10 20 5666 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/f0b83b96e378c8d4486c33de2fe69149.jpg 8b31343922598c45c3a7f15a20e78a43 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/9c241c195d1f8608cc370892f3661e1d.jpg f8e21fad80ae3d8a0c72589a809d8bc3 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 Image Collection—Annapolis Description An account of the resource The Greenfield Library Image Collection houses over 5,000 photographs, postcards, drawings, and other graphic materials. The images in the collection document the history, academic, and community life of St. John’s College. To learn more about the Greenfield Library's archives use policy or to obtain high-resolution images, please see the <a title="Image Collection Use Policy" href="http://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/libraries/greenfield-library/policies/#photographicarchivepolicy" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Library’s Image Collection Use Policy</a>. Click on <a title="Photographic Archives" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=7">Items in the Image Collection—Annapolis Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield 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 Annapolis, MD Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context imagecollectionannapolis Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data black and white photograph Physical Dimensions The actual physical size of the original image image 22.5 x 16.5 cm, mount 25.5 x 20.5 cm 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 Dr. James L. Whiteside's class of 1878, St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland Description An account of the resource Photograph of the St. John's College class of 1878, taken circa 1875 or 1876. An inscription on the back of the photograph's mount reads: "Dr. J. L. Whiteside's class of 1878, St. John's College, Annapolis, Md. Back row: Wright, Gontrum, Martin, ?, Sprigg, (Judge) Stump, Harter (Pres. Del. Univ., Dover), Reed, ?, 2nd row: Krebs, J. L. Whiteside (roommates), Weagley, Leason, Batson, Andrews, Billingslea, Dashiel (in Navy), 4 men sitting: Comegys, (Judge) Harlan (Baltimore), Washington, Gorter, (From 1921 Pa. Ave. N.W.)" Whiteside's address listed in the Register of the Graduates and Alumni of St. John's College at Annapolis, Maryland (1908) was 1921 Pennsylvania Ave., Washington, D.C. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource unidentified 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 circa 1878 Type The nature or genre of the resource still image Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource jpg Subject The topic of the resource Male college students Whiteside, James L. Andrew, Lewis C. Batson, John R. Billingslea, James Dashiell, Robert B. Gontrum, John F. Gorter, James P. (James Polk), 1858-1939 Harlan, Henry D. (Henry David), 1858-1943 Harter, George Abram Krebs, J. Harry Leason, James A. Martin, George Thomas Reid, Magnus Sprigg, Alden Mant Stump, Henry Arthur, 1857-1934 Washington, Ernest Weagley, Charles C. W. Wright, Abram W. Comegys, Cornelius, 1858-1938 Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SJC-P-2841 Alumni https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/e8bfe27572c59e8d85b50c3c86a0ac1b.mp3 5507733f9f435be1199a1f16fcfb587b 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 m4a Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:58:56 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 Reading the Silences of the Text: Space, Word, and Japanese Linked Poetry Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture given by Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen on September 27, 2024 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "Renga is a hundred-verse sequence composed during a session by a group of 3 to 10 or more poets in the Japanese medieval period (12th-16th c.); it is the precursor of the kasen, the shorter 36-verse version popular among Basho and his group in the early modern period. This lecture examines the socio-historical and cultural conditions that made such a unique genre possible, including the rules of progression from verse 1 to 100, and casts light on the way of reading the poem in its own time. We will pay attention to the influence of Buddhist philosophy in the understanding of poetry's function and practice in premodern Japan while reading 'Broken Beneath Snow,' a renga composed by a group of samurai and monks under the guidance of the renowned poet-monk Shinkei in the winter of 1468 in Tokyo. We will also look at examples of US college student renga from my Great Books classes as one of the genre's possible translations into a Western social poetry practice using the Internet." Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Ramirez-Christensen, Esperanza U. 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 2024-09-27 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 SF_Ramirez-ChristensenE_2024-09-27 Subject The topic of the resource Renga Friday night lecture Worrell lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/ba14c6e6d86459b54a80f61a884bb60a.PDF 93354561ba51f8078d8657652e2939b5 PDF Text Text Studying Phlogiston in the 21st Century We usually think of science as a progressive activity, where “progressive” means that today’s science is not just different from yesterday’s science, but that it is better. According to this view, old science is generally wrong, and the older it is the more wrong it is. Why then at St. John’s do we learn science through so many “wrong” ideas? The answer is that our science is not better or worse according to the age of the texts we read, but it is better or worse according to how we learn to think. The conception that old science is irrelevant is rooted in misunderstandings of the word “science.” What is science? I think that there are three ascending levels of understanding science, but it is only at the third level that we would be doing science. The first two levels resemble science, and they are popularly understood to be science, but they are only its superficial manifestations. 1. Science as a collection of facts At the first of these levels of understanding, science is a collection of facts. For example: The combustion of methane with oxygen is an oxidation-reduction reaction which involves the breaking and forming of covalent bonds. The reaction occurs as CH4 + 2O2 → CO2 + 2H2O. The first of the reaction products, CO2, has a double bond between the carbon and each oxygen, and these are each one σ bond and one π bond. Two of the carbon’s p-orbital electrons are used for the two π bonds.... (etc.). Many high school students memorize something like this in 10th grade chemistry, and most students of college science face similar collections of facts in their studies. If science means knowing these kinds of facts, it seems strange to read Joseph Priestley’s 1775 paper “Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air.” In that paper Priestley describes combustion by means of “phlogiston.” Even more curiously, phlogiston may not be a thing but a “principle” and may be related to the alchemical element of fire. Phlogiston also seems to have negative weight. From a modern perspective, Priestley's terminology is alien, his ideas are strange, and his facts are certainly wrong. But what do we mean by facts? “Having the facts” passes for scientific understanding, and having the latest fact is the trump card (“But there’s a new study which shows…”). We belong to one category of people (perhaps called “rational”) if we believe the current set of facts, but we belong to another set of people (perhaps “tin-foil hat”) if we reject some of them. But what meaning can the word “fact” have if it only distinguishes orthodox opinions from heretical opinions? In 1775 Priestley’s work gave the world new facts, and the alchemical element of fire (old orthodoxy) was giving way to phlogiston (new orthodoxy). Are ‘facts’ what we find in today’s headlines and textbooks? They may 1 �be called facts, but we know that most of them will later be called ‘false.’ Science-related headlines are often interesting because they tell us that yesterday’s (or last year’s or lastdecade’s) headlines were wrong. Tomorrow, and next year, and one hundred years from now, there will be new headlines and new facts. 2. Science as unifying concepts and theories At the second level of understanding, science is a collection of unifying concepts and guiding theories. For example: Atoms are composed of a dense nucleus of protons and neutrons surrounded by a diffuse region of negatively charged electrons. The number of protons in the nucleus is the fundamental determinant of an atom’s chemical properties, while the electrons occupy specific orbitals and are responsible for the nature of chemical bonds (etc.). Broadly speaking, anything that is called a science has its own unifying theories and concepts. At this level we recognize that there isn’t such a thing as a mere fact. Facts aren’t simple or isolated things, but are actually understandings that are only meaningful in a complex expression of relations. Only when we understand those relations and unifying concepts does the “fact” have meaning. And yet, the theories to which our facts belong are not the heart of science, either. To understand this, consider what happens when we take existing theories as the framework within which we ‘do’ science. We would presume that those can account for what we see, and we may conclude that there is little science left to be done. In 1900 Lord Kelvin said “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.” Tremendous revolutions in physics (quantum mechanics and relativity) were looming in 1900, but as far as Kelvin could see, everything was accounted for within the existing frameworks. When we take existing theories as our guide, it’s like searching inside a box of our own construction and we can’t recognize its walls as self-imposed limitations. How can we understand the results of an experiment if we judge them according to what we think they ought to be? How can we see beyond a theory if the theory is the lens through which we look? 3. Science as a living inquiry Science is not a collection of facts, but it also isn’t the theories or the lenses through which we look. Science is a way of thinking, a way that is grounded in and contingent upon observation. Observation is the touchstone which allows us to challenge our own thinking. This is the third level for understanding science: as a living inquiry. To study 2 �science is not to study facts, nor is it to learn to think theoretically. Doing science means learning to observe and coming to understand how observations are the basis for creating, organizing, and possibly rejecting our own principles and theories. As Priestley did in 1775, we can marvel at a single burning candle, at its light, its heat, at the disappearance of its wax. We might even try burning a candle in a closed vessel and watch what happens, and perhaps measure or weigh it as well. From our own work we could experience the complex and seemingly disparate events of ‘combustion,’ and perhaps wonder how they might be related. Without this direct experience, criticizing Priestley on the basis of his errors, or his shortcomings, or his unwarranted assumptions, is being scientifically lazy. We are merely taking the authority of later geniuses to criticize the insights of an earlier one. Science really is inquiry. When we can see it this way, we see it not as arbitrary ideas but as an expanding enterprise that only makes progress by overcoming its own myopia, often in seemingly radical ways. It is too easy to be trapped by our own preconceptions. In 1971, Carl Sagan said “I think it is a kind of intellectual chauvinism to assume that all the laws of physics have been discovered by the year of our meeting. Had we held this meeting twenty or forty years ago, we would perhaps have erroneously drawn the same conclusion.” Albert Einstein, Lewis Thomas, and others have said similar things, and no one who believes otherwise is poised to discover. If we perform combustion “experiments” 1 while reading a Chemistry textbook we might feel that our work is correct only if its results agree with the book. An accident, a curious occurrence, a “wrong” answer would be considered distractions from the goal. Students in most chemistry labs are graded on the quality of their results because the aim of the class is to determine whether they can do careful work within predetermined bounds. This is an important skill, but science is more than having the skill of a technician. Science is learning how to inquire, and nothing undermines an inquiry more than supposing that the answer is already known. A belief that the question is fixed in advance and that someone already knows the ‘right’ answer might keep us from seeing the wonders that appear before our eyes. If they interfere with our ability to see and to inquire, today’s theories and facts are no less a tyrant than yesterday’s. At St. John’s we observe and experiment for ourselves with combustion while we read Priestley and Lavoisier. The questions come to us as open, not with pre-fabricated answers lurking behind them. We read Lavoisier along with Dalton, Gay-Lussac, and others, but we do not read them because they proved Priestley wrong. We read them because, like them, we too have wrestled with phlogiston, and we too have seen 1 The scare quotes are here because it’s not an experiment if the expected outcome is known in advance. It might be a demonstration, an illustration, training, a recipe, or a test, but its aim is not discovery. 3 �combustion, and we too have tried to observe and weigh, and we too have tried to seek better ways of understanding what we have seen. One further reason to read older works is that they better reveal scientific thinking, while papers from the early to mid-20th century onwards often contain only “results” and a narrow statement of hypothesis. Older papers, right or wrong, are a far better way to see and engage with the thinking that characterizes science. If we study only the facts, we will only ever know today’s news. If we study the best thinking and strive to do similarly ourselves, we will be better prepared to evaluate today’s news and perhaps even create tomorrow’s. Eric Poppele Tutor and Director of Laboratories December, 2016 (minor revisions in 2024) 4 � 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 Word doc Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 4 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 Studying Phlogiston in the 21st Century Description An account of the resource This essay by Tutor and Director of Laboratories Eric Poppele explores the meaning of science and how it is practiced at St. John's College. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Poppele, Eric Hunter 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 2016-12, revised 2024 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 Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_PoppeleE_Studying_Phlogiston_in_the_21st_Century_2016-12,_revised_2024 Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/1c9f1744b49ca16735d6978e6266b6b6.mp4 f841c1639c0ffe4aea7da15167c18020 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/. 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. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts. For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Moving Image A series of visual representations imparting an impression of motion when shown in succession. Examples include animations, movies, television programs, videos, zoetropes, or visual output from a simulation. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data mov Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:50:35 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 One and the Many in Psalm 42: Sicut Cervus Description An account of the resource Video recording of a lecture delivered on August 23, 2024, by Suzy Paalman as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Ms. Paalman offers the following description: The motet by Palestrina based on Psalm 42:1 is beloved at St. John's College. If one reads further into the Psalm than the first verse, one can find a return of the motif of water which first appears as "fontes aquarum" in Palestrina's Latin. These "flowing streams" return as tears, as a pouring out of the soul, as cataracts, and more. The "cervus" (deer) of the first verse never appears again explicitly. Instead, we take in images of people: a crowd of mockers, a throng of joyful worshippers, and more. Whereas adding bits of water together doesn't change the character of the water, gathering different people together can have great consequences for the individuals so gathered. The Psalmist wrestles with division and community in himself, in his surroundings, and with his God. What does he long for? Can we learn something about the longing of our own hearts by paying close attention to this Psalm? Ms. Paalman's lecture is the first formal lecture of the academic year. Previously referred to as the Dean's Lecture, this lecture is now called the Christopher B. Nelson Lecture. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Paalman, Susan R. 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 2024-08-23 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: make a recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John’s College Greenfield Library; make a recording of my lecture available online; make typescript copies of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John’s College Greenfield Library; make a copy of my typescript available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource moving image Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp4 Subject The topic of the resource Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da, 1525?-1594. Motets (1584 : Voices (4)). Sicut cervus Bible. Psalms, XLII Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Lec Paalman Susan 2024-08-23_ac Deans Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/f1483e8e62eb0076e8bb62c3d8ae3df4.mp4 7573930b275a0ee9d9bf5f317951061d 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/. 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. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts. For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Moving Image A series of visual representations imparting an impression of motion when shown in succession. Examples include animations, movies, television programs, videos, zoetropes, or visual output from a simulation. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data mp4 Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:07:38 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 Phenomenology of Nature Description An account of the resource Video recording of a lecture delivered on September 20, 2024, by Ryan Shea as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Ryan Shea taught at Providence College for eight years, including courses in philosophy of science, environmental philosophy, and nature writing. His research weaves together ancient philosophical biology (especially Aristotle), the scientific revolution, phenomenology, German idealism, and Goethean qualitative science. His main project is to learn what it might look like to read the “book of nature” in a participatory, contemplative, phenomenological, and poetic fashion. Ryan Shea offers this description of his lecture: Edmund Husserl inaugurated the modern discipline of phenomenology with the rallying cry, "back to the 'things themselves'." And yet, when reading the works of phenomenologists, one might reasonably worry that we have bracketed the natural world, that we have left out precisely the "things themselves." This talk pursues two distinct, yet intertwined, questions. We begin with Socrates's central question (ti esti), "What is phenomenology?" This leads to our central concern, "How might we practice a phenomenology of nature?" The work of the poet, scientist, painter, and dramatist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe will serve as a guiding light. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Shea, Ryan 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 2024-09-20 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: make a recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John’s College Greenfield Library; make a recording of my lecture available online; make typescript copies of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John’s College Greenfield Library; make a copy of my typescript available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource moving image Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp4 Subject The topic of the resource Phenomenology Nature Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_Shea_Ryan_2024-09-20_ac Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/8b9c150192d6b7da8aad07234a5baa49.mp4 ea3433d8f3ad859a7d1646994230b977 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/. 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. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts. For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Moving Image A series of visual representations imparting an impression of motion when shown in succession. Examples include animations, movies, television programs, videos, zoetropes, or visual output from a simulation. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data mp4 Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:51:36 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 Listen, Love, and Learn: The Formative Power of Singing without Paper Description An account of the resource Video recording of a lecture delivered on September 1, 2023, by Paul Vasile as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Mr. Vasile describes his lecture: "We'll explore practices of musicking rooted in the oral tradition and the ways they enrich and complexify how we interpret music from the page." Paul Vasile is a church musician, teacher, and composer who finds his greatest joy in collaborative and community-centered work. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Vasile, Paul 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 2023-09-01 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource moving image Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp4 Subject The topic of the resource Sight-singing Singing--Instruction and study Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_Vasile_Paul_2023-09-01_ac Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/85496d1c24820397c03c46b8de9461e1.mp3 b63cb824cfbd08eee80904a9decd1b6c 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/. 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. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts. For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis 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 minidisc Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:07:58 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 Political Foundations of Modernity Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on January 24, 2003, by Henry Higuera as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Higuera, Henry, 1954- 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 2003-01-24 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College 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 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 1469-1527 Galilei, Galileo, 1564-1642 Descartes, René, 1596-1650 Bacon, Francis, 1561-1626 Science--Philosophy Science--Moral and ethical aspects Political science--Philosophy Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context MD-0020 Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/6b56bcb73dc481fa0f85f15efef59305.mp4 896474d537ae373a4f360aa7ff57a9ac 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/. 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. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts. For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Moving Image A series of visual representations imparting an impression of motion when shown in succession. Examples include animations, movies, television programs, videos, zoetropes, or visual output from a simulation. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data mp4 Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:15:20 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 Footnotes to Aristotle Description An account of the resource Video recording of a lecture delivered on September 13, 2024, by Graham Harman as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Professor Harman is an alum of the Annapolis campus of St. John's. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and the Liberal Arts Co-Ordinator at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, with teaching stops around the world focused on philosophical thinking, architecture, and art. He has repeatedly been included on ArtReview’s Power 100 list of the most influential figures in the contemporary art world. Dr. Harman gives the following description of his lecture: "The title of this lecture is a riff on Alfred North Whitehead's famous remark that Western philosophy can be considered as a series of footnotes to Plato. The lecture will interpret the difference between Aristotle's Physics and Metaphysics as a difference between the continuous and the discrete, and will seek to develop further Aristotle's notion of "contact" as how two things meet (thereby bridging the gap between the continuous and the discrete)." Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Harman, Graham, 1968- 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 2024-09-13 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a copy of my typescript available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource moving image Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp4 Subject The topic of the resource Aristotle. Physics. Aristotle. Metaphysics. Philosophy Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_Harman_Graham_2024-09-13_ac Relation A related resource <a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/8021">Typescript</a> Alumni Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/8cb39d4520a732fff2ce16bcdd6b5c99.pdf aae20f45b0f652b7ebf7649fb1fc4277 PDF Text Text Thursday September 12, 2024 The St. John’s Collegian A Gadfly Publication From the polity Rendelman Rundown: Intramural Draft Hello, Readers! This year I will be keeping you up to date on all things intramurals. So, with summer over and the season opening, I’m here with a recap of the intramural draft. On Sunday, August 25th, the captains gathered in the conversation room to decide the fate of the current sophomore class. I won’t go into specifics about the order of individual drafts, but I’ll provide my impression of each team’s final draft class. With the first overall pick of each round, last season’s last-place team, the Hustlers, came in with a plan… sort of. The team managed to retain some of their major players with Amha Worku and Auggie Bellanca, and pulled off two incredible picks: 6’7” Reagan Carr, a basketball and Netball legend, and B-team phenom Josh Calonje-Quintero. What the Hustlers truly need is attendance, so only time will tell how their draft truly pans out. If I had to assign a letter grade, I’d give the Hustlers a B+. Next, the Spartans: their four fearless leaders managed to keep their standout Irish soccer star, Charlie Mahon, and filled some graduate-shaped holes in their volleyball team, picking up Hannah Winn, a former Hustler. They also grabbed Ella Jackey, another great soccer player, and had a pair of athletes returning from a year in Fe. All in all, the Spartans did a good job, earning them an A. The Guardians picked next and used their draft to supply a critical need: female athletes. After retaining standout basketball player Henry Strand, the Guardians made some key fixes, drafting Sofia Argones— a speedy B-team beast— and a handful of other stellar female athletes. The team’s two male captains did a great job evaluating and meeting the needs of the team. For self-awareness, they earn an A, but in general I give them a B. The Greenwaves had a strong draft, keeping a lot of their previous freshmen. There were very few notable moves, other than picking up Nate Burke from the Hustlers and Jackson Snyder from the Guardians. The Waves always have incredible energy, and I think that would have remained the case regardless of the draft, but I’d give the draft itself a B-. Continued on page 2 Vol. II Issue I Printed Thursdays in Annapolis LETTER FROM THE (NEW) EDITOR The Collegian Wants You If you read the final article of last year’s Collegian, you may wonder why you’re holding this issue in your hands: our previous editor, the illustrious El’ad Nichols-Kaufman, announced last spring that the Collegian would not continue, since he was taking over editorship of the Gadfly and would not have time for both. Nevertheless, here I am, writing a new front page article, and here you are, reading it. This blessed circumstance is due to the fact that I offered to take over the Collegian instead, alongside my co-editor Jacob Sharpe (‘27). Huzzah! Editing a student publication is a significant time commitment. Why would we volunteer to do this? We each have our reasons. Jacob has written his own letter for you on page 2—go read it. In this article, I’d like to tell you why I want to keep the Collegian alive—and, more importantly, why I need your help. Last year, I didn’t think I’d have time to write for school publications at all. The Gadfly didn’t get a peep from me, and I was a stranger to the Collegian for the whole first semester. I had too many other obligations to focus on extracurricular writing. But then something changed: I started having opinions—opinions on topics concerning the polity. And I wanted to express them. Suddenly, I found myself writing out of necessity. I had things to say, and I wanted them to be heard and considered by my peers. The Collegian provided the perfect platform. I wrote about bike paths, whooping cough, and Kirk Garner. Other students wrote about commencement speakers, Mellon art displays, and how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. I realized that we need the Collegian. We need it not only to keep up with school events, but to keep sane by— to share our weekly thoughts and questions and to hear what our friends are thinking about too. It fills an important niche by being the most up-to-date student publication. More notably, I believe it strengthens our community by providing a structured forum for respectful and well-thought-out discourse. I couldn’t let it slip into journalistic oblivion. But I can’t keep it alive without you. So, why should you write for the Collegian? I’ve got a few good reasons. First, the great thing about it is that it is short and speedy. (Not to be confused with “harsh and hasty.” We still expect high-quality journalism.) This Week in Seminar Freshmen: Thursday, September 12: Homer: Odyssey, XVII–XXIV Monday, September 16: Plato, Meno Sophomores: Thursday, September 12: Bible, Psalms (selections) Monday, September 16: Bible, Amos; Jonah; Isaiah 40-55 Juniors: Thursday, September 12: Milton: Paradise Lost, I–III Monday, September 16: Milton, Paradise Lost, IV; V; VI Argument only; VII Argument, 1–39; VIII Seniors: Thursday, September 12: Hegel: Phenomenology of Spirit, Unhappy Consciousness (207-230); Reason (231-232) Monday, September 16: Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Conscience and The Beautiful Soul (632658) Friday Night Lecture: Professor Graham Harman, “Footnotes to Aristotle” Page 1 You don’t need to spend an afternoon crafting a threepage essay or conducting an in-depth interview— that sort of writing has its place in the Gadfly. The Collegian provides a different outlet: You can take a few short words to speak your mind, report on a recent event, or exhort your classmates to actually read the seminar reading (as Jackson Green did last year). Your thoughts and news will be published the same week that you submit them. The Collegian is yours: not just to read, but to write. Anything you want to say to the polity is publishable in the Collegian (barring slander, gossip, and misinformation, obviously). We will publish opposing opinion pieces in the same issue, if you send them. We will publish your thoughts on college traditions, Friday night lectures, and intramural politics. We will publish anyone from tenured tutors to first-year students to college maintenance staff. We will publish your reports on waltzes, SCI meetings, and reading groups, your complaints about the math manual, your questions about administration, your satire and your social commentaries— if you send them to us. You must send them. I took over the Collegian this year because the polity needs it. At the same time, it needs you to keep it thinking and breathing and holding us together. Will you help us bring it to life this year? Submit your articles to us (sjca.collegian@gmail.com) on Mondays before midnight (see page 2 for details). You’ll be in print by Thursday. We can’t wait to hear what you have to say. Love, Helen Wagner Nichols-Kaufman (left) with Wagner and Sharpe at the college activities fair. Photo on film by Dora Vecoli. Upcoming Events: Saturday, September 14: Art Exhibit Opening: “Theater of Turmoil,” 12:30pm, Mitchell Gallery Folk Life Contra Dance, 7-10pm, Great Hall Sunday, September 15: Pangea’s Chuseok: Korean Thanksgiving, 6pm, Boathouse Monday, September 16: Gadfly and Collegian II submission deadline Tuesday, September 17: Waltz Lessons, 8:30pm, Great Hall (weekly) Wednesday, September 18: Wellness Wednesday, 11am-1pm, Quad Professor Maxwell Stearns: Constitution Day Lecture, 7:30pm, Great Hall �Thursday September 12, 2024 St. John’s Collegian Vol. II. Issue I Letter from the (Other new) Editor Help! Hello, Polity! You are reading this second page of the Collegian, whether by happenstance through it being set down upon its face, through a literary ardor that demands you read this delightfully resurrected publication in its full, or per Helen Wagner’s request that you read my accompanying letter. Whatever your reason, I’m glad you’re here. That we now have a Collegian to read is a fortunate turn of events! Despite other parties’ evil efforts to consolidate the college’s news within the oppressive monthly confines of the Gadfly, Helen and I have wrested the paper from the maw of death and now the Collegian lives to die another day. Huzzah! But why did we choose to save campus journalism? Why did we deem the opinions of Johnnies worth saving? Furthermore, wherever will we find all the time that the press demands of us? Helen has her reasons for her endeavors on the front page (or on the back page, if this issue is face-down). Go read it, if you haven’t already. I, however, have my own little spiel of reasons, which begins with the story of how the Collegian was endeared to me. I spent most of last year’s first semester reading as I’ve never before, and Plato wore heavy on my soul. Seeking the perusal of reading material but fatigued with philosophy, I was led to the readily available and frequently updated Collegian, which always had something entertaining and clever to occupy my mind. However, my relationship with the Collegian remained as a reader, and I was not moved to write for it until I was baited with an absurd attack article that struck at the heart and soul of this campus (cigarette smoking in non-designated areas). Of course, I was forced to take up arms. Writing a creative piece for the first time in who knows how long was refreshing; in the sense that I could spend an hour or two crafting a relatively short article, and that there was a dedicated place for it to go! It made me understand such a place’s necessity. For people who have more extensive, and longerplanned articles, the Gadfly is a wonderful institution. For others with less, but just as valuable content to share, it is still requisite that this campus have a Collegian. To be without one would silence the many Johnnie voices that have a little to say here and there. This paper, as the only weekly one on campus, lends itself particularly well to short snippets of opinion, fact, and whatever lies in between. I’m fond of the bursts of whimsy and wit we get from the polity, as well as the more journalistic pieces that showcase the diverse interests and activities of this campus. That I can read a piece on desire paths on our campus, a Aphorism of the Week “Time is a game played beautifully by children.” -Heraclitus panegyric exulting the virtues of actually reading Huckleberry Finn, or a spirited debate over cycling infrastructure on a given Thursday—all studentcontributed and with unique impassioned voices, is miraculous. The articles I’ve read in the past year have confirmed that the Collegian is the home for anything and everything you, the reader, have to contribute. It builds community, gives a voice to all, and acts as an outlet in the midst of a busy and stressful life. All these joys of published glory are yours, if you choose to share in them. And you should choose to share in them! The only requirement is that you actually contribute it to us. Email works, fax machine, passenger pigeon (save their extinction). So, please, find it within yourself to contribute something unique and yours to our lovely paper. Unless I steal your annual essay out of the Dean’s Office, I won’t otherwise get this opportunity from many of you. In this coming year, I look forward to this Collegian being a blank slate for whatever you have to give us. It can be the means of recording the day-to-day happenings at this campus, a creative outlet for ye who tire of thine manuscripts pertaining only to the great books, et cetera. If you want to write about the Metaphysics, though, that’s okay too. Just make it pretty cool. Submit your articles to sjca.collegian@gmail.com, and you’ll see it in glorious Garamonded print on Thursday. Welcome back! Jacob Sharpe St. John’s on Tv During opening week, a South Korean film crew from EBS (the Korean version of PBS) shot different scenes around campus, including convocation. On Saturday morning, a group of students assembled in the Barr-Buchannan-Center to participate in mock discussions: a seminar on the Meno led by Mr. Haflidson and Ms. Langston and a math tutorial on Galileo’s Two New Sciences. Among the participants were Ms. Lee (’26) and Ms. Kim (’25). Ms. Lee dreams of becoming a documentary director herself, so she helped the crew with interviewing students and faculty. “The concept of reading books and then discussing them is very new to most of Korean education,” she shared. Ms. Kim added: “Ten years ago, there was another kind of documentary [about St. John’s]. But at this time, we are focusing more on how this education happens…: how we read books, how we talk about [them] and why it is important. And I think it is a really great opportunity not only for South Korea but also for whatever country that would watch.” One of the members of the film crew, Mr. Hong, explained: “The Korean government realized that there is a social issue in South Korea, which is people don't read. I think it's kind of a world worldwide problem. People don't read these days... Especially in South Korea, the country of Samsung, LG… So, the Korean Government has decided to make a documentary film to encourage people to read.” There will be five episodes about the benefits of reading, including the relationship between cognitive ability and reading and reading in the AI era. While in the US, they will also travel to New York to interview BVG member and alumna Carla Echevarria (‘96) at Google Gemini. Mr. Hong shared his impression that the program at St. John’s is very “tough,” but is “totally worth it.” Ms. Langston expressed her hope for more collaboration between Korean institutions and St. John’s. Much of this is driven by Dr. Yongwha Lee (AGI01), professor at Incheon National University and founder of the Great Books Center there. Ms. Langston’s hopes for the documentary are not limited to more visibility in Korea but extent to the US as well. A technologically advanced country embracing reading again is “an important story for people here to hear as well,… I'm really hopeful that this is going to be a fantastic way to let more people see who we are and see the value of [this kind of education].” The documentary will air in the fourth quarter of 2024. Helen Felbek Intramural Article, cont’d Finally, the reigning champs with the last pick of each round, the Druids. The Druids did a great job: they kept Ella Hedman, an incredibly talented athlete across the board, and picked up a few B-teamers, nabbing Henry Redfield and Celina Lee who are both key contributors. They had very little to be upset about—a solid draft, another B+. These grades are just based on my own impressions, and soon the season will be in full swing. Only time will tell regarding the impact of the draft. Lainey Rendelman Page 2 About the St. John’s Collegian The St. John’s Collegian is the weekly newspaper of St. John’s College Annapolis. We work to bring quick and timely coverage of important events going on, to help develop a more informed student body. If you’re searching for more in-depth investigations and reporting, as well as essays, art and culture, check out the Gadfly, our affiliated publication, which is published once every three weeks. Want to submit an article? We always need more writers, whether for opinion or reporting! Submissions for news articles should be between 400600 words, while opinion should be kept short at 350 words. Just email sjca.collegian@gmail.com with your article, and we will work to get it in print! Longer form articles and more in-depth exploration of ideas should go to the Gadfly, which accepts submissions at gadfly.office@sjc.edu. Contributors for this issue: Helen Wagner, writer and editor Jacob Sharpe, writer and editor Helen Felbek, writer Lainey Rendelman, writer Liza Love, cartoonist Dora Vecoli, photographer Your new editors, Helen and Jacob. Original cartoon by Liza Love (‘27). � 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 St. John's Collegian Description An account of the resource A student newspaper of St. John's College. The St. John's Collegian began publication in 2023 and is affiliated with <a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/collections/show/16">The Gadfly</a>. Published weekly on Thursday, with the exception of weeks The Gadfly is published. Earlier publications with the title The Collegian and The St. John's Collegian are available in <a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/collections/show/26">The Collegian Collection</a>. Click on Items in <a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=69&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&sort_dir=d">The St. John's Collegian Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource St. John's College 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. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SJCCollegian 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. 2 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 St. John's Collegian, September 12, 2024 Description An account of the resource Volume 2, issue 1 of the St. John's Collegian, published September 12, 2024. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource St. John's College (Annapolis, Md.) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College (Annapolis, Md.) 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 2024-09-12 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College holds 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 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 SJCCollegian_vol2_issue1_2024-09-12 Student publication The Collegian The Gadfly https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/849630a611400afaf9a686e23e20b245.mp3 0e14364a6a22b913dfe4ae1fd2da9762 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 m4a Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:48:56 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 Family Resemblance: On Knowing and Not Knowing Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture given by Dean Sarah Davis on August 30, 2024 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "What do a Greek tragedy and a 20th-century work of philosophy have in common? At first glance, Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations seem worlds apart. However, this lecture suggests that these authors are wrestling with a similar problem, though from different angles -- one we might characterize as tragic, the other, comic. Both texts ultimately call for a reorientation toward the pursuit of knowledge, challenging us to reconsider what it truly means to know anything, especially ourselves." Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Davis, Sarah 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 2024-08-30 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 Sophocles. Oedipus Tyrannus. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_DavisS_Family_Resemblance_On_Knowing_And_Not_Knowing_2024-08-30 Deans Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/01ccfbcf93fc38dba62660dee2f78778.pdf a2e402be0093d82820d305d86470256f PDF Text Text niE COLLEGIAN THE STUDENT WEEKLY OF ST.JOHN’S COLLEGE ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND lA ORANA MARIA PAUL GAUGUIN 76 13 DEC. 1971 �PAGE TWO Tuesday, December 7 To the Editor: I read the article by Mr Matters, whom 1 unfortunately neither teach nor know, with that rising, irri table interest which is produced by aerious arguments seriously pro posed with which one finds onself in almost total disagreement. Mr Hattera must forgive ma in at least one respect: in order to do justice to his reasoning I should have written my answer during the Christmas vacation, |>ut by nest year the readers of Tia would have forgotten what his issues werea As it is, although what I have to say la not sufficiently weII-composed,, I feel myself entitled to refer to his article and to answer his arguments in the order in which they appear. I. Mr Hagfcara says, rightly, X think, that those who come here, students and tutors, accept a theory of learning, but he is, in ray experience, not right in saying that they accept it “In toto“ or do not question It, To accept a way of life “in principle”, that is, to live in consonance with it and faithfully to it, 18 far from swallowing it “as a whole” plthout asking questions about it. The fact that the program has Indeed changed little since its institution is not proof that It has not been thought about but that it has. In prin ciple, commended Itself to the participants. “To question”, it seems to me, ought to mean not to doubt, or to oppose, but to wish to understand--In full engagement. I do not think I can ask questions concerning what I do not accept as having worth, IX, Mr Mattera chooses, again rightly, 1 think, the absence of the study of history as the most telling negative characteris tic of the college. He claims, - explicitly or implicitly, that *Uihols Grains and Bssns *nacrQbiQtlc Foods Uagstsrisn Foods ♦Delicious Organic Fruits and Msgatables ♦Discount PricBB for Bulk Buying 1923 WEST ST M0N4HU-FRI: 10-9 ANNAPOLIS 26a6eG2 TUE-^ED’SATi 10-6 (I) history is a well-known and available subject matter teachj able in schools, (2) the study a of which forms a useful back ground to the study of texts, and (3) which yields a well kno^/n and obvious conclusion, namely that man is mutable, (4) the denial of which is Itself a part of history, namely Greek history, I answer: Cl) the discipline known as history is a near-lnfinita oneI a large part of its study consists in establishing what it 18 that ia to be studied; a competent judgnspait 1" this pre liminary matter alone can only be acquired over a life-time; the actual acquisition of historical knowledge, once defined, is a matter requiring enormous skill J in languages, archaeology, epl| graphy, palaeography, etc,; it | �PACE THREE In, in short* • subject natter far aeli-cultivation and advanced •t«dy, (2) Such neager and derivative "infometlon’' as can be conveyed to beginning learners is far from giving then a "background" for reflection on taxts-»lt is eseentially a way of surreptitiously inatilling the prejudice that esrtaln works are written for ulterior Motives, economic or Aristocratic, or some other. But supposing this "information" to ba conveyed in the most scrupulous way, it is still in crucial cases vacuous--for Instance tha "background" for the Homeric epics is found to be largely derived from Homer when traced down. Furthermore, the interesting vribcrs often have the property ’ of being stubbornly unconventional: whatever their historical situation say be—that precisely they are not. (3) That history teaches that san is mutable can not yet be safely concluded—it may be that history teaches that a small part of mankind thought itself infi nitely transformable and was proved—heaven for fend—catastro phically wrong. (4) Jbuong the Greeks there was not only Parmenides but also lUraclltus, not only Plato but Also Herodotus. Furthermore, the vary fact that at this present nooent it is possible to assent to or dissent from the proposi tion that humsui nature is fixed shows It to be not a "classical understanding" but simply an understanding. 