms, of which each was a piece of my self, one game after another, all of them distantly similar, all recognizable as belonging to the same world, obligated to the same origin, yet each completely new. “This is the art of living,” he said didactically. “You yourself may, from now on, continue to set up and invigorate the game of your life at will, to entangle and enrich it, it is in your hands. Just as madness, in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom, so is schizophrenia the beginning of all art, all fantasy. Even the erudite have already half-recognized this, as one may glean, for example, from the “Princes’ Magic Horn”, that enchanting book in which the courageous and industrious labor of a scholar is ennobled through the resourceful collaboration with a number of crazy and institutionalized artists. — Here, place your little figures close to you, the game will spark joy often. The figure who, today, has mushroomed into a forbidding bogeyman and spoils your game, tomorrow you will downgrade to a harmless supporting role. The poor little figure who, for a while, seemed condemned to terrible misfortune and bad luck, in the next game you’ll make a princess. I wish you much pleasure, sir.” I bowed deeply and gratefully before this gifted chess player, placed the figurines in my pocket, and ducked back through the narrow doors. I had actually thought that shortly I would sit on the floor in the corridor, and for hours, an eternity, play with the figurines, but I had barely stood back in the bright, round theater aisle when new currents, stronger than I, pulled me out... 62 �63 �Queen Titania - Nadine Bucca 64 �Toasts To the Tutors (Spring 2024) - Michael Connors To the Tutors (Spring 2024) - William Houston Taylor III To the Tutors (Spring 2023)* - Siobhán Petersen 65 �The Johnnie Conversation Michael Connors - Toast to the Tutors (Spring 2024) The Great Books are often described as containing ‘The Great Conversation’ of Western civilisation. Indeed, it has been said that there may be nothing more Western than the ongoing dialogue of ideas. And there is nothing more Johnnie than having that conversation anytime, anywhere, about anything, and in front of anyone. This is ‘the Johnnie Conversation’. If you haven’t found yourself mid bench press discussing state of nature theories with a fellow Johnnie, or if you haven’t done a deep dive on the relationship between truth and beauty within 3 seconds of bumping into a friend at the shops, or if you have done anything other than talk about the Great Books while you have been at St. John’s, you have missed the point. If Johnnie, then existential analysis at the drop of a hat. This is the Johnnie Conversation. It is true that at St. John’s the conversation really does not stop. Over these past two years, I have had the distinct privilege of experiencing this with all the graduating students. Here are some highlights. Sylvie Bernhardt and I recently carried out a thought experiment involving how a contentious argument between Plato and Aristotle might play out, and its philosophical repercussions. A regular in the GI office on school days, Nick Dacosta and I would discuss every topic we were reading each night, then Kashya would pop out and tell us what Nietzsche would say. At the Ramsay house, Dominic Escorpeso and I shared conversations about the impressive oratory style of Cicero. Before class, Stuart Kenny and I discussed the merits of the Kantian ‘moral imperative’ in the GI office. Living with my good friend Yonas Ketsela at the Ramsay house, meant early breakfast breakdowns in the kitchen about, let’s say, every possible aspect of philosophy. In the GI office Jordan Klein and I discussed Hume’s scepticism. Ben Morgan explained to me that everything is political… even the office MM’s. At the ASG, Luise Parrales and I have discussed the ways in which the texts of the Western Canon are in dialogue, and what makes them great. Quinn Rifkin and I would chat at the pub, at the gym, or at social events like Sunday Supper Club, hosted by our good friend Sarah Ritchie. I would explain to Quinn what I was studying, then Quinn would sum up the entire history of that idea perfectly in 20 seconds. He would tell me about Straussianism… but it was over my head… After class Jack Ryan and I would continue to draw diagrams on the chalkboard, in an attempt to map out Aristotle’s virtue. At mealtimes fellow Aussie Luca Sudjovic and I would discuss every single topic we were studying. And lucky last, who could forget my main man, Houston Taylor? Houston and I achieved 66 �something intellectually noteworthy. We discussed every topic imaginable, while at the same time, managing to relate every single idea to either Plato’s Timaeus, or Chattanooga, Tennessee. In all seriousness, we do owe a debt to Houston for his work in the bookstore. Every time I went there to buy a book, I hoped Houston was there to help me get the right one…and to explain the whole book to me. I’m sure everyone in the GI has had similar Johnnie Conversations with these graduating students, and been enriched by them, as I have. Since beginning my studies at St. John’s, I have spent much time researching the benefits of a liberal education. And I think there is one main takeaway that should ring true for us all, an overarching purpose of a liberal education. This purpose was once articulated perfectly to me, by Mr. Petrich who said, ‘Well Mr. Connors, I think it makes us more human’. I think this is true of my experience, I have certainly connected more with humanity by reading the Great Books. But when I graduate St. John’s, I will also be a bit more human for having known you all, for sharing in the great Johnnie conversations, and from the enriching friendships created in the Graduate Institute. To my fellow graduating Johnnies, it has been a highlight of my life to undertake this education with you. I wish you all the very best for the future, and I know that wherever life takes you, you will continue to enrich the lives of others, as you have done in this community. May your future conversations be as great as those we enjoyed together at St. John’s. Now to some thank-yous. I’d like to take this opportunity to recognise the relationship between the Graduate Institute and The Ramsay Centre back in Australia. The Australians in the GI are all generously sponsored by the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, and without that support we would not be here. On behalf of the Ramsay Scholars, I’d like to acknowledge the Ramsay Centre and thank them for their support. I’d also like to acknowledge our dean Mr. Brendan Boyle, and our former Dean Ms. Emily Langston, who have not only worked hard to strengthen the Ramsay-St. John’s relationship, but who have assisted the whole graduating cohort in many ways over the course of our studies. Ms. Langston and Mr. Boyle, thank you for your ceaseless positivity and enthusiasm for the mission of liberal education at St. John’s, the generosity and guidance you have given each of us individually, and your commitment to fostering a culture of collaboration and friendship in the Graduate Institute. We must also acknowledge Ms. Kashya Boretsky, who works behind the scenes 67 �to make sure the GI runs like clockwork. The level of energy and enthusiasm that Kashya brings to her work, and to discussing the Great Books, is infectious. She is also ninja-level at Johnnie Conversations. Kashya, all the graduating students have benefited from your administrative help throughout our education, and all been touched by your friendship. Thank you. Finally, I’d like to recognise those great stewards of the seminar, our masterful tutors, who have led us through these great ideas, and who make our intellectual journey possible. Tutors, the enrichment, wonder, and joy we have experienced from the Great Books would not have been possible without your guidance and friendship. You have encouraged us to think deeply, to strive for understanding of the great ideas, and to clarify our opinions. On behalf of the graduating students, a toast to the tutors: Thank you for your patience, your wisdom, your good humour, and for your friendship. Thank you for your guidance, for helping us to be more human, and for encouraging our Johnnie Conversations. To the Tutors. 68 �Lead and I Will Follow William Houston Taylor III - Toast to the Tutors (Spring 2024) In Gretel Ehrlich’s book The Solace of Open Spaces, she tells the story of a rancher friend living in Wyoming. He’s an eccentric and recluse. He works as a farm hand while his labor is in season. When it’s not, the man, she says, holes himself up in a little shack on a vast plot of land and plunges himself into total isolation. Ehrlich sentimentalizes this a bit. In one beautiful passage she compares the farm hand to the Zen monk Dōgen. Since she herself moved to Wyoming following the early, sudden, and cancerous death of her fiancé only a few years prior to writing, she is sympathetic to the man’s existential despair because she feels it, too—as all human beings do, from time to time. I love this story because I’ve also been known to be eccentric and reclusive, prone to nutty