1 do not think that studies like sociology and anthropology show otherwise— every such text I have ever read^ AStAblished, clearly or by im plication, an anthropologizing and sociologlzing animal, whose nature it was to be the fixed observer of the various and changing natures of the human aubjects of investigation. Ill, Mr Mattera says that "icisnee" , which he takes as a given pre-established object with well-known characteristics, is cumulative and that the program denies this. It is a curious thing to say of a course of learning sometimes accused of being "history of science", 1 think that Mr Mattera, who is, 1 understand, a sophomor^, has forgotten that the advancement from, or if you will, the defeat of,the ancient physicists conies, appropriately, largely in the junior year, in which the founders of modernity, whose point of departure is almost invariably a confutation of Aristotle, are studied. IV, Mt Mattera observes a "dis dain for contemporary Investi gations? « I think there is no such dlpdaln (though perhaps some avpr81on--the consequence of acquaintance rather than Ignoranpe) among the tutors, but rather great perplexity in the facp of an absolutely con founding proliferation of dis ciplines. I think we will eventually find a way to make a choice fnong them, perhaps with the help of graduates of the college. V, He also observes a con demnation of the ways of other collegeo. I think myself that we should t^^ead tactfully on that ground; nevertheless. If it is, as Mr Mattera himself thinks, possible to have good or bad plans of education, and if one thinks that the St John's programs Is both very good and—as he also thinks it is— essentially opposed to that of other schools, it is right and proper that we should walk about with a modest sense of exultation, especially if we have experience of the unhappiness of students in other schools. VI, Mr Mattera says that the program is not In fact a "revival of anything which has ever existed". It is, of course, of no essential consequence whether this is the case or not, 1 am uncertain of ray history here and do not believe �PAGE POUR anyone else's, nor do I much wish to engage In the lengthy inves tigation by which I could assure rayself of the truth of such a statement, the verification of a statement of historical non-existence being the weariest of all undertakings. I do know that the program Is a realization of certain essential features of liberal arts learning as set out in ancient and medieval treatises, for example the Dldascalion of Hugo St Victor. VII, Mr Matters objects to the all-required nature of the pro gram, chiefly on the grounds, as I understand him, that it stifles freedom and kills the zest for learning. To take the latter first, I too, find it to be, intermittently, the case. This has to do partly with the excessive magnitude and variety of the tasks we require of ourselves, but partly with something deeper and less likely to be curable, namely the essential perversity of the attempt to Institutionalize learning at all. Tet 1 offer myself this negative consolation: KITCHIN DRUGS 60 WEST STREET*ANNAPOLIS 268-22H that there is no feasible alter native— that my nature, at once Inert and distractable, needs the whip of public obligation to do what it most desires, that I do not really want to forego the conanunlty and purposefulness which comes from having a thought-out common plan of learning, and finally, that the sad experience of other schools shows that free dom of choice does not Induce exhilaration. Now, as far as freedom of learning is concerned, Mr Matters thinks that It is connected with this very freedom of choice, but I do not agree, for reasons the first of which is very familiar— that the freedom to plan one's own education cannot be exercised without a good deal of initial knowledge, more than a student ordinarily possesses at the mo ment of choice. But what is axire important, the alternative to a required program, namely a par tially or wholly elective plan, which must of necessity be car ried on in large and department alized unlversltlas, in fact robs the student of his freedom in one vital respect—it presents him with "fields” or "subjects” which are pre-established and pre-delimited so that the fundamental inquiry, which concerns nothing if not the nature and extent, the parts and their relations, of the "learnable”^ Is obviated and the student is obliged to begin under the hidden constraints of burled decisions. The perfectly open requirement to read certain books, on the other hand, is precisely Intended to leave the student intellectually free to formulate questions and answers; in a word, the books are pre-set so that the matter may not be pre-determined. Since most human beings need intellectual nourishment in order to flourish or to "realize themselves”, some material for study must be pro vided; books of the highest quality are that material which is least conducive to witting or unwitting censorship. �PAGE FIVE PAGE FIVE Mr Matters furtfeertnore. quarrels wl th the unified progras# as representing a dubious teaching, that of “the unity of knowledge**# I would rather say that the program only makes this doctrine a center of concern, and that the doctrine it does assume la that of the unity of the k-nose£. He furthermore asks why all the hocks have to be read by all the students| if each book is to stand by Itself, how can the program list form a leg it irvte whole? I answer that almost all the students should read the books to preserve the communal character of the conversation about them, and that almost all the books should be read because, while each book speaks best for itself, any one of the others may speak best against it or about it# Iflll, Mr Matters notices a “general distaste for contemporary affairs’*. This evidently true observation is a source of concern for many tutors, which I, however, do not share, and for this reason: it seems to ms that the immediately second object of an education in a republic is precisely what it is ccninonly ©aid to be, the making of citizens. But I prefer fal low citlsenft who have at some time had so lively an absorption in the good, or, at least, personal, things of life, that they know what a good, or, at least, human, life is. I do not wish for fellow citizens who, too early, conceived an avidity rather than a distaste for contcjRporary so cial evils — I do not trust them to know in what directions to look for a solution. I think political activ ity should follow education, not ac company it, and I Cannot blame students for lacking interest where they do not yet mean to influence, 12. In ft last section Mr Matters makes son« criticisms not of the pro gram but of the members of the col lege idiich amount to Imputing certain vices to them. 1 do not quite know what to say, but 1 am sorry that he should feel so, Berhaps the arguable point In this section is the question of the “inequality of status of tutors and students". Let me say in what 1 do not and do consider our equality to consist . I think that the students in my tutorials would not thank me If I relinquished ray responsibility as leader, mediator, adjudicator, pace maker, and chief learner and became Indistinguishable form them in function. Hence in respect to external role we ought to be unequal. Furthermore, since I have been engaged for fifteen years tn the enterprise of which this 18 their third year, it would be ybry peculiar if I were not, by cause of seniority, superior to thm. Hence in respect to accomplishment we are apt to be unequal , Thus equality within the school, that is, aside from our obvious civil equality, seems to me to consist solely in thist that we are all, together, very small before a very great matter, 1 can think of no consideration more conducive to good and essential equality, 1 feel obliged to end, as I began, with an apology to Mr Mattera, It is in the nature of this sort of a reply that it has the air of "dispos ing of" the other's argument. I am far from thinking that I have done that—I have only sketched out a first few counter-arguments, Hhafe is more, in a real conversation my main effort would be, on Che contrary, not to re fute him but to persuade hira to state his arguments more fundamentally, more radically, if you will; for whereas their strength lies in their decent seriousness, their real weakness seems to me to be that they are framed on a someid^at conventional level, I im agine that in the course of such a conversation Mr Mattera, whatever his views may finally be, would show him self to be in fact--and it must be -obvious that I^can think of no batter compliment—a very faithful member of our college, Eva Brann Tutor �PAGE SIX WEDNESDAY 11,10 BEETHOVENJ Plaao Concerto G #4, .Jlchnabel WOLF, Pra«astheac,i Hans Hofcter, Gerald Moore 1,40 SCRIABIN, Poeffl of Ecstasy, Stokowski 2,10 SCHUBERT, String Quartet #14, Iniadeus Quartet in Area FW station#$ For continuous listening tfCAO (102.7) & WGWS (103.5). fit your own risk (UaJC (91.9) & mt (97.9). Kll listings are for IBCAO unless otherwise noted. All ties# are approximate. For further inforaation, eisTiNCTive Qirrs consult Forecast FBI. African A Atian Imports Hand A Laath.r Crafts MONDAY 12.35 BRAHMS 8y». #4, Toscanini, NBC 1,35 BARTOK, Piano concerto #3, Katchan. Ansemtet 3 VERDI, Ai^a highs J,V«lry Ex.tid Clothing TUESDAY 11.10 BEETHOVEN, Piano concerto G ’^31 Artur Schnabel . 3 STRAVINSKY, Oedipus Rex 7.20 BEETHOVEN, Piano concerto #3, Wilhelm Backhaus 268-4711 54’/2 WEST ST. ANNAPOLIS PHOTOGRAPHY CONTEST Last week in the caajnss mailboxes was a notification of a photography contest which is open to all mewbere of the St. John*8 Ccllsge community. However, the Admiseione end Public Information Officse naglectsd to liet the prizee to be awarded. They are herewith listedt Firet priza (each category) Second prize Third prize Honorable mention S50 S25 SIO Mo financial reward Judging will be dene by three looel profeeeional photographers» Serion Warren, Stu Whslsn, and Stanley Steerne. Mr. Ham end Wre. Felter will serve on the judging committee as ex officio members. Copise of the reguletione governing the first photogrephy contsst may ba obtained from the Admieeions or Public Information Offices. A reminder of deadlinest Phase I-Jenuary 30j Phase II-April 30. Photographs should be labeled and eubmitted to the Public Information Office. Wary Falter �PAGE SEVEN MOTiO ’ An Educated Audience: William Wellman b "WingB** and the Truffaut/Hitchcock book® This week’s column is a rather fonaleas one> written because I happened to be thinking about visual methods of storytelling after seeing the silent film “Wings" (being ghovjn at the Circle}. The film is being shown without even a musical score, creating an extraord inary involvement with the visual events. Sound film directors are protected by •the sound track, which distracts atten tion from their “cinematics", It may ba that it was the closer attention payed by audiences that produced achieve ments referred to by those who single out the silent era as the roost creative and imaginative in the history of Amer ican filas, "Wings" certainly makes this claim seem plausible, even granting the films of men like Hawks,. Ford, and especially Hitchcock, I have generally taken a spectator’s attitude toward movies, but there was a perlod--faralliar to every film lover— when I half-serlously considered making a film of ray own. At that time I read a half-dozen books on film technique, from camera operation and lighting meth ods, to editing and special effects. I watched the films I saw then through quite different eyes than I did before, or have since. It convinced me that a technical cinematic education can add immeasurably to the enjoyment of films. The issue hare is parallel to one involved with music, which comes up often during sophomore year at St John's, Music is meant to be heard, and may not even exist before it is heard, A listener’s concern should be with what he hears, and feels as he hears, and not with what the composer writes, the notes on the page. Even so crudely stated this would make a certain amount of sense, if it were not the case that people hear nuire and hear it better after studying musical theory. There would. Indeed, be no point in studying music at all other wise. As X said, my own experience indicates that film and music are alike in this respect, both being arts with very detailed and exact technical dimensions. As 1 watched "Wings" I found rayself being amazed at the visual skill of its direction (by William Wellman, re membered also for "Public Enemy", "Call of the Wild", "Beau Geste", and "The Ox Bow Incident"). The style was often quite startling and complica ted, very much at odds with the best recent camera methods, like those in "Sunday, Bloody Sunday", which almost subordinate themselves to the narrative, slowing the viewer to observe the char acters more as he might in actuality, surrounded by the details and furniture of their dally lives, I thought about this primarily in terms of what the introduction of sound, with its liter ary tendencies, had done to the pictor ial art of film construction. Shortly afterwards I began reading Francois Truffaut’s book of interviews with Alfred Hitchcock, I was struck at once by a comment of Hitchcock’s about the silent film: "The silent pictures were .the purest form of cinema.... In many of the filsia now being made there is very little cinema. When we tell a story on film we should resort to dialogue only when it’s impossible to do other wise. 1 always try . first to tell a story in a cinematic way, through a succession of shots...." Hitchcock's method, as it emerges in thei interviews, demonstrates a unique vis ual preoccupation. He conceives his projects always as a series, a rhythm of scenes and images. Usually a sequence of pencil sketches, drawings of frame compositions, are the first form his film projects will take. "Wfy mind is strictly visual," he says. His pictor ial goal with respect to the audience seems to be double: to make things clear and to make them exciting, to involve the audience and manipulate them emotionally. �PAGE EIGHT "If you stand close to a train as It is speeding through a station, you feel it; it almost knocks you down* But if you look at the same train from a distance you don’t feel anything. Tn the saa» way, if you’re going to show two men fighting with each other, you’re not going to get very much by simply photographing that fight. The photographic reality is not realistic. The only way to do it is to get into the fight and make the public feel it," It is well known that often (as in "Rope", "Lifeboat", and "Rear Window") he takes on a project largely as a technical challenge. He will Invent Bcenes first as visual excitements and then try to integrate them into the plot—the whole cornfield episode in "North by Northwest" is such an inven tion, But his concern is not with tricks as such but with tricks that work, that create a purely visual ex citement, In a scene conelaved not Visually but as a moment in the rhyttss ef the plot, ha will use his camera to expose the essential. His concern is net with the literary aspects of storytelling and drama, his plots are constructed visually. As Tpuffaut says, in his introduction? "Whatever is saj^ Instead of being shown is lost upon the viewer," He speaks of Hitchcock’s "unique ability to film the thoughts of his characters". What a character feels about something is mlrrared by the ways in which is Is photographed; the audience sees it as the character does. "Hitchcock is almost unique," he says, "in being able to film directly, that is, without resorting to explana tory dlalcgue," Actors, naturally, are not a large part of his concern. It seems clear that Hitchcock has preserved the pictorial achievements of the silent film, and has thus succeeded in making films that are exciting and interesting to watch. In "Wings", viewed in complete silence, the effect of visual absorption is extraordinary. The acting styles are somewhat exagger ated but even Clara Bow, who is most guilty of this, roaraages to create a believable character in spite of herself. A striking example of visual exposition is the changing manner in which Mary (the character she plays) is presented. as Jack (Buddy Rogers) gradually realises that he is in love with her. At first, parallel to his indifference, she appears a rather horsey, tomboyish, simpering type. She is costumed un becomingly and lit to emphasize the Imperfections of her face. As the film goes on, she begins to change, subtly but distinctly, until at the end we realize, just when Jack does, that she is really quite a beautiful girl. We have seen her through his eyes, our view of her raatwing with his. In the quiet acenes, in the battles, in the bombing of a small French village, in every major sequence, titles are scarce, presenting only essential facts. There Is a chilling sequence in which a large black Geimai bomber called the Gotha is loaded and wheeled out for takeoff. Seen from above as it taxis on the field it resembles a monstrous insect, seen from beneath are the white bombs clinging to its belly like eggs. A film as rich in striking images as "Wings" can reacquaint a speotator with the importance of "cine matics". The filmgoer is so used to seeing pictures without the slightest visual Interest that he almost forgets that they exist. It has gone so far that even a cheap blood-epic like "The Night of the Living Dead" can be hailed as a masterpiece because its director can use a camera with a little imagination. It soinetlraes seems that on large-scale Hollywood efforts the camera was just too heavy to move, the film-makers too bored to make the effort. The Industry has gotten fat. When a filragoer learns something about motion picture technique, and particularly if he thinks in terms of making his own films, he bacomea personally involved in the problems of visual narration, can begin to think in "cinematic" mays. There is a greater sympathy for the nature of a motion picture, a sense of co-oper ation, luith a director in the produc tion of his effects. Hitchcock claims to resent the increasing knouiledgability of his audience, because he thinks it makes his job more difficult. To ma �PAGE NINE this seems entirely the wrong attitude for a director to take. An educated audience is more fully behind him then any other, interested in the film in much the same way that ha is, enjoying his success and regretting his failures. Learning about !lJagne?s harmonics hardly makes "Parsifai** less thrilling to hear, and no mors does understanding the special effects and camera trick ery^,employed make the tower sequence in Vertigo" less unneruing. In both cases a new dimension is added, the experience cesses to be a passive one. In the future I may write about some specific cinematic methods and ths effects they can produce. For now I urge you to sea "lilings", and to watch it closely. You might learn something! A film of Hitchcock’s will serve as a good example, I know this active involvement works. In "Rear li/indow* James Stswart plays a photographer layed up in his apartment with a broken leg. For amusement he spies on his neighbors across the court, observing their lives and trying to figure them out. He begins to suspect that one of them has committed a murder, and things proceed rapidly thereafter. The astonishing thing about the film is that, except for one crucial scene, the camera shows us nothing escept the inside of Stewart’s apartment and the things visible from his window. It seems at once as if extraordinary skill would be necessary to save such a film from being dull. lUa want and expect a certain variety in what we see. But if we think about it we realize that in actuality, being in such a situation ourselves, boredom would be the least likely possible sensation. U/hat makes us expect to be bored is our prior experience with run-ofthe-mill film-making. Hitchcock has made "Rear lUindow" one of his most absorbing and exciting films, be cause he places the audience in an active, participating position. The action is photographed from within and not, as we have come to expect, from without. It is-a very simple principle in theory, but very dif ficult in practice. It is Hitchcock’s visual emphasis that is at the bottom of his success, and that same visual approach must be present in every powerful film. At the Playhouse "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" (G) I will say very little about this film, both because my space is lim ited and because it did not interest me very much. The novel, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, has a large reputation, and if it’s justified this adaption is a very poor one. The idea is fine, to explore the daily lives of prisoners in a labor camp. But this is not actually what the film does. Thera is little intimacy, almost nothing to command sympathy for the charactersg A scene in which a group of prisoners construct a wail in the sub-zero winter was, for example, handled in a fashion that gave no sense of a group working together or even of the overall process of construction. The make up jobs are awful with black charcoal lines visible in ovary close up on the healthy, well-fed faces of the actors. There were a couple of scenes which could not, because of their context, fail to be moving, but these were more than balanced out by passages of complete] artificial dialogue, sounding auspiciously like badly translated word for word liftings from a mediocre novel,(not having read the book I cannot be certain about that). Anyone who can take a subject like this and fail to make a depressing movio, must be doing something wrong. At the Capitol ’’Shaft” (R) Held over; see last week's COLISGIAN Guest Review At the Flaza ’’Airport” (G) ’’Airport” as a motion picture never gets off the ground. It belongs to the ”Grand Hotel” genre of film, but falls miserably to breathe any life into the cliche»riddan formula, "^he usual horde of stars and subplots are there but to such an excess that ft is not better direction but an aiif traffic controller that is needed, There are many questions that arise while watching ’’Airport**, Is Helen Kayes really the cutest little-oldlady ever to be seen in films? Why �PAGE TEN does George Kennedy, the tough-*talking crew chief, smoke cigars while in bed with his wife? Is Dean Martin deliv ering an accurate portrayal o£ Dean Martin? Does Van Heflin, the mad bomber, wish to blow up the plane for hutnanltarlan reasons! It would seen that the acting, direction, and screenplay are what make the difference between a film like "Grand Hotel" (1932) and one like "Airport" (1970). Craig Freedman Coning to town soon will be the new Janes Bond film "Diamonds Are Forever", with Sean Connery again. It should be here when we get back from vacation. David Chute WINNERI k ftWIMBPS I 3acader*y JOSCPHC 1€V1N€ ANAVCOeMBASSYFilM P€T€R KATHARIN6 CTOOLe H€PBURN iUONIN WlNXeR Sally kutsky 617 Arch St #3 Ann Arbor* Mloh, A8104 313-66S-M2S Sean St John's College AeRspolls, )^ryls»d DeeenheF 7» ISH 21404 Deer Sir* I am a greduete nt St John's ('(8) end eurrently e seeend yeer student at the ORlvereity ef Miehlgen Lew Seheol. The Deen of Admissions has expressed en interest in St Jahn's end its pregrem eed esked s* to dlseuss it with him. He hex esked me te write you end inform you thet he will eonaider seriouely eny epplieetiens he reeeives frcw e St John's greduete* Lew sehools ere currently swamped with epplieitiens end I urge eny seniors who are interested to epply es soon es possible. Tou will heve the slight edventege of being e euriesity, end the diff|eulty wigh eeeeptence in eny lew sehool is te be sing led out of the erowd. Of eeurse* the Deen did not guarantee admissions* but I think it might be worth e try* Incidentally, 1 did net go te lew sehool for two years after graduation and am pleased with ny deeislon to go, I eneourage St John's graduates wihh no iwsediate plans for low sehool te keep it in mind as a future possibility. The problem of scsf dlseriminatien has been end is being discussed a great de*i ie the lew school admissions offices. 