beliefs, and quick to anger. I once moved all the way not to Wyoming but to Japan—the home of Dōgen himself—looking for the kind of solace that Ehrlich describes as I too am a human being—and I sometimes act like it, from time to time. I moved to St. John’s College two years ago, not ever having been to Annapolis, curious about these great books, but expecting just a little bit of isolation and a little bit of solace. Instead, for two years now, time has stopped. Despite Annapolis’ geography, I’ve found perhaps the most spiritually open and generous place left on the planet. During my first tutorial, while reading Hamlet, Mr. Petrich instructed us to consider in the first scene why Bernardo, who has just entered the scene, should be concerned with identifying Francisco, who is already at the guard post. After all, it would make more sense for the guard on duty to be doing the guarding. But Bernardo is wary of the ghost. This, a perfect example of the power of close reading, opened up the text in a bright, new way for me. It showed that from the first, mundane lines, Shakespeare sets the dark tone of Hamlet. After all, the Danes are at war. The state of war requires constant, acute diligence. There’s no guarantee that anyone will find what just he expects around the next corner. As with the state of war, so with the text. From Hamlet to the Republic, from Chaucer to Rousseau, close reading has prompted text after text to bloom in its significance for me. The entire world of literature, philosophy, science, and politics has become much more open and thereby much more satisfy- 69 �ing, exciting, and sometimes even consoling. But even more significantly, my experience at St. John’s has taught me—and, in particular, Ms. Axelrod has been fond of reminding me—that philosophy need not be a solitary, nasty, brutish, or isolating endeavor. In fact, as I myself have been known to point out, Socratic philosophy seems very much to be about hanging out and killing time with one’s friends. So, we thank you all, our tutors, for modelling this behavior in the noblest way one can. I’d like to thank the tutors I have not yet mentioned. Ms. Benson and Mr. Goldberg, for showing me—like Mr. Petrich—that when one cedes pride of place to the text, that close reading—reading between the lines, so to speak—pays back dividends. I want to thank some others, in particular, for simply putting up with me—especially Mr. Goldsmith, Ms. Paalman, Ms. Silver, and Mr. Crockett—because they’ve taught me that the greatest intellectual rewards are not necessarily to be found waging dubious intellectual battles—being eristic as Socrates calls it in the Meno—but are much more often found when showing up to seminar ready to hang out with one’s friends—to be a bit more dialectic. Even though this is a toast to our tutors, I’d like also to thank my peers—each and everyone of you—for being those very friends, as well as Kashya Boretsky, Ms. Langston, and Mr. Boyle for their work in helping to build a place like the St. John’s College Graduate Institute, where philosophic that very friendship is so carefully fostered. So, without further ado, I propose a toast to our St. John’s tutors; as Glaucon says to Socrates: “Lead, and I will follow.” 70 �In the Doing Siobhán Petersen - Toast to the Tutors (Spring 2023) *Ms. Petersen’s toast was unfortunately omitted from the Spring 2023 issue of Colloquy, our sincerest apologies. One thing I’ve realized is I can only say something of real importance when I speak personally, so if you’ll please indulge me, I’ll just speak for myself here. Insofar as there’s a meaning to life, it seems I’m only going to find it in the doing. Being the sort of kid I was – that is to say, someone who would fall in with the Johnnie crowd – I very early found myself lost in an existential haze. Who am I, what are we doing here? You know, normal kid stuff. I could never shake this feeling that we’re just here. Meaningful answers did not seem forthcoming. I remember this moment last semester, as I’m doing my little pre-class ritual – refilling my water, getting coffee and the like – when I suddenly stop, and I realize I’d found it; this all felt meaningful to me. Getting a glimpse of Capital-M “Meaning” is kinda blink-and-you-miss-it – you go to seminar, you get wrapped up in the next reading; the day to day, moment to moment; constantly bouncing around new and exciting conversations. Yet, that moment; it’s like the clouds breaking, and realizing you’re standing in the sun. Suddenly you realize it’s been a beautiful day for a while now; perhaps it was the whole time. And even if the clouds close back in as you rejoin the hustle, maybe we can keep in mind we know the sun is back there, because we’ve felt its warmth. Meaning, then, isn’t an articulable experience because it’s not an intellectual experience. If that’s indeed the case, it’s a peculiar thing to note, given what it is we do here all day every day Rather it seems meaning comes from a pattern of fulfilling actions. You can’t guarantee it’ll be “for anything,” you don’t know if it really “means anything;” but if feels good now, it feels right now; it’s important, now. And that’s probably easier said than done. But, I’ve found that set of actions through exploring important things with interested people. Sharing in our own canon, but then more importantly our collective library of reflections on them; knowing that I am among like minds who are looking for something, 71 �and who are willing to collaborate to find it. I don’t think a life can’t just be meaningful, but perhaps it can continually become meaningful. Perhaps it must. I can’t promise we’ll arrive at that fulfillment, because there is nowhere to arrive. The spirit, if you like the term, perhaps always wants a project; I can think of no project grander than ardently, bravely trying on every available lens to attempt to glimpse something true. Even when you’re not sure it’s there. Especially when you’re not sure it’s there. In dialogue we all get to try each other’s lenses too; and for that I’m thankful to our learning community. Over time you collect a lot of lenses, and I am certainly not quite ready to let that go. How could you be?But this brings us to the tutors... I have to imagine our tutors are just like us; earnestly searching for something when they join us in seminar. I also have to imagine these kinds of questions only get harder to resolve over time, not easier. Honestly engaging with an idea requires a special kind of uncertainty, accepting that no matter what’s in front of you, you might still have something you need to learn from it. For me, the problem has only compounded the more things I’ve had in front of me - I’ve never felt more uncertain in my life than I do right now. If that’s so, it must take incredible patience to sit at the table and let us struggle through it, to master uncertainty so it doesn’t rob anyone else of theirs. I must then – I’d like to say “conclude,” but I’ll instead say speculate – that the fulfillment I’ve glimpsed must be the source of some repose, and hope for each of them that they’ve found enough of it here, in the doing, with us. That they too have found genuine meaning in this project. Our tutors perpetually display a flexibility of mind, a patience of contribution, and an attentiveness to the unstated, all in service of profound enthusiasm for seeing us perform that pattern of action. I’ve never felt more intellectually lost than right now. But I’ve never felt better equipped than now to wander, either. And so for that, I’ll ask us all to raise a glass to the tutors of St. John’s. Thank you all so sincerely for becoming at the table with us. And, I’d like to particularly thank our outgoing Associate Dean, Ms. Langston, who’s meant so much to the GI and who’s been unfailingly generous with her time, her thoughts, and her mentorship; and to whom I never managed to turn in a tutorial paper that wasn’t the length of a precept. Cheers, to the tutors of St. John’s! 72 �Path Through Reeds - Nadine Bucca 73 �Year in Review By Stephen Borsum �Year in Review: Growing & Flourishing It is with a gentle look back that we all prepare for a bold step forward. And in turning back to see this academic year as a whole, rather than living and experiencing its multitude of parts, we could perhaps venture to pinpoint some small number of the various exceptional moments that have made up this year for the St. John’s College Graduate Institute. First, in recognizing a banner year for the GI’s growth, it’s worth giving thanks to the faculty and staff who work so hard to make the experience enriching for the students, and to build it up to be a sustainable and effective agent of change in the lives of students yet to come. In particular, we pause now to give thanks both to Associate Dean Brendan Boyle, for his tireless efforts of advancing the GI within the community and beyond, and his daily work to ensure the wellbeing of the students and GI community in general—always seen to be of paramount importance; and also Kashya Boretsky, whose behind-the-scenes efforts, to the perception of the student body, keep the GI operating seamlessly—not to mention she is