1 wee told to inform you that women and minorities will be eonsidered equally (I'm not lOOX sonvineed about equal), but I especially eneeursge woiuin to eonsIder the lew as a follow-up to a St John's education, I will he delighted to correspond, speak, »r arrange accomodations for St John's students interested in the University of Michigan Lew School, Sincerely, Sally Butnky STARTS OECEWBER 15 Submitted by the Dean’s office �PAGE ELEVEN Until by chance we Meet again, my friend, I love you true as If I’d never gone. No passing time can our sweet bond unmend. No friendship new obscure you in its dawn, THE COLLEGIAN I can no more forget your warming smile. Or careless laugh, or wisely mirthful eyes. Than I could give your least request denial — The time my memory nocks, my love defies. But In this an I constant more than you? Have you In time your former self outgrown? Will you, at meeting, emblem someone new. And rend our love, being not the love I’d known? Until, by chance, we meet again , , , no more — X think X fear the thing X hope most for. David Chute Peter Fairbanks Francis Harkins Tom Horvath Bryce Jacobsen Laura Jenkins Arthur Kungle Jack Lincoln Tom Poiuell Connie Rubino Lane Russell Steven Sadlis Jeffrey Sinks, Editor Paul Szabo Jane Young Tom Robinson To The Carolers, Kt Al. X would like to thank all those who came caroling with us Thursday night«^-eapecial ly Maria Coughlin, who made the original sign inviting’ every one, Christel Stevens, our concert-mistress, and Kathy Austin, who helped to map out the route, I would also like to thank all the tutors whom we serenaded, for their hospitality —especially the Goldwlns and the Kieffers, who received us very graciously. Public expressions of Joy and good-will are a sign of a healthy community, I am proud of those who came with us for their spirit of friendship. Merry Christmas, Jim Tourtelott PS Praise is also due to Doug Anthony, and the Syndicate of Bacchus, who provided the money for candles, and Mrs Myatt, who supplied the song sheets. '’Just because you are seeing divine light, experiencing waves of bliss, or conversing with gods and goddesses is no reason to not know your sip code,” —Baba Ram Dass submitted by BalrJ Donabedlan JMerrp (SOrisstmas FROM LAURA NCE LTD 48 MARYLAND AVENUE Low-Comedy Seduction Let us go then, you and X, down to debasement. —Roger Greene �PAGE TWELVE To Whom It Way Concern Every so often a community-minded individual attempts to focus concern on a possible correction which merits consideration by all members of the St John’s community. This is rare} a statesman here can hardly count on any reward for his effort other than a lury smile, an askance look, or a terse statement implying agreembnt or disagreement. Thursday evening a large number of the students on food service dressed in compliance with a rule they felt to be erroneous. The sentiment pre vailing was "It’s too much trouble to argue", "This won’t last long", or "I’m hungry". This is a sad display of community spirit. Why anyone who does not dine in the dining hall desires to put dress re strictions on those who do, perplexes ma. Yet, more alarming is the "every man for himself" student apathy which indicates an unwillingness to do any thing for the sake of the community as a whole. This self-centerednoss is extremely discouraging for those who might be motivated to share with others here. Caring is the axiom for change. We all (the students) have at one time or another thought of possible innovations which might make St John’s a better place to learn at, and a more pleasant place to live. How few have made use of the various channels available in an attempt to implement change! I feel strongly that this would not be so if there weren't usually the tendency to "rally to the defense" of the old, but a sincere attempt to consider alternatives. The students are often by far the most guilty. Thursday night was a demonstration of this. Donna Demac News of the World IRIDAT, DECEMBER 3RD Foreign Pakistan declared war on India as heavy fighting broke out on both the East and West Pakistan borders. Reports fvots the front said that Indian ground forces penetrated Into Pakistani territory, while Pakistani planes bombed Indian airports. Foreign Ministers Mahoud Ried of Egypt, speaking in the General Assembly, called on the UN to force Israel out of Arab territories, Poraestlc White House Press Secretary Ronald Zeigler an nounced that ths budget for the fiscal year 1973 starting in July would be about $250 billion and would aim at full employment. Unemployment in November rose .2X to SATURIiAY, DECEMBER 4TH Foreign The UN Security Council met to discuss the widening Indian-Pakistani war. Meanwhile the United States State Depart ment blamed India for the hosti lities, A US govennent survey revealed that since the United States started to bomb Cambodia in 1970 2 million refugees were forced to leave home as a direct result. In a speech before the Spanish parliament. General Franco announced that there will be no reforms or liberalization of his regime. This ends a theory prevailing for the last ten years that Franco would start to pave the way for a more liberal successor, SUNDAY, DECEfiBER 5TH Foreign Indian troops reported great success in East Pakistan. They claimed to have freedom of the skies and to have surrounded the Pakistani troops. In the UN Rus sia vetoed a security council cease-fire order. �PACE THIRTEEN President Anwar Sadat of Egypt agreed to hold talks with Israel In New York, Ponestlc A billion dollar bequest to the Johnsc.i foundation turned it from one of the nation's smallest to the second biggest In the country. Only the Ford founda> tion is bigger. General A team of scientists at the University of Southern Cali fornia discovered a virus causing cancer in humans. This Is a tre mendous step forward in understanding and curing the disease, MONDAY, DECEMBER 6TH Foreign President Nixon vowed that the United States would remain completely neutral In the IndianPakistani war, and the State De partment cut off all aid to India. The United States will sell Skyhawk jets to Israel, but the acquisition of Phantom fighter bombers still remains Israel's first priority. Domestic The Senate voted 89 to 1 to confirm the nomination of Lewis Powell to the Supreme Court. Senator Harris of Oklahoma cast the lone dissenting-vote, TUESDAY, DECEMBER 7TH Foreign India captured the town of Jessore, giving them effective control over half of East Pakistan. The UN General Assembly voted 104-11 to call for a cease-fire. This action, how ever, is not binding on member states. Ten European members of NATO, replying to US criticism, announced that they would raise their joint de fense budget by $1 billion in 1972. Domestic The House voted 210 to 186 to extend the anti-poverty program. The measure included controversial day care legislation. WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER STH Foreign India refused to accept a UW cease-fire resolution as her forces advanced further into Bast Pakistan. Chile nationalized all food supplies following a political and economic crisis caused by food shortages. Domestic President Nixon presented a pension reform plan to Congress, The measure called for tax exemptions on savings and investments for retirement, THURSDAY, DECEMBER 9TH Foreign Indian troops surrounded Dacca, the capital of East Pakistan. A bcanbing raid on the city destroyed an orphanage, killing 300 children. Former Vice President Aly Sabry of Egypt and former Minister of War Mohammed Fawzy, both leading figures in Gamel Nasser's government, were among those sentenced to hard labor for a plot against President Anwar Saoat, Sadat reduced Sabry's original sentence from death to life ImprisCnment. Ralph Bunche, former UN SecretaryGeneral, died. Domestic President Nixon vetoed an extension of the anti-poverty program because of its child-care programs which he denounced as weakening the family and fiscally irresponsible. The House passed a $26 billion tax cut, including a plan to finance election campaigns after 1976 by income tax check-offs, Steven Sedlis TO WIN” with SAVINGS LIFE INSURANCE 110,000 policy —— age 21 Total Premiums to Aga 65 - $6,463 Total Cash & Dividends Value Profit $14,175 - ----- $ 7,712 MANY ADDITIONAL FEATURES RICHARD F. 8LAUL Richard F. Blaul & Associates Phones: 268-5401 268-1348 54 Maryland Avenue ST. JOHN'S ALUMNUS �PAGE FOURTEEN THE SYNDICATE OF BACCHUS THE DSV and ACTION ONE invite tVe entire coimnunity to the annual Christmas Party to be held in FSK Lobby Tuesday, December 14th at 7:00 pm« We will begin the festivities with a buffet supper to which all are wslcome. Then the DSV will provide mixed drinks, and you will provide the con versation and singing. Please bring your husbands and wives, and help us celebrate. tides will benefit all. The last meeting of the food com mittee on Wednesday, December Sth, determined these items of informa tion, Paul fJJeller is the new manager re placing Bob Ullrich, who has been promoted to another position. Neither ’’shrimp creole” nor ’’chick en hawaiian” will ewer be served again. Replenishment of certain commod ities is in progress. Another brand of white loaf bread will replace "lUonder bread”. Other delightful things. Thee Smith DELEGATE COUNCIL FOOD SERVICE To the student community, oncampus and offs As expected, it is the duty of the food committee not simply to forward student complaints and sug gestions to Action One, but also to direct similar remarks from Action One to the student community. It is our hope that mutual concern be achieved; that improvement of attitude and action by one party be accompan ied with improvements by the other party. Please lend your attention to problems too easily regarded as trivial, A box has been placed in the lobby of Randall, to be properly used as a receptacle for gratuitously returned dining hall articles (glasses, ash trays, plates, silverware, cups, pitchers, etc,). The continual return of infrequently borrowed ar- DELEGATE COUNCIL ifllNUTES 7 December 1971 (Pearl Harbor Day) 1837 hours (No delegate from Randall, Paca, and half of Campbell) Old Business i'y"Miss Unger brought the revised charter for the DIS division of CESC The Council voted 10-0-0 to approve the sub-charter. Then the Council voted 0-0-2 to allocate 150 to CESC to pay bills, 2) Mr Main then asked for a con stituency report concerning academic gowns. The following dorms came out 50-50 for the gowns: lUest Pinkney, Campbell, Chase Stone, Humphreys. Paca was simply in favor, so said Mr Brown. East Pinkney was overwhelm ingly in favor and the off-campus independents, showing their normal iconoclastic streak, voted 25 for, 17 against. Randall’s opinion was not present. In view of this response especially since no dorms seemed against gowns, the Council voted 10-0-0 to ask President Ulaigle to �purchase 350 goiuns for the student body, 3) ffiiss Spear (F-C) luanted to knot# the status of the Randall Lobby renovation plans. No one seemed to know tuhether the plan was still extant. New Business 4) miss Jenkins requested J5Q for the expenses of Rob Wermin, the Wime. The Council approved the al location 8-0-2, 5) (Tir Lincoln, in his other capa city, i.e, Headwaiter, said that the number of missing glasses, plates, cups, salt shakers, spoons, saucers, khivBS, pepper shakers, forks, bowls, pitchers, etc., from the Dining Hall had reached proportions such that the efficiency of the Dining Hall is seriously Impaired, This is especially true at the noon meal. He asked if Delegates would please try to recover these items and return them to the Dinery, 6) Rlr Main statBd~that the Dress Reg- ' ulations at Evening Meal would be en forced beginning ll/sdnesday evening. The Council agreed that it would be extraordinarily appropriate of the Council Members if they complied. 4M3 MARYlAh® AVE. ANNAPOLIS • MARYLAND PAGE PIPTEEN 7) Christel abdicated and left Doug Anthony as Head SOB on campus. Any one wanting funding for small parties should see Doug, He’s always up for it. 8) At 1907 hrs the meeting adjourned. Meeting lUith the Administrators 9 December 1971 1405 hours (Discouraging attendance,) 1) Mr Main told the Dean that the council had voted to ask President Weigle to buy gowns. The ensuing dis cussion showed there are a great num ber of confusions and difficulties involved (such as style of gown, decor ative nature vs formal nature) that it would be wise if the, purchase step were slowly taken. Mr Morrill (M-CS) said that he thought the students of the collage would rather see the rather considerable amount of money involved spent on something useful. The matter is under consideration. 2) Mr Main said that the vandalism to the Dean’s house and the college would be taken care of by those responsible, 3) Mr Lincoln invited faculty members and their families to eat as guests of students at the eveiiing meal, par ticularly Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday evenings. This invitation brought about a discussion of the dress code enforcement. The resulting clarification is that the Council urges that the student body comply. The headwaiter and his assistants have the authority to refuse admission to students failing to dress properly. This authority comes from the Dean, 4) Mr Comber again brought up the case of the missing lamp in the Baldwin Room. The chair has been returned. Miss Spear said her investigation is continuing. 5) Mr Finch said that there are opening; for volunteers at the Germantown Primary School on Cedarpark Road. A Miss Fisher will be here on January 13 at 3 PM(l500)to speak about this program. Anyone interested should see Mr Finch, 6) The meeting adjourned at 1503 hrs, □.Lincoln Sec. �PAGE SIXTEEN Fseturing Soafood—Aged Beef—Raw Bar Stsamad Clams Cocktails Open 7 Days 11 A.W.—11 P.RI. 22 fflarkat Space Annapolis, (Baryland 268-2576 On Saturday, January 8, 1972, and Sunday, January 9» the R.A.M. Film Society will present Jean -Luc Godard's "A Bout de Souffls” ("Breathless"). Based on an originaVstory by Francois Truffaut, this brilliant film was made in.1959 and stars Jean Seberg, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Lilians David, Daniel Boulanger, Jean-Paul Melville, HenriJacques Huet, Claud Mansart, Van Doude, andJean-Luc Godard, The film takes place in Paris. Paris where a young American girl, Pat, who hawks HeraldTribunes on the streets, falls in love with a Humphrey Bogart parody named Michel who steals cars, "borrows" money, and kills-policemen. The two of them (Seberg and Belmondo) go nowhere with determination. With no plot, nor real motive, and only the slimmest pretexts for action, this film moves with such a frantic pace and such, a high pitch of tension, that the viewer is sure that all this madness is going somewhere. ."La Chinoise" and "Made in U.S.A." have recently brought Godard into the notice of the American public, though they do not have the solidity of "A Bout de Souffle". Godard is a rare and remarkable director-for he is unafraid to mix Hollywood with Kant and Hegel, Eisensteinian montage with Rossellinian Realism, words with images, professional actors with historical people, or the documentary with the iconographic. More than anybody else, Godard has realised the fantastic possibilities of Cinema as a medium of communication and expression. In his hands the cinema has become an almost equal amalgam of the symbolic, the iconic and the indexical. His films have conceptual meaning, pictorial beauty and documentary truth. Though Godard often defies the conventional logic, he does so with a deliberate and precise purpose—under standing that logical convention can be simulta neously unconventional and real. The short is to be t announced. Peter Fairbanks SPORTS Basketball; Hustlers - 47, Guardians - 50. After the first quarter, there were some raised eyebrows, the score being 9-6, Hustlers leading. People were wondering if, even without Mr. Frame, the Guardians could humble the highly touted Hustlers ... those Hustlers who came resplendent with a pair of flashy freshmen, plus some old standbys like Messrs. D'Addario, Morrill and Mollin. But reality asserted itself in the second quarter. By halftime, it was21-8. In the second half there was only a slight edge to the Hustlers, mostly because of some timely shooting by Mr, LeVan, No telling what might have happened if Mr. Frame had been playing. Are you really �interested, in knowing who scored the most points? If so, read the next sentence, Mr. Bell scored the most pointe, eighteen altogether. Spartana-40, Druids-24. After a slow start, the Druids picked up steam and outscored the Spartans in the second quarter. They were only trailing by two points at halftime. But Mr. Maiatrellis, et aX, (broke it open in the third quarter, and the Spartans coasted in to their first victory, Mr, Maiatrellis contributed sixteen points, as did the Harris Brothers, The Spartans, it will be recalled, were quite inept last year in basketball. But the September Draft brought them Mr, Maiatrellis and Mr, Harris, who, all by themselves, constitute a respectable team. Then add Mr. Spirer, who was refereeing last year. Now add Mr. Harris the Younger, and it begins to look like a formidable group. Mr. Gasner, a Johnny-comelately on our basketball scene, completes their starting five. Clearly, they will be tough to beat. Badminton: Druid8-9O» Spartan8-16, TLSTB. Volleyball:Druids-55» Guardian8-50. This was an exciting game to watch, replete with long rallies and great "saves". The lead kept fluctuating, as now one team, and now the other, would develop a hot hand. But the steady Druids were hot when it counted at the end, when the Guardians went cold for some reason. So, the Druids are now 2-0, quickly taking the lead in our volleyball league. But who knows what surprizes the new year will bring? Hu8tler8-55» Greenwaves-41« The revamped Hustlers squared PAGE SEVENTEEN up accounts today. They now have one win and one loss. They definitely looked better than they did a week ago. But can they win the big ones? These things will work them selves out in time. The Creenwaves, who are still experimenting with their lineup have not hit on the right combination yet, A little change here . , , a little there , , , and some other team is going to be "shocked" by them. Wait and see. M.U.S.H, After prolonged soul-searching, hand-wringing, hair-pulling and foot-dragging, we have finally come up with winners for these annual awards. They go, of course, to the Most Un Sung Hero in each sport. The competition and interest in past years, as in this one, has been keen. The qualifications are simple: substantial, positive contri butions to the team, coupled with absolutely no mention in any of these columns, and no selection on any All-Star team. In short, the Awardee Is a Legitimate Un Sung Hero. (Readers who are addicted to acronyms may make of this what they will.) In soccer, our MUSH winner is Mr, Asclk, who is well known to all. The improvement in his soccer skills over the years has been considerable. Honourable Mention goes to Mr, Larsen of the Greenwaves and Mr, Green of the Hustlers, In football, we were inundated with strong candi dates. We finally settled on a pair of joint winners ... Mr. Jarvis and Mr. Ellis, Honourable Mention goes to the Guardian entry of Mr, Diggory and Mr. Elkins. So, there you have them, Dear Readers, heroes all. These people, from now until the Winter Solstice, are hereby granted Genuine Hero �PAGE EIGHTEEN Status. They will be un abashedly praised, shamefully deferred to, and obsequiously fawned on. Lusty young damsels will pursue them relentlessly. They will do brave things. They will be above the Law. They will be like Gods ... but only until the Winter Solstice. Fitness Test: Remember to pass four of the tests by Christmas Vacation. Basketball Hustlers Spartans Guardians Druids Greenwaves W L 10 1'0 01 01 00 Pts. 3 3 1 1 0 This Week’s Schedule: Tuesday, 4:15(Badminton) HuBtlers-Guardians Bryce Jacobsen League Standings: Volleyball Druids Hustlers Spartans Greenwaves Guardians W L Pts. 206 11 4 10 3 02 2 01 1 Tills week’s Chef’s Choice Iflerry Christmas to everybody from your fflother (Emma) ! TO OUR SUBSCRIBERS: We are experimenting with different forms of mailing, and any suggestions will be welcomed (however, we cannot afford envelopes) THE COLLEGIAN St John’s College Annapolis, Maryland 21404 � 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. 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. 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. 18 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 Collegian, December 13, 1971 Description An account of the resource Number 76 of The Collegian. Published on December 13, 1971. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sinks, Jeffrey (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 1971-12-13 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 Subject The topic of the resource College students' writings--Periodicals College student newspapers and periodicals St. John's College--Periodicals Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Collegian 13 December 1971 Student publication https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/a1cda09c74b208fcd49f05e76c4edc54.pdf beb36743efa724d8b20543cf836a7398 PDF Text Text essay Infinite Regress ometime in the past few years, liberal arts college adminis trators across America decided that they had had enough. They wondered: what is the goal of a liberal arts education? Why study English instead of “Marketing/Advertising”? They could maneuver around aesthetic concerns (that dropping out of life in order to study Plato was... distasteful) but remained unable to surmount the issue of practicality. Nobody wanted to say that a liberal arts education would get you a certain kind of job that paid a certain kind of salary. And then all of a sud den, everybody did. You may have heard the phrase “critical thinking skills” thrown around lately. Critical thinking skills . . . what are those? Well, what seems to be certain is that C.T.S. are very important for acquiring a job nowadays. Which kinds of jobs these are seems less certain—and for what ends C.T.S. are “necessary” even less so. The argument that follows from this deduction is, of coiu-se, tenuous. (Mostly because is is not es pecially coherent.) It is also intolerably middle-brow: exactly the kind of statement your parents might pronounce to rela tives during a family reunion at Olive Garden: “Johnny’s de veloping criricuZ thinking skills because they’re so necessary for today’s job market!” Such is the critical equation: that college is foremost about money. Critical thinking is good. The world has changed for the bet ter because humans think critically. But at some point, maybe in the past few years, this became insufficient—being a critical thinker wasn’t just a necessary condition for being an educated person. It became a prerequisite for employment, specifically for a job carrying with it the kind of salary a college-educated person might expect to earn. How did this happen? It does not seem complicated. Over the years the job market has become increasingly transparent. It is no longer as common as it once ast year, gadfly coliunnist Michael Lacy made an astute was, perhaps up until the Nineties, when the Internet rose to observation, which I’ve been mentally rehashing ever prominence, to gain employment by working for a friend or since. “So much of what the gadfly was this year,” he said, relative’s company. (This still happens, of course, but it is less “was what ‘the gadfly’ was.” acceptable.) And so a person could reasonably attend a liberal This stuck "with me for a few reasons, but primarily because arts college, major in history, earn not even very good grades, it revealed our self-involvement as a Staff, rather than a pub and then somehow—as if by magic—end up working the trad lication. As a member of the Polity, when I picked up an is ing desk for a Chicago securities firm. There was a man behind sue, I wanted to see a reflection of the St. John’s community. the curtain, and that man’s name was Dad. Instead, I saw distinct fingerprints of The Staff and what we, The education of a person and that person’s employment rather than the Polity, created the paper to be. were once two wholly separate things. This was an eflfect of That being said, the true object of this Letter is to inform fairly ridiculous income stratification. (Income disparity also our old and new readers of the existence of what we are now accounted for the now-unfathomably low price of college in calling G: A SUPPLEMENT. In theory’, this will be our literary the twentieth century, which has since been corrected for, supplement to the more news-oriented gadfly. And while now that people who are not wealthy aspire to go to college.) I take up this space to encourage you to submit yoxir poems, Years ago, you didn’t expect a job due to your degree; you ex translations, vignettes, comics, photographs, short stories, et pected one because of your social status. Nobody really need cetera. I also encourage you to help us shape our new endeav ed to worry about the practicality of a liberal arts degree when or, as it truly belongs to you. economic injustice guaranteed every college graduate a high—Elizabeth Spagnoletti payingjob. Along with a fervent extolling of C.T.S. comes a swift con ______________ The Gadfly 1 — For this issue. The “G” will be carrying what would nor demnation of utilitarian degrees: programs of study like ra mal appear in the gadfly. diology or nursing or electrical engineering. (Or: massage S letter from the editor Introducing “G” L �Aphasia, NY (Beyond the Zero) Vandal propaganda on The neighbor temple: MEEK, smeared Proud in David’s Star Waging modest holy war In this mumble drowned hamlet, While the yoimg ones Study stray voodoo. Vast fatal papyrus, and Deities that gather clouds in their wake. » A habitat under Assault by disputed Details of the Wonder-drawn nightly Fathoms, deep into the Blue distant shores, Vista speckled with Foreign starlights. A ceaseless argument of Namely whom had been Sewn lucid into the Folds of that prayerscape, and the Frequent invocations and Conjurations of Them imder strife. Once happy hollows Clove to their Doomed horrors alleged, the Judgment lain on those Fallen fools, be it the Core’s un-luminous furnace, or the Vengeful wrath of the Chthonic dominion below. Upon those cleft of mortal thread. Supplicants to the somber air. Pleading, “whisper in my ear,” But we don’t speak that Language Since our towers fell. —Carter Brown therapy.) This is one of the few cogent parts of the argument against specialization, against pre-professionalization. (One may find a parallel in the medical commimity’s persistent con troversy vis-a-vis specialization versus general care.) A liberal arts education prepares you in a way a degree in video game design never will for the exigencies and pain and uncertainties of everyday living: for the monster of modernity. It makes you fully alive. Since market corrections along with the continued eradication of inequality made impossible the prior terms of a college education, it wasn’t surprising that a lot of young people in the past decade or so felt like they had to choose be tween making money and a “life of the mind,’’ between being comfortable and being free: between death and life. So what to do with people for whom college is the means of making more money? Tell them that a liberal arts education doesn’t prepare you for a job but does develop C.T.S., which will help you get a job, insofar as they develop you as a fully functioning, highly capable hiunan being. There’s not a whole lot wrong with this. But what is wrong is deadly. Why did we cede that education is for profit-making? Degrees in engineer ing, or computer science, or cosmetology: they are not the problem. The difficulty is that market capitalism has success fully encroached upon one of the last bits of sacred territory— the liberal arts—hitherto protected as a means to abetter, more democratic society. What do we have to show for it? Critical thinking skills. It is terribly ironic that the institutions that looked at the world and became determined to make it better by educating people are now stuck defending themselves for “practicality.” The revolution did not start in Accounting 101. But this is where those college administrators, from Kenyon to Swarthmore to Reed, have gone to console themselves. titled this editorial with the intent of criticizing two things. The first is that critical thinking skills, or the status associ ated with them, are an inherently regressive concept, especial- I ly within the object of my second criticism, which is the terms set by market capitalism, terms with which we have agreed to follow. After all, you can’t think too critically, lest everything fall down. Lest you be required to reconsider the world. I don’t know why C.T.S. were appropriated for the ends of capitalism. And I don’t know why liberal arts college admin istrators were complicit in such theft. In the end, a liberal arts education doesn’t give you much of anything at all except the huge, great, life-giving ability to process, without breaking down, the heady, outrageous stuff of living: the capacity to still recognize life, and yourself, in the entropy. This is what you came here for: not to get a job, but to be able to deal with hav ing to do so. —J. Keenan Trotter books Summer Reading recommend the following four books that I read this sum mer. They weren’t the only good ones I came across, but these were the last of the bunch, read as the siunmer was ending, and so imbued with that preemptive nostalgia which marks the waning of a season. 1. Gypsy Rose Lee, The G String Murders, 1941. (The ety mology of the “G” is, perhaps happily, unknown). Gypsy Rose Lee, the famous stripper intellectual (striptease is a subclass of burlesque; vaudeville is its snobbishly genteel relative) lived for a while at 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights. Here W.H. Auden (with his lover Chester Kailman), Benjamin Britten, Carson McCullers, Janet Flanner and a whole slew of other celebrities, including Klaus Mann (Thomas’s son), dos sed down or dug in to form a roiling commune composed of I brilliant talents and irregular existences. (I got the reference to G String Murders out of a book by Sherrill Tippins, Febru ary House, that tells this Brooklyn story; it was lent to me by an Annapolis alumna, Cynthia Barry.) There Gypsy worked on her first book with help from various members of the crew. However, the thing is essentially her own, told in her own name. It’s pretty racy, but a little too littered with characters and strung together and, to me, a tad boring in the long run, I didn’t read every page but looked to see who dunnit (my hermeneutic method for reading mysteries). Yet you learn a lot about the tough argot and the rough ways of a nearly by gone form of entertainment. (That “Little Flower,” Fiorello LaGuardia, New York’s kookily wonderful mayor in the for ties—he used to read us kids the funnies on the radio during newspaper strikes—shut down all the burlesque theaters in the cause of family values.) Under the rubric Femmes Fatales the book has been republished by Feminist Press, which takes pride—imagine!—in the fact that women can write pulp fic tion. (Since the genre is often sexually exploitative, this surely isn’t quite kosher as feminism.) The work seems to be good of its kind, and it’s certainly fascinating as anthropology. Any how, it’s a phenomenon. She was a phenomenon who could do something remarkable: raise vulgarity to wit. I think I’d have liked her better in person than in her book, but then I got that notion from her book. Roadhead Roadhead, the live-long monster of morning sits in black platitudes waiting to sing of all scrape scrapers and newborn winged Dongers who with goggle mouths fly in the rain. O roadhead, your mouth is a letter, your arms are wrangle red nether. So if I rise, and chuck you off a cliff a biff, a whiff of the high air think nothing, and fall down, moonlight rich in your hair. The Gammy Gaze I seldom shun Especially when I’m on the run. So enter wide enter. Lay Down A Black Sneeze. Come on sweet Lolly, get on your knees. You know Unckle and Aunt they’re followers of the Floundoo Pipe and Readiers of the Eagle: It’s often that they fly along on the wicked shore. You know Rickie and Samantha they’re better in the flesh, if you can convince them to squirm and spin the fucking bottle. —Chris Johns 2. William Saroyan, The Human Comedy, 1943. A Santa Fe alumnus, Laird Durley, gave me his copy, thinking quite right ly that it would speak to me, since the book was published not long after I’d arrived in Brooklyn, America, from Nazi Ger many. Saroyan is as gently sweet as Gypsy is harshly raw. To make it perfect, the two heroes, a four year old boy and his teenage brother, are called Ulysses and Homer respectively. It’s a lovely tear-jerker and remarkably right-minded. It ad umbrates the social changes of the sixties but as yet without ideology—rather as feelings of the American heart. It even has one redeeming vice: the opinion, twice enforced, that women aren’t supposed to go to work. This is the American small town and its folks—all yet in the age of innocence. And if a cynic wants to argue that Americans never were that innocent, it would be a truth of hindsight only. In the forties, they felt that way to themselves and looked that way to escapees from Europe. Spend two and a half hours in lost Eden! 3. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night, 1934. Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby has long been one of my favorite novels, partly because I love that “elegant roughneck,” Jay Gatsby—I’ve had him in seminar. But Tender is the Night seems to me even more accomplished. It has a slow and sure tragic inevitability—from hopeful, halcyon Riviera days to declining, dingy North Euro pean years—for a man who is willingly enslaved by loving duty to his schizophrenic wife and insidiously seduced by his iner tial ambition to depend on her relatives’ money. The wife is a masterpiece of madness: the inextricable strands of wicked egotism and woeful pathology. But what is most to be savored is the writing itself: the pungent observations wrapped in fig ures of speech that often seem tough to swallow, but when you chew them over release their satisfying substance. This is a great book, among the best American novels I’ve read, and it needs more notice than a paragraph; if I ever get to do a pre ceptorial again. I’ll propose it. 4. Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft, 2009. I don’t like motorcycles; if I was somebody’s mother I’d hate them What’s more, some sixty years ago I rode behind a young madman, up and down the steep streets of the side of Athens that runs up the slopes of Lycabettus, and it put my back out for months. I do watch American Chopper, for its mixture of gross manners and exquisite knowhow. It’s the knowhow that Shop Class, a book that goes straight to my soul, is about. The writer owns a cycle repair shop, and though he is modest, he must be first-rate. He makes a detail-informed case for the soul satisfaction to be gotten from becoming an expert (or serious amateur) at some hands-on craft and offers a restrainedly appalled critique of the “separation of thinking from doing” that governs a great deal of contemporary work. It’s as much a passionate how-to-live and what-to-shun book as a cool sociological analysis of our condition, whose central issue he diagnoses as—I think that’s right—“individual agen cy.” Crawford studied political philosophy at Chicago, with obvious benefit: like Socrates before him, he knows that, as cleanliness is next to godliness, so craftsmanship is next to philosophy. Compared to Shop Class as Soulcraft, its charm ingly talkative predecessor, the cult classic of the seventies, Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (which makes irrelevant hay of Plato’s Phaedrus) seems about ready for honorable retirement, except that it’s the more ju venile of the two books. Some chapters of Shop Class would �make a splendid guerilla seminar. Afterthou^t: Who’d have imagined that a Ph.D. in Political Philosophy could net you a best-seller? Whoever wants to talk about any of these four, or, for that matter, any others, is welcome to give me a call. I’m in the Campus Directory. —Eva Brann Tutor personal history Arthur Mallamo forty-year-old memory occurred to me this summer while I was attending a lecture about the effects of alcohol on the brain, presented by a professor of neurology from Johns Hopkins University. As I listened to the lecture and took notes, my mind drifted to my friendship with the legendary Arthur Mallamo. Mr. Mallamo was my 7th grade gym teacher. He was also a poet, a philosopher, and a comedian. He had a command ing presence and a pushed-in, twisted nose that led to much speculation among us boys about how its unique shape was acquired. Theories ranged from his being a professional wres tler to a Mafia hit-man. The truth was even more remarkable: he was a WWII bomber and fighter pilot who’d been shot down not once, but twice, and eluded capture both times. His misshapen nose was a reminder of his ordeals. If Mr, Mallamo liked you, his way of showing it was to tease you in front of the class. One cold November day he had us running around the track, our thin gym uniforms providing almost no protection from the icy winds. As Mr. Mallamo ex horted us onward he bellowed, “Whoever comes in last has to take Januszewski home for Thanksgiving dinner!” It was then I knew we were getting along well. He was also my health class teacher, which was where he expounded on various life lessons. He’d speak earnestly to us about living generously and about the value of dedicating your life to service. “Gentlemen,” he’d say softly, “greed is a terrible thing.” One day a boy smuggled a very dead but otherwise intact frog into the classroom. As soon as Mr. Mallamo’s back was turned, the boy, in a display of boldness I will always remem ber, laxmched the frog into the air like a grenade. It landed with an inert thud on the teacher’s desk. All eyes were on Mr. Mallamo as he turned, carefully examined the frog, held it aloft and said, “Gentlemen. This... is a frog. Am I going too fast for you Januszewski?” We howled with laughter and loved him for that. Another day in health class, Mr. Mallamo explained how alcohol rendered brains cells less and less functional. To il lustrate his point, he took the blackboard eraser in his huge hand and dangled it at arm’s length. “Gentlemen... this is what alcohol does to brain cells...” and he dropped the eraser onto the desk surface, which sent a puff of chalk dust into the air. I got the message: drink too much and your brain cells go poof. This seemed plausible, but was it true? This summer’s neurology lecture at Johns Hopkins jogged A Nuclear Physics is Interesting im silence profond; the wide deserted streets hate the vanity of men. I love without regret: the majesty of human suffering, the autumn, a red hat to the west Dedie aux Palmeri et Milligan —Translated and arranged by Kelly Trop my memory about Mr. Mallamo’s lessons. It turns out that yes, alcohol, and drunkenness in particular, has a significant nega tive impact on an aspect of brain development called myelina tion. Myelin is the material that forms a protective sheath around nerve cells, or netnons, enabling them to communicate and be social with each other. Proper myelination is vital for the ce rebral cortex, the part of your brain that helps you do well in college. Healthy myelination is very good for the grey matter: it enhances crisp thinking and efficient recall in our mental processes. Like people, neurons work well when they are well connected with each other. One reason drinking is such an effective way to get high is that alcohol easily penetrates the myelin sheath to mess with cell function. The more intense the drinking, the more de structive the assault on the myelin sheath. If the myelination process is impaired, intellectual activity is also impaired; neu rons become more rigid, less fluid, more easily irritated. Poor ly myelinated neurons work less efficiently, become poorer communicators, and eventually die of loneliness. In practical terms, impaired myelination makes it harder to remember things, harder to concentrate, easier to be frus trated with new information. You could say a well-myelinated brain is better able to enjoy exercising its intellect, and a less well-myelinated brain will struggle more. Healthy myelination is important at all ages, but, according to the Johns Hopkins neurologist, the cerebral cortex in the human brain desires a myelination “growth spurt” in the 1821 age range. The worst way to drink, from a brain growth perspective, is to binge drink in college. That’s high-impact toxicity. Once again, I tip my hat to my old gym teacher and friend, Arthur Mallamo. While he. didn’t have access to all the sci entific data, he was right to suggest that alcohol can diminish brain power well after we’ve finished drinking. Since the life of the mind is so highly valued at St. John’s College, it makes sense to examine how our drinking pleasures influence our in tellectual pleasures. If there was a conflict between the two, which pleasure would take priority? If you’re mindful of how much you desire your intellectual powers to flourish and would like to limit your drinking, then the next time you’re at a party and someone offers you a drink, feel free to say, “No thanks. I’m myelinating today.” —Jerry Januszewski analysis likely come down to the Guardians and Druids -with Popov throvting the disc, and handball looks to be wide open. Linus Feder and Marin Skokandic give the Guardians solid experi ence on the soccer field, and on paper at least, the Guardians look to be serious contenders to win the overall intramurals he sophomore draft is over, and the fall intramurals sea championship. son has finally begun. For the freshmen and anyone else Green Waves In the Draft: After seeing Eric Shlifer light who didn’t follow the draft (or for anyone who just likes readup their B-team handball and basketball teams last year, the ing about sports), here’s a recap of the first round of the draft Green Waves ensured that history would not repeat itself by with some predictions of how each team is likely to fare in the taking him with the fourth pick in the draft. Shlifer will pro coming year. vide some much-needed scoring in both of those sports as well Druids In the Draft: Trading away their top two draft as adding his forehand to a fidsbee team with no clear-cut han picks in order to move up and get the first overall from the dlers. — Guardians, the Druids made David Campbell the number one On the Field: The Green Waves look to be one of the most overall selection in this year’s draft. Campbell, who played for balanced teams in the league after finishing second overall last the Druids last year, should continue to anchor their basket year, despite failing to win any individual sports. They are the ball and handball teams, giving them a proven scorer -with the clear favorites to win soccer this year with a deep roster fea ability to take over a game. He’ll also bolster an already strong turing John Dusenberry and Acacia Pappas and should con frisbee team, giving their talented throwers a big target in the tend in handball with strong play from Andrew Mize. The end zone. basketball team, anchored by the ageless Jerry Januszewski, On the Field: The Druids soccer team has been decimated is solid as well. Frisbee continues to be a question mark for the with the departure of Mikey Mowry, Taylor Reese, Corey Cas- Waves, but their depth should help them to a decent finish. tellaw, and Eugene Samarin. After winning that title last year, With no glaring weaknesses, the Waves are definitely in the the Druids will be hard-pressed to repeat last year’s success hunt for the championship. and will rely heavily on Ezra Doucet. Basketball will also be Hustlers In the Draft With the fifth pick in the draft, the a challenge, especially without the alumni presence of other defending champions selected Dhidhat Vanichstian, a speedy teams. On paper, frisbee looks to be their best sport, with a and remarkably complete athlete, who will be important in large team and several good throwers, including Johnny Flem every sport. Dhidhat will provide extra offense in soccer and ing. But after dropping the season opener to the Spartans, even continue to play A-team basketball and handball, contributing that seems to be in doubt. to a strong but potentially thin roster that needs new players Spartans In the Draft: Ryan Eberlein, this year’s second in order to stay afloat. overall pick, returns to the Spartans after taking a year off On the Field: It is the beginning of a new era for the Hus from St. John’s. Eberlein should provide solid play in goal for tlers after the graduation of J.P. Snyder, who anchored the a soccer team that struggled at that position last year and will team in nearly every sport After going imdefeated in basket make major contributions on the basketball court. Though his ball and handball last year (and losing only to the Green Waves strong arm may be less important with Athenian reason ball in reason ball and soccer), the Hustlers may be in a rebuilding reduced from an eight-game season to a tournament, it should phase. Luke Wakeen, Alton Lind, and Matt Gore are all very help the Spartans end their two-year winless streak in hand good basketball players, but without Snyder, it will be difficult ball. for them to win by taking turns dominating the B -team half of On the Field: Strong defensive play from Honore Hodgson games. Dhidhat and James Russell give them lots of goal-scor should keep the Spartans in every soccer game. If they can ing potential in soccer, but to really compete in any sport they find a way to start scoring goals, they could be very dangerous. will rely on alumni Noel Brockett, Luke Russell, and Tobias Their frisbee team still looks solid, but handball has not been Russell to round out their squad. If that trio continues to show kind to the Spartans in several years. Look for them to focus up consistently, the Hustlers could repeat as overall champs, on basketball, where Doug Anderson should thrive in a league but if not, they may just be stretched too thin to compete in that lost most of its other big men with last year’s graduating anything. class. Guardians In the Draft: Knowing how intent the Druids inal Thoughts As always, the freshman allocation adds and Spartans were on bringing back Campbell and Eberlein, a variable to intramm-als that is impossible to account for the Guardians were able to trade down from the first to third when looking at a team’s likely strengths. Any player could be pick and still get the player they wanted: Tommy Bonn. Likely the one to put a team over the top, and teams needs new re the tallest student at St. John’s, Bonn’s basketball skills make cruits or they starve. Particularly in frisbee and soccer, which the Guardians an early favorite to take home the title, though involve lots of players and lots of running, getting enough his strong arm will also prove useful in both handball and fris people to have a bench is vital, so the teams that are able to bee. The Guardians also snagged Daniel Popov with the first get players out have a distinct advantage. This year’s freshman pick of the second round, last year’s frisbee MVP, and a poten class looks to be large and strong, which should make for an tial soccer goalie. exciting league. If you’re a freshman (or anyone else) thinking On the Field: With the addition of Tommy Bonn to their all- about coming out for intramurals, give it a shot, and unleash star roster of tutors and other alumni, the Guardians look to your inner Achilles. have the strongest basketball team at the school. Frisbee will —Gil Shank The Draft T F �Hard Hard hard hard, It’s so when the blowing winds backwash and Orange Julias’s rule the night, and lozenges gurgle up and down in places where alleycats fuck other alleycats to the sound of beautiful music. I remember days when morning cartoons would play at night, and in a symphony of smiles, flash flash flash, I’d suck in, with pleasure, a lethal dose of the ordinary. But never, in my most bogus dreams, was I the living entre, spinning wide on a platter. Like: Gimme some money Gimme some love and if you like do it with a leather glove. Because in my bogus dreams, I’m a slick alligator. —Chris Johns reading at large The Seven Habits Personally, I am quickly learning to differentiate between a professional and an expert. A professional is someone who does something for a living and then shares the tricks they have learned to overcome whatever adversity that career of fers. Many such tips can be applied to life in general. An ex pert has a list of impressive degrees and paradoxically always seems to have written at least one other book before the one you are currently reading. Feel free to formulate your own distinctions. Personally, I was embarrassed to admit that I needed some one else’s tips to improve my own productivity, but I was more embarrassed at being an aspiring writer who had written pre cisely nothing. If you share this problem, I recommend The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield. I will not summarize the book here, suflSce to say it is written by a man who has written many cool things Qike Gates of Fire, a novel of Thermopylae) and whose advice about overcoming resistance has helped me immensely and will likely help anyone who struggles to fulfill some creative endeavor. The trick, of course, is in being pro fessional. So, while I will most likely continue to be distrustful of books that talk about “optimizing my synergy,” I will keep an eye out for books that offer insightful and applicable exper tise. It’s less about self-help and more about just plain help ful. And no, I will never read Seven Habits for Highly Effective Teens: I’m just too old. —Kyle Amann Johns & Johnnies Hanging Out ’ll never forget my mother’s push to get me to read The Sev en Habits of Highly Effective Teens by Sean Covey, a book that easily belongs to the “self-help” category. Her motiva oh yes, it is time for the highly-anticipated return of Of Johns tions for this were never clear to me; presumably, she heard and Johnnies.' You were anticipating it, right? Highly? A little? somewhere that I would benefit from it. Without so much as Please?... Anyway, it’s the same deal as last year: you write me skimming its content, I rejected the book and refused to even questions, I answer them as best I can. For those new to An napolis, topics I wrote on last year included role-play in the bed consider reading it. My justification did not partake of anything identifiably room, what we talk about when we talk about sex, the meaning rational, but relied instead on an inherent distrust of anyone of “queer,” and woman-friendly sex toy shops. This week’s ques who at that time claimed to know more than I did about my tion is on the less-adventurous side of things, but it touches on life. I cynically upheld my distrust as refusing to be “taken in” a lot of issues that come up time and time again in the Polity, so by someone trying to make money off of a burgeoning market withoutjurther ado; composed of naive and desperate people. ear Emma, While it still seems to me that many self-help books fall somewhere between pop-mysticism and parapsychology, I re I was wondering if you might be able to give me some ad cently changed my mind about condemning the entire catego ry. After all, once we sort through some complex philosophi vice concerning friendships and “hanging out’” here in gen cal ramifications, what is Aristotle’s Ethics if not prescribed eral. My specific question: is there any good/nice way to ef guidelines for positive human behavior? In today’s marketing fectively stop hanging out with someone that you really aren’t centric society, it might well be called Mean Habits For An Eu- very interested in spending much time hanging out with (for daimonian Man. (Memo to Mr. Sachs: Your proposed slogans whatever reason)? —Mild-Mannered Misanthrope are due for presentation to our focus groups by the tenth.) The entire St. John’s experience is one that emphasizes self MMM, you seem like a no-nonsense sort of person, so here’s betterment throu^ extensive reading, and although some texts are more open about their practical applications than the short answer to your question: no. But since you asked nicely. I’ll flesh it out for you. There others, there are life-lessons to be found everywhere from are two ways to botch this immediately. One is to simply stop Herodotus to Shakespeare. (But for the love of God, go easy picking up your phone, cease making eye contact, and reso on the Machiavelli.) So, it probably would not hurt to keep lutely ignore their very existence. This is a fair amount of work an open mind about modem authors who want to share their to execute, and it’s likely to leave the de-friended party con personal maxims for your sake. I fused and seething, at best Plus, it gets awkward, fast—have class together? Mutual friends? Yeah, not so much. Even if you hate this person’s guts, you’re not going to accomplish a whole lot by treating them rudely. The second way is to tell him or her off, explaining every reason why that person is undesirable as a friend, and get in a gigantic fight. Again, you now have an indignant, pissed-off person, you’ve introduced a whole lot of unnecessary awk wardness into both your lives, you’ll probably feel guilty for being petty, and... for what? Honestly, unless you think that they are so screwed up that they absolutely need someone to tell them this stuff—and you tliink that telling them will have an impact on their Ufe other than thinking you to be heartless and cruel—you’re better off keeping your trap shut. There’s no good way to immediately cut short nascent friendship, MMM. Don’t be afraid to say no to them if they want to hang out; maybe you are going to spend some oneon-one time with another friend, maybe you’re going to study, whatever. (It’s harder if you only hang out with one group of friends and this person is in that group, but maybe this is a good opportunity to branch out!) Avoid lying as much as possible, and simply phase out spending time with them. Be thoughtful. There’s no script for this sort of thing, but if you do yoiur best to be considerate of others, you’ll be okay. In fact, being considerate of others, especially if you don’t like said others, will get you pretty far in life. —Emma Gold register Freshman Bodies, Freshman Souls This reprinted article first appeared in the gadfly on Septem ber 2,1982. It was re-submitted by our current athletic director, Leo Pickens. We’re sure Mr. Pickens is willing to stand in for the first person voice used in this article and answer any questions you might have about our great athletic program. —The Editors he reasons, both physical and metaphysical, why every one ought to be apart of our sports program are many. I list a few: 1. We have the best athletic program of any college in the country. 2. Exercise is good for the body...unless you sprain an ankle or something like that. 3. Most of us feel better, are more alert, and can get more work done if our bodies are healthy and our souls are relaxed. 4. Friendly competition is one of the really fun things in life. It is good for your soul. 5. Your circle of acquaintances will be greatly enlarged. This is good for the soul, provided you can separate the wheat from the chaff. 6. You will learn to accept, and bear with, thousands of splitsecond decisions from the officials, a few of which are wrong. This is very good for the soul. 1. Do you like to strive for, and achieve, specific goals? If so, consider our college blazers. They are much sought after, and T Courage Tuck in your shirt, or I’m going to make you. Whether it’s a button down or a T, I don’t care. I want to see you tuck it in. But you’re wearing sneakers? Oh great. As if that matters. Now go ahead and tuck it in. But you’re not wearing a belt? Yeah, well I have a black belt, you son of a bitch. Tuck it in. Take a cue from me, and whether you want to or not, take the shirt, unbutton your pants, shove your shirt down your pants and zip up again, so that the shirt, is. Tucked, in. —Chris Johns the pathway is clearly laid out Striving for goals is good for your soul. 8. It is probably true that the more pure fun occurs in the athletic program than in any other area of the college. Fun is good for your soul. 9. If you get involved in team sports and become a “good team player,” you have realized that there are things in the imiverse that are more important than your own ego. This is a great good for your soul. 10. The benefits of exercise and friendly competition, learned while one is yoimg, should be maintained for the rest of your life. ..i.e, they should become habitual. For virtue, as the Philosopher said, is a habit. 11. You will get to know numerous alumni, tutors, and staff members who participate in the program. This is good for your soul, or ought to be...provided that they are the proper sort of role models. 12. Our showers are the best at the college; always plenty of hot water. 13. Are you bothered by, or worried by, tobacco fumes in the air? Come to the gym. The whole building is a nicotine-free zone. 14. If you perform some sort of heroic deed on the athletic field, your name will be mentioned in our weekly column. He roes are always acclaimed. But do not be carried away by this. Remember that “the paths of glory lead but to the grave.” 15. A high percentage of our best students are active partici pants in our program. 16. Those who play, stay. 17. The gym is not particularly well-equipped, as gyms go. But it has washers and dryers, and a Coke machine...and I will explain to you, if you ask me, how you can get yourself in tip- �top physical shape, without any equipment at all. 18. You can sit in an old-time barber’s chair in my office. You can pump yourself up and down, and adjust the slope high or low. Where else can you do that? 19. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. 20. It is better to li^t a candle than to curse the darkness. So there you have it...twenty good reasons why you should participate in our athletic program. If you are not convinced by all of this, come and talk to me...I can probably think of some more good reasons. Or better yet, talk with the upperclassmen. They will tell you all sorts of strange, interesting, and wondrous things. —Bryce Jacobsen, Class of 1942 and FORMER Athletic Director etiquette Speaking of Tutors To All Our Students, Many of you seem to be in some uncertainty about how to handle greeting Tutors on campus. The primary rule-of-thumb is this: you, the Student, are so cially obliged to greet a Tutor first, unless it’s reasonably clear that he or she is otherwise engaged. Failure to initiate such a greeting, at least when it runs no evident risk of intrusion, is rude or insulting. You may be forgiven for such a lapse, but you should still be ashamed of it. Sometimes Tutors may greet you first, but this makes no difference; although they’re free to initiate, they’re not the ones obliged to do so. Note that the polite default is not a rigid rule, binding in every single case without regard to circumstance. There is, of course, some tact involved in judging when your expected greeting might be thought intrusive, an attentiveness and dis crimination that’s worth cultivating. I would counsel you all not to let the challenge or inconve nience of having to make such a judgment lead you into im politely ignoring your Tutors or foolishly pretending that you haven’t seen them. Status-conscious social primates that we all are, the latter tactic is remarkably transparent at almost any angle or distance. I would also observe that a slight intrusion, if there be one, will almost always be felt far less keenly by a Tutor than the appearance of a snub. —Carl Page Tutor MASTHEAD Elizabeth Spagnoletti & J. Keenan Trotter, Edi tors; Marin Skokandic, Business Manager; Megan Faulkner, Copy Editor; Chris Johns, Michael Lacy, Annika Schweibert, Assistant Editors. SUBMIT: GADFLY@SJCA.EDU The photo above was taken by Rachel Ulrich. � 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 Gadfly Description An account of the resource Founded in 1980, The Gadfly is a weekly student publication distributed to over 600 students, faculty, and staff of the Annapolis campus. Click on <a title="The Gadfly" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=16&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&sort_dir=d">Items in the The Gadfly Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context thegadfly 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. 8 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 G: A Supplement [first issue] Description An account of the resource First issue of G: A Supplement, September 12, 2010. Several issues of this literary supplement to The Gadfly were published in the fall of 2010. None of the issues are dated or enumerated; the dates of publication are assumed based on dates printed on illustrations or, in the case of the first issue, Eva Brann's notes on a copy of her book review in her faculty file. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Spagnoletti, Elizabeth (Editor) Trotter, J. Keenan 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 2010-09-13 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 Subject The topic of the resource College students' writings--Periodicals College student newspapers and periodicals St. John's College--Periodicals Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Gadfly_G_1_2010-09-13 G: A Supplement Gadfly Student publication https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/a028246f9f6b773e23bb1a08b7060c26.pdf be436da5c199a2bf9f4c283238552435 PDF Text Text 1 Convocation Address St. John’s College, Santa Fe August 29, 2024 J. Walter Sterling, President Good morning, again, on this beautiful day here, on our Santa Fe Campus of St. John’s College, here over 7000 feet above sea level, in the foothills of Monte Sol and the Sangre de Cristo mountains. A beautiful day, and a significant day, ending one chapter, and opening a new one, for all of our new students — beginning this evening for you freshmen, with the terrible beauty of the Iliad and an opening question. Thus begins a new rhythm of life, as the bell rings, each Monday and Thursday evening, and you enter seminar. So, welcome to you freshmen, Class of 2028, and first semester graduate students. Welcome family and friends joining us, the faculty of the college, all of our staff, and our returning students. Welcome to low-residency graduate students and family members and others joining us online. A special welcome to Katarina Wong, president of the St. John’s College Alumni Association and member of our Board of Visitors and Governors. My remarks will seem aimed at our freshmen. For our new graduate students, including lowresidency students, please know you are just as integral to our community of learning, and the heart of all this is intended for you, too. What you are undertaking exemplifies, in its own extraordinary way, the convictions and aspirations of our college. I will explore two themes: First, to reflect with you a bit on what it means to join this “community dedicated to liberal education.” — Our most foundational document, modestly titled, “The Statement of the Program,” has long opened with the assertion that, “St. John’s College is a community dedicated to liberal education.” — Second, I will propose four sources of sustaining strength, for the journey you’ve begun. “A community dedicated to liberal education.” Who is this community? Let’s begin with you 90 freshmen. You come from all over geographically, and from all varieties of backgrounds. From 25 states, and from 6 countries abroad — Albania, Canada, China, Egypt, India, Nepal. From public, private, and homeschool educations. Some grew up right here in Santa Fe, some daring few have entered the United States for the very first time to join us here. Within the U.S., some have traveled very far: 3,500 miles from Palmer Alaska, 2,300 miles from Pownal, Maine. You discovered St. John’s along various paths: from a deep love of books, or the advice of a favorite teacher, from a Johnnie family member, or moved by the visit to campus or the Summer Academy, some thrilled by the people they met here, or the conversations they joined, some drawn to this bold vision of what a college education can be, some arriving after attending other colleges or being out of school in the world of work for a season. The community you join is small in a way — 400 undergraduates, 100, graduate students — but it contains more varied backgrounds than many larger communities, and, because of the shared �2 course of study, and the constant conversation together which you have already begun, you will experience more diversity and empathize with and learn from this wide range of backgrounds, beliefs, and perspectives more than is likely in the relative anonymity and dispersion of more conventional colleges. We are also a campus community, including our staff and faculty who are united by uncommon dedication to the program and to your and their own learning. Our constant practice of shared inquiry requires, and fosters, mutual civility and respect, inclining naturally toward empathy and friendship. Such civility and respect are modeled daily in the classroom by our tutors. We do not seek facile agreement or hard-edged debate. We seek to reason together and, as our Statement says, to learn from our differences and discover our shared humanity. Radiating out from our campus, you now join the community of all Johnnie alumni, whose education was shaped by the same program and community, if varying in details, over the years and decades. And you now live in this remarkable city of Santa Fe, New Mexico, a city in which this college has found a home for 60 years. To what are we dedicated? “Liberal education.” You know already you have chosen a college that aims to offer as complete an undergraduate education as possible in the most important respects, “a complete and generous education,” to borrow a phrase from Milton — that is, to go as deep as possible into the fundamental questions, to the roots and foundations of things, and to be as broad as possible in respect to the range of human faculties and fundamental domains of knowledge and life. You will be required to, or given the opportunity to, translate Plato and Sophocles from the original Greek, in which you will acquire basic competence, and you will be asked to work through Einstein’s 1905 paper on special relativity, equation by equation. You will sing and analyze music. You will draw flowers and conifers and dissect biological specimens and observe light’s wave-particle duality. You will study the works of Adam Smith and of Karl Marx. You will study Euclid’s Elements and the genesis of and techniques of calculus. You will begin tonight with seminar conversations on Homer and then as seniors explore the works of George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison... and so much more! You may be challenged by those who see in the phrase “liberal education” neglect of the practicalities of life. But this is a mirage. Every college and university, all of what we call higher education today cannot avoid balancing three aims, simply put: the pursuit of truth or knowledge as an end in itself, preparation for citizenship or political life, and preparation for career or the practicalities and necessities of our work-life. Liberal education properly pursued advances all three aims, in a well-balanced way. The truth is that what distinguishes St. John’s is not that our aims and values are unusual; it is that we are able to pursue certain widely shared values in a more uncompromising way than most educational institutions. Most educators and academics, when asked, would love to have smaller classes (like yours), discussion-driven classes (like yours), and highly self-motivated and curious students (like you). They too believe all or most students would benefit from much more time with great works of literature and philosophy, read patiently and thoughtfully, and with deeper logical and mathematical study, and from many other areas that are too often neglected. But they and their institutions, for many and varied reasons, are not incentivized and not able to offer these things quite so well as we can. Most other institutions have added aims and added constraints. They must strike a different balance or have a necessarily narrowed focus. �3 You may also be challenged to explain the relevance of studying so closely classics of the past. I recall many years ago hearing our revered former dean Eva Brann answer a parent’s challenge to that effect in this pithy way, as I recall it: “Our world is technology and democracy. Those are Greek words, and to understand our world today you must ultimately understand its roots in Greek thought.” — Properly interpreted, you could almost deduce our whole program from that premise. We are not studying the past as past; we are studying the living roots or natural history of our present world. Liberal education, pursued in this broad and deep way, is not only relevant today, it is needed seemingly now more than ever. It strengthens you, where current society is weak or faltering. It cultivates the habits of mind and character that are needed now to face the dystopian trends of our technological society and the polarization and loss of civility in our political life and discourse. The remedy to these depends on and passes through a renewal of education, one that points strongly toward the heart of what we quietly pursue at St. John’s. I am convinced that there are more people today who see the need for that renewal than there were 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. I offer those as some opening reflections on our community dedicated to liberal education. Now, “Noble things are difficult.” So goes a Greek maxim you will translate. You arrive here, I hope, eager and energized for the work ahead, curious, with senses sharpened. But you also know it will be challenging. You came here not for something easy but for something substantial, and therefore challenging. You will struggle at times. Let me point to what I see as four sources of strength and sustenance that seem to me well-suited to lift you up, to lift each of us up. My hope is that making them explicit can make them more available. The first, perhaps easiest for us to see on the surface, is not to lose sight of the seriousness or grandeur of the work itself, its height or excellence, its depth or gravity. The works we characterize as “great books,” and the kinds of questions you will pursue, are truly impressive, often enigmatic, often dazzling and elevating. Do not let their difficulty eclipse that vision. When the work of the day falters or becomes a grind, remind yourself that you really are doing that hard work and persevering, in order to illuminate the most fundamental matters, to cultivate the kind of soul that can dwell near and benefit from great wisdom and beauty and the works that express them. Second, you have, we have, one another: There is much in life that isolates us, and typically it is when things seem darkest or most difficult that we feel most isolated. Here, you are closer to many others who can offer empathy, understanding, and support, than most students out there are. The small size of this community, your daily study and life together, the common curriculum, the familiarity which your tutors have with what you are doing and with the members of their classes, the staff who know well the character of this campus, the program, and all the resources available for getting through times of difficulty, your friends, and your classmates and room and hallmates. There are truly always more folks you can reach out to and connect with, nearby, prepared to help — and likewise, you are there for them. Sometimes it’s �4 hard to see that — here and in life — but I really believe it can be very true here, for each of you — and you should be ready to reach out, open up, and rely on those around you. Third, let yourself experience this place: the city of Santa Fe and our natural setting. For some of you, this is familiar — home or like home — for many of you it may be unlike anywhere you have lived. The geography, climate, culture, and history here are truly extraordinary, and you would do well to cultivate actively an interest in and attachment to the place you are in. That is true wherever we are, but there is so much here that invites and rewards the effort of active attention and exploration. The world-renowned author, and longtime friend and supporter of our college, Scott Momaday — who passed away this January and whose Native peoples were of this land and its history — was one of the great thinkers and writers of place and land. I have thought about him often since his death. As he wrote, each of us, “ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth, I believe. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk." This place, which seems austere to some, rewards our care and attention. The evening sky at sunset, the brightest stars most any of you will ever live among, the smell of the land after the rain. Likewise, the art, music, and history open to us, just in a two-mile radius. If you can really make this place part of what it means to be a Johnnie at this college, that alone will carry you forward like a wave. Finally, joy: Cultivate a spirit of joy. This does not mean carrying things lightly. What you do here is serious, but not at all grim. Avoid the temptation often pressed on us by the loud voices in the world, to dwell on what is melancholy in things, especially when facing hard work and challenges. Find joy in what you do here, in playful fun, in the deep wonder of insight, in exercising resilience in the face of adversity. Delight in the range of what you are undertaking and in the many flashes of beauty in these works. Find joy in perplexity, knowing it’s a precondition for learning. Find joy in cultivating your attention (against the great counterforces of this age of distraction). Enjoy physical exertion and moving your body in this wonderful setting. Delight in the landscape. Enjoy the company of your friends and companions. Success at St. John’s involves a blend of humility and audacity, as does a worthwhile and adventurous life. The program naturally elicits both, in different ways. If you can remain attuned to sources like these that can strengthen you, that can invigorate you and pull you up and over, through, or around the obstacles of the moment, each of you will, I am confident, flourish here. I declare the college in session. CONVOCATUM EST. � 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 Santa Fe Convocation Addresses Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Meem Library 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 Word doc Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 4 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 Santa Fe Convocation Address, Fall 2024 Description An account of the resource Transcript of the convocation address given on August 29, 2024 by J. Walter Sterling in Santa Fe, NM. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sterling, J. Walter 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 2024-08-29 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 text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Sterling, W. Convocation 2024-08-29 Convocation Presidents https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/e188ef7223c15d8d3988569b2b9fd950.pdf cc6524226b152e5ea567b220e54df5dc PDF Text Text Music: The Representative Liberal Art Dean's Lecture, Friday, September 2, 1988 Wendy Allanbrook - Eva Brann I. fn General (Eva Brann) There is an old tradition concerning this, the first lecture of the new year of learning. It is supposed to be dedicated particularly to the freshmen among us. The others, upper-class students and tutors, are not supposed to mind if they hear things not entirely fresh to them. This is an occasion for talking straight and being explicit about what this community, which the freshmen r..ave newly entered, is like. Consider that phrase, "what St. John's is like." It is part of our pride and of our anxiety that this college is not like any other. And yet we intend it to be like something, namely as much as possible like the idea for teaching and learning it embodies, the Program. This program consists almost as much of what we staunchly don't do as of what we do do. So this lecture will be about the Program, about what is in it and what is not. But we have chosen to talk about the program by means of an example. It is what you will soon learn in your Greek tutorial to call a paradigm: how many things work. one pattern which indicates This paradigm is music. However, we want not only to tell but to demonstrate how things are intended to happen here. We hope that as this lecture proceeds it will show, practically, three things: First, that although the program is a firm course of learning, it is also full of live questions and problems which the faculty argues 1 �about. One such current concern is precisely the standing of music and its shadow effect, the absence of the visuai arts. Obviously the program that is will keep you very busy, but it is very likely to rouse in you an occasional interest in the program that isn't and might be. Let me inject a preachment here: Prepare to live a schizophrenic life ("Schizophrenic'' is a Greek word meaning splitminded). On the one hand trust the program to be a thoughtful and experience-laden guide to the studies of your next four years. other hand, hold everybody and everything responsible. On the Ask your tutors now and then--not so often as to become pests who wreck the daily process of learning--why you are doing what you are doing. them respond. Make And reserve the highest respect for those tutors who admit they have no pat answer and begin to think in front of and together with you. As the year goes on you will discover that there is a presence that haunts this campus. It is that of a man called Socrates who said that to carry on in life without asking questions about it is simply insupportable. He will be, as it were, egging you on. The second thing we want to show you is that it is possible to think together. We've all heard a lot of talk about "thinking for oneself," as if anyone could possibly think for us. The miracle is that we can think for ourselves together; it is that strange possibility which makes this school a community of learning.--By the way, I should say right now that such cooperation, too, will become questionable. You will read a text later on this year which will claim that although the friendship of like interests is a wonderful thing, to be totally happy is to be totally wrapped up in thought, 2 �absolutely self-sufficient. But the soul of this school is conversation, which is audible, cooperative thipking. study is not only allowed.--It is encouraged. And common In the question period we can talk--if you like--about the role of competition in this scheme. The third, dependent, effect we want to demonstrate is the really important one. It is that we can approach a subject on very different levels and with very different preparation. I will be talking about music in the widest sense. Mrs. Allanbrook will specify and make concrete some of my broad indications. Moreover, I am a, by now confirmed, amateur of music, while she has a lot of musical learning. My deficit will not, I hope, keep me from making some sense nor will her expertise keep her from reaching some fundamental questions. I am now getting closer to the topic, music, and it is precisely the matter of amateurism which brings me to it. college of amateurs. You have come to a All your tutors will have some expertise, but usually not in the classes in which they are guiding you. In those they will indeed be merely amateurs, which is just French for lovers-lovers of learning, of course. I will tell you what my expertise was, because it will be to the point later on. I was an archaeologist, which is to say, a kind of grass-roots art-historian. I got to sort out sherds of Greek pottery and to reconstruct the pictures on them, often revealing dramatic and sometimes deliciously scandalous goingson. Then I had to put a date to them, which takes close looking. But in music I am an amateur, and thereby hangs a tale important to the program. This program stands under the aegis of an activity called philosophy. In a few weeks you will have learned enough Greek 3 �to know that the word philosophy means "the love of wisdom." Now, the reason it is possible to put a whole school under this aegis is that to engage well in philosophy it is truly sufficient to love the enterprise, just as the first and last entrance requirement for this college is an ardent willingness to be here. There ~. sadly, some people who care very much about philosophical questions and are just not good at talking about them. But they are very rare. Philosophy requires disposition more than talent. It is otherwise with music. It is possible to love music with all one's soul, to live with it and by it and yet to have an uneducated ear, an ear that hears the effects without discerning the elements. Music has this enormous and mysterious power: Whereas one must be literate to love, say, a great novel, it is possible to be entirely enraptured by music and entirely illiterate iri it. It is because music can touch the soul by means of effects which are deeply rational and may yet remain stubbornly unapprehended that music is the hardest part of the Program to teach. Why, then, should it be a part of the Program at all? A good way to begin is with the name. Music is that which belongs to the Muses, nine ancient divinities.--If you transfer to Santa Fe sometime later on you will easily learn their names because the dorms are called after them. These goddesses are in charge of all kinds of human cultivation, epic, lyric, tragic, comic poetry, miming, dancing, even history. astronomy. The grandest of these is Urania, the muse of This fact will figure later on. daughters of Memory. All the Muses are the This fact yields a double inference: arts come to human beings by divine inspiration. 4 First, the And indeed, your �first and second seminar books begin, or very nearly begin, with the words: "Sing, Goddess. . . " and "Tell me, O Muse . . . " arts come to us through tradition or through memory. Note that a third possibility, the one most familiar to us is missing: arts are our own creation. Second, the that the That possibility was not added until the Renaissance, the start of modern times. In the beginning, then, music embraced all the arts. that will preoccupy you in the middle of human cultivation is seen to have two aspects. soul and gymnastics for the body. the place where you go naked. the year, In a book Plato's Republic There is music for the "Gymnasium" is a Greek word meaning So music is for the shapeliness of the soul, and gymnastics is for the candor of the body. However, it turns out in that book, there are even greater things than psychic and physical cultivation. These higher studies are those which later come to be called the liberal arts. They are higher because they do not just cultivate and shape you but because they put you into a relation with the way things are, or, as you will soon learn to say, with Being. One cultivates the arts for pleasure and self-development, but the liberal arts one pursues for the sake of truth. Incidentally, these arts are traditionally called "liberal'' for three reasons. First because they are taught to the free children of politically free parents, second because they liberate these youths from their dogmatic opinion, and third because they are done freely, without money-making in mind. If you look at our college seal you will find there a little ditty on this theme. They are called arts because they are elementary approaches to the elementary subject matters. Today there is much talk about skills vs. subject matter, process vs. product. 5 In the liberal arts there is �no such distinction: Studying the subject and learning the skill are almost completely one. Traditionally these arts, of which there are seven, have been divided into two sets. The lower, and basic, set of three is called the trivium or "three-way." speech: These trivial arts are the arts of grammar, logic, rhetoric. of "trivial" in this school is: Therefore the proper understanding of absolutely fundamental importance. The second set, the quadrivium, or "four-way," contains the arts of reason in nature. The Republic, the work I mentioned above, sets out what these are and how they are to be studied. The four arts-- they happen to be sciences, but sciences liberally learned happen in turn to be arts--are these: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and a fourth I will mention in a moment. I need not tell you that you have come to a liberal arts college, indeed one of the few in the world where the liberal arts tradition is taken quite literally. Let me show you how much we mean it, how much your day will be dominated by these arts: Morning: Here is the schedule: Trivium, done in the Language Tutorial. Lower Quadrivium in the Mathematics tutorial. Late morning and early afternoon: Upper Quadrivium, done largely in the Laboratory. Late afternoon: Cultivation of the body, done largely in the Gymnasium. Evening: -Let me backtrack here. The Republic not only describes the quadrivium but tells how to study it, namely liberally, philosophically, not for practical purposes nor even as performances, but for the sake of 6 �reflection and insight. there is philosophy. Evening: Beyond the liberal arts and all through them So let me continue: Conversation about books that reflect on the nature of things, done in the Seminar. Night: Continued conversation. On Fridays, a Lecture. Possibly some sleep. And once a week you will come together to sing in Chorus. Now is the moment to come back to the topmost liberal art, in Plato's book, the one I had omitted just now. It is called harmony. The word itself means a fitting-together, a system, and in the narrower sense those fitted tonal structures out of which music is made. For these are a paradigmatic system. So we have come to music as the coping stone of the liberal arts. Why should this Greek author have put music, of all the arts, at the top, with and above the study of the heavens? reasons. I can think of four The first is complementary to the reason why the Greeks assigned a muse, the aforementioned Urania, to astronomy. It is that they thought that the stationary heavens, being organized on the model of a musical scale, were not only a rational but a beautiful system, as they said, a "cosmos," meaning an ornament. The second is that they thought that each moving planet (the Greek word planet means ''wanderer") in its orbit sounds forth a lovely note as it revolves and that all together these make a ravishing harmony. The third has to do with the fact I mentioned earlier on; that the conscious apprehension of music involves the study of number, as the production of musical instruments involves the study of geometry. Leibniz, a philosopher you will study as Juniors, says, that music is the soul's counting. One might say that it is also the ear's measuring. 7 Indeed as you will �d~s~over, there are certain ever-fascinating problems in mathematics to which we pay great attention, and which are spectacularly well exemplified in music. music. The whole quadrivium appears to be assembled in In fact, in a moment I shall claim that it coopts the trivium too. The fourth reason is closely bound to the third: Music is not only a kind of mathematics, but also a wonderfully peculiar kind. might call it "qualitative mathematics." Here is what I mean: One In number theory one does not, on the whole, want to say that some number relations are more agreeable than others. some, very definite, number relations They are called consonances. In music it turns out that ~more agreeable than others. Others make you shudder. For example, the tone that sits exactly between the two C's of our major scale, F# sounds so dreadful when sounded together with C that it is said to belong to the devil. Behind it there lies a simple but scandalous mathematical fact, the fact of so-called irrationality. I mean by qualitative mathematics. mathematics. That is what You could even call it miracle And that is also why we think that something is necessary for studying music that we expect for no other tutorial: some common prior experience. It is . for this reason that you will be going to Chorus in the year before the music tutorial--to have the specific common experience of this rational magic. But now I have committed a sin against logic. I have explained why music is the topmost liberal art without saying how this activity, so specially named after the goddesses of the cultivating arts, comes to be a liberal art at all. and ask rather: Let me attack this question in new terms Why is music traditionally a liberal art when the equally ingenious visual arts are not? 8 I can think of three answers-- �and a fourth, which is more a wonderful problem than an answer. First there is simply more hard music theory than there is art theory. There is, for instance, a physics of music as there has never been a physics of aesthetic color. There is, to be sure, a science of structured space which is analogous to the number theory of wellfi tted notes, namely perspective. But perspective came late into the visual arts and left soon.--It is not as n~cessary to painting as structured numbers are to music (though in fact we used to have in the Program a lovely sequence on perspective as a preliminary to the study of optics). I do not really know why there is more teachable theory of music than there are principles of visual arts. It must be something like the same reason why there are many respectable Sunday painters and very few bearable Sunday composers. Moreover, space has vastly more possibilities of being filled than does time, so that the spatial arts are correspondingly less easily developed from basic elements. This is one of those great questions which I leave dangling before you. Secondly, music has always been known to have a potent influence on bearing and character. You will read several books this year, the Republic among them, which will claim that music--and the dancing that goes with it--is crucial in the shaping of citizens. The ancients do not think, as we tend to do, that music primarily expresses our souls, but rather that it impresses them, stamps them with character. Imagine an unlikely event which will drive the point home: Suppose all children in our democracy were to learn to dance the minuet in kindergarten, to move every day for a year to a slow and stately music in modestly connected couples. Wouldn't America be a different 9 �country? I cannot think of any visual work that would have such an effect--if only because one can close one's eyes but not one's ears. There is also another reason why the visual arts do not impress themselves as directly on the soul as does music which I leave to last. I do, however, except architecture. • Architecture was, incidentally, the one visual art which was at certain times a candidate for being counted among the _liberal arts. Third, music has just the reverse relation to words than have the visual arts. We rightly wince just a little at those people who can't look at a painting in a museum until they have run to look at its title. But we think that is is a part of musical discernment to listen as carefully to the words of a Passion or an Opera as to the music. Pictures displace words, but words and music are meant to go together. Now thinking takes place in words. Consequently the meaning of music must be somehow closer to our thought than the meaning of a painting. How music and words have meaning separately and together is a confounding and enchanting question which you will hear more about tonight. Following my own advice to you earlier on, let me stop here to tell you forthrightly what I think about the presence of music and the absence of the visual arts from the . program. I think that the Greeks, who produced works of visual art, especially of sculpture and architecture, which once very palpably pierced my soul, had deep reasons for including music among the liberal arts while excluding these visual glories. And we in turn have good reason to stay with the liberal arts and, in preserving our integrity, to exclude something very wonderful--exclude it from the Program, I mean, of course, not from the campus. On the campus we should have, and do 10 �have, a lot of opportunities to do and see such art. But even in the Program itself there is sporadic room, for example, in Seminars, Lectures, Study Groups and Preceptorials on the visual arts. Particularly those Preceptorials, the small semi-elective study groups which you will join in your last two years,• are a good place for tutors to offer such studies. the following title: "Greek Temples, Gothic Cathedrals and Mid- Western Grain Elevators." of their own. preaching: I myself would like one day to offer These last have a certain utilitarian glory Here, incidentally, is the moment for yet another Come to the question period! For there you will hear with what passion and reason the contrary argument can be made. And there you yourselves can join in this perennial conversation. Finally, then, there is that fourth distinction between music and the visual arts which I have left to the last because it is the trickiest, most fascinating yet. representative. The visual arts are by and large They re-present , or imitate, a visible object. They convey a likeness, a similarity, an imitation, in such a way that one can find some sort of rough geometric relation--it is of the kind called projective--between, say, a portrait and its sitter or a landscape painting and its natural scene. It is the representative nature of the visual arts that accounts for · the effect I just mentioned, that these arts go to the soul less directly than does music: They require an intermediate recognition. I must tell you that the hottest and most crucial issue in modern esthetic theory is the "representationality" of all the arts in general and the imitative nature of painting in particular. There are people who claim that a cat in one painting and a cathedral in another are more like each 11 �other than a painted cat is like a live cat or a painted cathedral is like a stone cathedral. They think that imitation (or as you will soon learn to say, mimesis) is no factor in what makes a painting a painting. I mention this to show how fascinatingly extreme the arguments about representative art have become. Music, however, appears to have no such diverting problem; on the face of it, music hardly appears to be representational in the projectivai way of paintings. Take your favorite symphonic movement and ask yourself and your new roommate what it represents. surmise. It's an invitation to wild And yet music seems to show so much and mean so much. Here lies a captivating problem, and so begins the specific demonstration . Is music really in no way representational? We will see how we can think about particular pieces of music in the light of this large questions. I have talked about music as a liberal art, and now we will be drawn into its actual and specific pursuit. 