always ready to engage anyone, literally anyone, in a conversation about language or Nietzsche. And now we come to a question about the Graduate Institute, one I think Colloquy can help answer in small part: What are we here for, beyond simply trying to seek, with some clarity, the higher things? Furthermore, if we’ve all digested the proper amount of Aristotelian nutrition: If we are forming bonds of fellowship with others attuned to the same search, are the various friends we make nothing less than true friends? This year we saw the flourishing of community, with Sarah Ritchie’s Sunday Supper Clubs becoming a regular event beloved by many in Annapolis. We immersed ourselves in music, either through trips to the National Symphony in DC, or Mr. Crockett’s music preceptorial. There were the highs of seeing our dear friends graduate, preparing to take yet another momentous step in their lives, and the lows of seeing those same friends leave us to take such a step. We engaged with the question of the soul’s salvation and eternal love with Dante, the beauty of verse with Proust, the structure of the Universe with Galileo, and questioned how best to structure society with Hobbes, Aristotle, and Rousseau. There were also bonds formed by pursuing the Johnnie Project with texts outside the program: like the works of Mishima, or the catalog of Mr. Boyle’s reading group texts. I recognize I have missed many, many moments, big and small, in this note. In a way, that’s the point. As we are constistenly becoming more whole as people, truly capturing every moment of growth in our character is impossible. But the end result, who we have become and are today, is evident. Stephen Borsum - Editor 75 �76 �77 �Thank you to all our contributors 78 Austin Suggs Oblivion Stacey Rains Sorrow Martha Franks Reading Nadine Bucca Enkidu’s Dwelling Cynthia Crane Lady Sagredo Stephen Borsum The Mode of Pi Melissa Hicinbothem I Am. Working? Johnathan Wright A Bug’s Life Jay Gold Karña in the Round Kelly Kwon The Ultimate Desire of Le Misenthrope Gus Kraus Intertextuality and the Elixer of Character Cynthia Crane Is Odette Odile? Charles Chapin The Steppenwolf (Herman Hesse) Michael Connors The Johnnie Conversation William Taylor Lead and I Will Follow Siobhán Petersen In the Doing Nadine Bucca Visual Art Paul Harland-White Visual Art Stuart Kenny Visual Art Cynthia Crane Visual Art �COLLOQUY St. John’s College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, Maryland Volume 14: Spring 2024 Editor Stephen Borsum Editorial board: Paul Harland-White, Nadine Bucca, Kyle Reynolds, Cynthia Crane, Sylvie Bernhardt, Stu Williams With thanks to: Kashya Boretsky, Associate Dean Brendan Boyle, and the Graduate Student Council And welcome to the new Editor-in-Chief of Colloquy for the 2024-2025 academic year: Nadine Bucca! ..... Colloquy is a biannual publication of the Graduate Student Council and St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. The journal is free of charge. Address correspondence to Colloquy, The Graduate Institute at St. John’s College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, Maryland, 21401. Or email to colloquy@sjc.edu. Students, tutors, and alumni of St. John’s College and the Graduate Institute are encouraged to submit their manuscripts in PDF or Word format by email to colloquy@sjc.edu . The journal also accepts submissions of poetry, original art, and photography. Please include your name, contact information, and the title of your work with your submission. Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in the journal do not necessarily reflect those St. John’s College, the Graduate Council, or Colloquy. 79 �80 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Colloquy Description An account of the resource A student-run journal for the Graduate Institute community of St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland. The issues feature essays, art, poetry, interviews, and more. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data pdf Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 79 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Colloquy, Spring 2024 Description An account of the resource Volume 14 of Colloquy, published in Spring 2024. The theme of the issue is On Character. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Borsum, Stephen (Editor) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived English Subject The topic of the resource St. John's College (Annapolis, Md.)--Periodicals Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Colloquy_Spring2024 Graduate Institute