12 �II. In Particular (Wendy Allanbrook) If I were again a student, seated in the audience tonight, the question I would be askingis "Why should one want to say that music is representational? Isn't it precisely its non-representational quality that gives music its glory?" This was surely my opinion when I was in college; I remember clearly the day I discovered a learn~d treatise that corroborated it, and spent hours in the stacks of the college library fiercely underlining pregnant passages. I have since lost my original copy of the treatise, a work by an eminent nineteenth-century music critic, Eduard Hanslick, entitled The Beautiful in Music, but I have no difficulty guessing the formulations that pleased me so: for instance, "The ideas which a composer expresses are mainly and primarily of a purely musical nature." [23] or "[Music's] nature is specifically musical .... [Its] beauty is not contingent upon nor in need of any subject introduced from without but ... it consists wholly of sounds artistically combined." [47] It is no longer clear why this notion of musical autonomy was so important to me then, against what heresy I was defending the sweet art. When, later on in my education, I came up against those who would argue the other way, I fought bitterly, and then fell. Often one becomes most passionately interested in pursuing the notions of which one once thought the opposite; I appear before you tonight with the enthusiasm of the converted. I shouldn't play quite so dumb, of course; there is an obvious enemy in question. For example, music that attempts a one-to-one correspondence with natural phenomena we often find ludicrous, and often indeed it is meant to be gently comic; there is something 13 �delightfully fey about those sixteenth-century madrigals that imitate cuckoos, and it is even more fun when, as was intended, you are singing them yourself. Another connection that gives musical repre- sentation a bad name is the one Hanslick seems principally to have been inveighing against: the noti~n of "self-expression," which leads to the vice of musical biography: in this passage Beethoven rails against his deafness, here Mozart mourns his father's passing. These claims are unsupportable, if only because so often our biographical expectations are frustrated. Mozart wrote some of his most sunny and popular music in the period just after the death of his father. Do we accuse him of lack of feeling on this account (some have), or dismiss the connection altogether? There seems to be a common agreement that music exists in another world than the fine arts and those that have to do with speech. One of your tutors, Mr. White, recently gave a lecture in which he discussed ways in which the fine arts and the poetic arts can be said to imitate. His point of departure was a well-known comparison, by the eighteenth-century German critic, G. E. Lessing, between a Greek statue and a passage in Vergil's Aeneid. Both depict the violent death of the Trojan priest Laokoon in the coils of a sea serpent, the one work in stone and the other in metrical speech. The statue, because it must choose only one moment in time for its representation, avoids the harrowing death cry of the priest and depicts a more restrained moment, prior to that of the greatest agony, in order not to become merely ugly or grotesque. The poetry, because it moves through time, can describe the terrible bellow of the priest, the desperate distortion of his features, because one by one it can leave 14 �them all behind. Music, too, is a temporal art, but can you imagine any way of making it the third in this comparison? no commonality at all. man? There seems to be Where do you make out the monster, where the How can we even specify what moment the composer has chosen? Unless the music is explained by a companion text--and this is really a special case--I see no way of talking about the three with the same analytic language. Unlike poems and paintings, the subject of a musical composition cannot be translated into a meaningful proposition. But what do we gain by severing all the connections the art bears to the human sphere? In fact, it was only in the nineteenth century that those who think about music decided to cast her thus adrift. And that came about largely as a development of that novel notion Miss Brann mentioned, that the arts are our own creation. If they are, it is not a giant step to the conviction that they are created anew by every artist, that every work is a personal statement of a private seeing--or hearing--that the audience is privileged to share. Music becomes pure feeling--the art of self-expression, the inner mysteriously made outer, and although this has its attractions, it is not an aesthetic that is supportable for long. No wonder Hanslick was in revolt; one begins to have some fellow-feeling for him. As a result of this legacy, modern philosophers make an extraordinarily vexed question of expression in music. That they use the word "expression'' is in itself indicative, for I suspect that were they to free themselves from the notion of feelings as the sole proper subject matter for music, they might not be so squeamish in their discussions. As one critic recently remarked, we go through 15 �such tortured arguments, and all we get is the freedom to attach the predicate ''sad" to the slow movement of a Beeth6ven Symphony. But other formulations had guided thinking about music for the previous millenia, formulations that more successfully made the connection between human beings and the art of shaping sound in time. Miss Brann mentioned the ancients' belief that music can impress our souls, give them shape. Aristotle, in remarks in the Politics about the importance of music to the education of a citizen, makes specific claims for the depictive qualities of music in its relation to the human soul: Rhythms and melodies especially contain to the true natures of anger and likenesses gentleness, and further of courage and temperance, and of all their opposites, this and of the other moral qualities is clear from its effects, for when we (and hear these things we are changed in our soul.) Aristotle's claim is that music makes "likenesses" of human passions and qualities, to which we naturally respond. Elsewhere, in the Poetics, he calls the poetic and musical arts all "modes of imitation" (mimesis in the Greek)--modes of imitation of human beings in act. Imitation is another degraded word today, for it implies origi- nals out there, of which the artist simply takes a copy, and it is more modern to consider the artist both the origin and the original. But if the original is the ways of human beings in the world, is the whole of God's cosmos, and there are infinitely many ways of taking that copy (I'll call these variations "style"), then the task of imitation seems not degraded, but endless, various, and noble. 16 �The crucial question then becomes, how do we make these musical copies? The answer lies in the qualitative mathematics of which Miss Brann spoke earlier. How does the soul count, the There are two principal ways, I would maintain: ~ measure? the way that number • shapes time--we call that rhythm--and the way that number informs pitch--it's harder to come up with a generic name for that. I hope not to be too provocatively simple when I say that in this counting only two numbers count, namely 2 and 3 (some Renaissance theorists counted to 6, and we could do that too, but for our purposes this evening it isn't necessary). I'll tell you briefly what those numbers mean, and then move to exemplify them. About rhythm I'll be most brief, for you probably know that the available rhythms reduce to counts of 2 and 3, or some combination thereof. Think of 2, or duple, as a march or simple alternation of left foot and right. 3, or triple, insert a hop on every left. With There are more elegant ways of adorning a walk to get a triple; the minuet Miss Brann mentioned goes to the count of 3. But more of this later. The 2's and 3's of pitch are rather more concealed, to the extent that we commonly call by the name "5" what really ought to be called "3." Yet the phenomena are sufficiently important and dazz- ling to have been credited to a discoverer, Pythagoras, and surrounded with their due mead of apochryphal stories about the circumstances of the discovery. The note we designate as 5 in the string of organized pitches we call a "scale" actually stands third in the order of generation. Take a string, and divide it in two equal parts. Pluck either half, and the resulting pitch will reduplicate the original, but higher--that interval we call the octave, which orders 17 �tonal space by its regular recurrence over the entire series of pitches. It puts the cap on our eight-note scale, which will sound all too familiar to anyone who has ever had a piano lesson: [Ex. 1] . Next in this soul's counting divide the string in thirds, and you have the fifth, so called from its position as number 5 in the ascending scale. It provides an intermediate resting-place in the / octave's span, dividing it almost, but not quite - (and this is crucial) in half. You'll recognize it from the sound of this perennial five-finger exercise: reverse: [Ex. 2]. By the way, the process works in if I want to divide a taut string into perfect halves, all I have to do is find the octave--our ear is indeed the measurer. While the octave is other, it is still somehow the same as our primal pitch, so the fifth is the first independent other; the octave is the encloser, the fifth the first enclosed. We will honor the order of experience by calling this pitch 5, and the interval it forms with our starting-place the fifth. Never forget, however, that it stands proudly third in order of generation, and that its generating number is 3. You will go more deeply into these miracles of embodied number in the music tutorial sophomore year, counting at least as far as 6, but for now this is all the theory you need to know. I shall try to put these various 2's and 3's to the work of imitation. ways. And I shall claim that they do this work in two important It's hard to find proper names for them; we've learned to be wary of the time-honored distinction between form and content in almost all its applications, and in a temporal art like music I think there is almost no defense for it. I find myself, however, stuck with modern names like "reference" and "process," or perhaps "reference" and "syntax" (I can't decide). 18 These duos take more explana- �tion, but they don't halt and freeze the persistent motion of the tones the way "form and content" do. If we wanted to be trendy, I could point out that we are on the cutting edge of modernity here, for our categories could be formalized into the modern pursuits of semiotics, or the study of signs, and narratology, which is nothing more than the study of beginnings, middles, and ends. Actually, that is - not such a bad description of what I want to talk about. I shall present you with three musical examples to illustrate these modes of imitation. In them the 2's and 3's of rhythm will intersect with the 2's and 3's of pitch to make dazzling imitative configurations. Given the embarassment of riches in music history, I can only be suggestive, not inclusive; I shall also be decidedly anti-chronological. I shall begin where those who know my preoccupations could well have predicted--with the music of Mozart. It was the music of Mozart that I most wanted, early on, to defend as pure, and precisely the same music I later found to be most delightfully contaminated with reflections of human activities. Furthermore, this particular work of Mozart's, the piano sonata .in F major, K. 332, a favorite example of mine, is precisely the kind of music the purists would argue is the most autonomous music your money can buy--instrumental music. Here there intrudes no voice uttering sounds that are signs of other presences, and thus forcing a translation to mundane can such music point beyond itself? porary with Mozart gives me~ning. How A French writer roughly contem- us a hint of how this might be: Michel Gui de Chabanon, actually an advocate of music's integrity, perhaps despite himself articulated one crucial way in which music can represent: Imitation in music is not truly sensed unless its 19 �object is music. imitate In songs one can warlike fanfares, melodies, etc. It hunting successfully airs, rustic is only a question of giving one song the character of another. Art, in that case, does not suffer violence. I'll translate this to our own purposes. Once music has a history, it can hardly fail to make reference to this past, - to provide its own vocabulary of expression. Miss Brann mentioned the educative value of minuets, and that is apposite here. Much of the art music you know, the music played in symphony halls and on good-music stations, pieces itself together from the more mundane music we use to accompany daily activities. The tempting world of human motion is out there to imitate, and some of our greatest composers have taken advantage of it. Love songs, lullabies, dances and marches, hymns, when are lifted from their usual environment and placed in the frame of a symphony or sonata, cannot help but point us back to the particular occasion that produced that humble popular gesture. One of the most prominent identifying characteristics of these gestures is rhythm. The music of the minuet, a noble dance, is there to assist the dancer in maintaining a noble posture--restraint, control, refinement. dignity. Practicing it, we may over time learn grace and Hearing it, we cannot help but think of these mobile vir- tues; our body strains to move with them. This smooth even count of three is character-building and character-evoking--truly "qualitative mathematics." To help you count that three, let me play a minuet part way into the first movement of the Mozart sonata. It comes at a crucial point in the piece, when a base has to be touched, a sense of arrival created--not home plate, but, to use a further spatial meta20 �phor, diagonally opposite. motion. Sense the dignity and tranquility of the When you hear what precedes it, you will feel it all the more by contrast: [Ex. 3]. This movement has a profusion of gestures; it might be described by the question "How many qualities has 3?" For it shows us 3 in many lights, often reminding me of one of those magic sugar eggs with the hole at one end, into which you look to marvel at the perfection of the detail observed in its miniature world. First we hear a singer, her breast swelling as she reaches for her high note. ber, this is all conveyed to us on the piano: [Ex. 4] Remem- She should continue, but instead her utterance is answered by two voices, not so clearly vocal anymore, one following the other at a brief interval and singing the same melody--imitative counterpoint is its proper name, and to Mozart's audience it had a rather old-fashioned ring-pompous and over-serious: [Ex. 5]. Another length, a simple unit of minuet, moves to the close, so that our first "sentence'' has three parts or clauses, of equal time but not necessarily equal weight. The next sentence is devoted to the rhythms of a hybrid minuet--a minuet crossed with hunting horns. We recognize the horns because the characteristic pitches of their calls in the field are imitated: [Ex. 6] . After a satisfying and discrete paragraph of this hunting minuet, the movement "turns on a dime" to a dark, passionate music often called "Storm and Stress," after the Romantic temper that affected it. Whole pieces were written in this style, but here it becomes just one affect among many. In its restlessness, however, it serves the subversive function of undermining home base, and moving us to that new place we must reach if we are to have any sense of 21 �having moved at all. And--as you have guessed--at the end of this so-called travelling music, we arrive at the well-shaped minuet you heard before: [Ex. 7]. The new arrival place marks the end of the beginning and the beginning of the middle, and quite naturally this new place is identified with 5 (3). The drama of the r~st of the piece will be the return to 1 via some cunningly shaped paths. The image of some sort of narrative does not seem to me to be far wrong, much more apt than the formalist analysis. Our delight in this imitation is the delight in the reflections of the many-wayed won- ders of a close and ordered world, disposed to form the crucial nodes of a well-wrought narration. What is peculiarly musical about it is that there is no real story in the sense we expect one, no proposition, no picture of Laocoon. Yet in this passage-through-time we sense an order, intuit a deep intent, and are deeply satisfied. This Mozart example is an example of imitation in the most direct and evocative fashion; I could show you many others. like to offer an example of a different sort: But now I would first off, vocal music (music with a text), sacred, not secular, and grand and special rather than playful and habitual. It is a piece those of you who have completed the music tutorial will know well, the culminating aria of Bach's St. Matthew Passion, "Mache dich, mein Herze, rein." It occurs after the Crucifixion, immediately following the moment when Joseph of Arimathea claims Jesus' body from Pontius Pilate. This scene follows the procedure of others in the Passion: a passage from the Gospel of Matthew narrating the scriptural event is set in the simplest speech song, and then commented on by an observer outside the time of the narrative, in verses by an eighteenth-century 22 �poet. The commentary itself usually has two parts--a discursive passage in a free declamatory style, sometimes called arioso, and a more summary, epigrammatic statement, set in the full panoply of . an aria, a closed musical form. This particular scene takes place in the evening, and the arioso text ponders the theological meaning of eventide: In the cool of the evening, Adam's fall was manifest. In the evening the Saviour casts him down. In the evening the dove returned, and brought the olive branch in its beak. o beautiful time! O Eventide! The covenant of peace is now made with God, for Jesus has completed his cross. His body comes to rest. Oh! dear soul, ask, go, and let the dead Jesus be given to you. O salutory, o precious keepsake! In this poetry the peace of the evening and the covenant of peace become one: Adam and Noah are fulfilled in Jesus, who has paid the most memorable price for the sins of all. Eventide becomes a sym- bol--and I think I use that difficult word correctly--for the peace of God that passes all understanding. Symbols are the theological way--the cross is paradigmatic--and the text of the Passion is suffused with them. So is the music, sometimes in an abstract and impalpable way, such as the reach up to B flat on the word "blood" (German Blut) in the scene of the Last Supper. Others, like the aria that follows this arioso, move us directly--musically--at the same time that they undergo this translation to a deeper Christian mean23 �ing. At the end of the arioso the singer (a male, a bass) addresses his own soul, telling it to go receive the dead Jesus, and then, in the most tender and moving aria in the Passion, enjoins his heart to prepare itself for the corning of Christ. Make yourself pure, my heart. I want to bury Jesus himself. The poetry of a second section, the music of which we will not examine, amplifies the symbolism: For he is henceforth to have his rest in me forever and ever. World, get out, let Jesus in! Bach suits actions to words. That's a conventional phrase most analysts like to fudge with, and given the text the composer has to set here, that must seem to you exactly what I am doing. not particularly fertile in musical ideas. The text is How do you draw a musical picture of a heart purifying itself? of a believer burying Jesus in himself (as the second part of the text suggests)? The task seems preposterous, perhaps even blasphemous. I'll suggest an absurdly simple answer. You write a cradle song, a lullaby. Cradle songs from time immemorial have used rhythmic 3's in groups of 2; that is, each 3 is a rock of the cradle, with the extra odd beat catching the pause of the cradle at the extreme of its swing, poised for return. These 3's are then grouped in 2's: the cradle rocks back and forth. Let's hear the instrumental introduction to the aria, to concentrate on the effect of the rhythm. Notice that the bass sets up the rhythm briefly before the melodic voices enter; th~ about it that the singer merely shares: [Ex. 24 motion has an eternality 8] . �Perhaps I should explain further why I find this device so wonderfully appropriate. On the surface it would seem to satisfy neither purification nor burial, the dual requirements of the text. But remember that the arioso text made death into sleep, an image that is important throughout the Passion. The believer--our last example was Joseph of Arimathea--holds the blessedly resting Jesus in his arms; this- male figure universalizes the pieta, the figure of the weeping mother holding Jesus in her arms after the descent from the cross. Mary holds a full-grown son who is beyond the solace of rocking, but the symbolic believer is allowed a maternal lullaby. It is thus, the aria argues, that believers should receive the Christ. In fact, the aria is an injunction to the believer to accept in full serenity the final agony of Christ as the bringer of peace to the world. Thus to bury Him is to rock Him to sleep with a mother's lullaby. There is some final musical detail I cannot omit describing before you actually hear the singer's voice. I have tried to show how Bach, in setting this seemingly unsuggestive piece of text, manages to explode it into deeper meaning using a musical gesture that becomes symbolic, moving the believer both physically and cognitively to a deeper Christianity. Strikingly, Bach sacrifices the text to the hypnosis of the eternal. Syntax, prosody, all those things that suggest human meanings in human time, are suspended, and even that element that makes musical syntax, the 5 (our 3), disappears to some extent. Musically the 1, the center of gravity, is instead held up on top, and a scale descends against it with each rock of the cradle: [Ex. 9]. The singer's line is wholly unvocal; it imitates a characteristic Baroque instrumental line where one instru25 �ment plays the parts of two, first high, then low. further apart so you can hear the two: [Ex. 10]. I'll split them A further distortion of our natural expectations is the actual setting of the text, rhythmically and melodically. "I want to bury Jesus myself"-- "Ich will Jesum selbst begraben"--"Ich will Je-- sum selbst begra-ben." Je- and gra- are stressed unnaturally by the move to a melodic peak on an offbeat: this extraordinarily awkward vocal line does violence to both melody and text in the service of the hypnotic cradle song. Singer, song, and syntax are dissolved in the cosmic lullaby that is the rocking of Jesus to the sleep of sin. All human history focusses on the descent from the cross; that moment of time must stand for eternity. When syntax must reassert itself, at the end of this musical section, we are wholly prepared for the vocal awkwardness on the final "begraben"--"bury"--the deep leap down from the 2 to the 1, the octave to the prime, precisely the kind of musical tone-painting we have grown to scorn this evening. Bach has habituated us in the course of this aria to music become meaning; we accept a musical barbarism as a convincing theological symbol: [Ex. 11] . There is other music I should have talked about, were there time, for example, the repertoire of many-voiced sacred Renaissance vocal compositions. There dance is absent, and composers eschew any obvious translation of textual images into musical ones. Yet the theorists of this music are most emphatic about its imitative quality. The object of imitation is nothing less than "wondrous Nature," as their prime spokesman, Gioseffo Zarlino, a sixteenth-century composer and writer, states. "Every composer ought to follow the beau26 �tiful order of nature, and he will be considered excellent in proportion to the resemblance of his procedures to those of nature." Zar- lino's "wondrous Nature" is a world informed by number, by our 2's and 3's. One of his cardinal principles is unity in variety, fol- lowing nature, which, he says "does not produce identical individuals in a species, but always somehow varied." "Numbers and proportion invite us to variety, for in them we do not find two similar proportions following one another." Here he is speaking about the harmonic proportion, a important number relation named after its embodiment in music. We have already heard the simplest form of that relation, in lowest whole numbers--the dovetailing of the 2 and the 3, or the octave and the fifth. [PLAY] · Harmodzein, the Greek word for the dovetailing of joints in carpentry (it also can mean to "set in order," or "govern," and also to "betroth") describes the way the octave and fifth lie harmoniously together, a concordance of dissimilar elements, giving their name to a number relation you will meet elsewhere in the program. To Zar~ino this relation comes closest of all musical relations to the sound of perfection, and so it must end every composition; for, in his words, "Perfection is characteristic of the end and not of the beginning of a thing." [EXAMPLE 8] A latet music that calls itself harmony (the examples we have been listening to this evening) will add another element to this dovetailing to fill it in, to make it less perfect and hence more sensuous (one eccentric modern theorist calls the fifth the "pre-sexual'' interval); this more homogeneous entity we call a "chord." But still the guiding relation remains the same--the harmonic proportion, the miraculous blending of the 2 and the 3. 27 �I have somewhat perversely tonight been giving you a music history in reverse, and it would be remiss of me not to add a postlude that takes it back to origins, so to speak. We have been dealing all evening with compounds--more than one line at a time--and now we will turn to simples. But only in the sense that we are no longer combining two pitches at a time; any implication that this one-line music is simple in the se-nse of "primitive" is wholly alien to my intention. I have heard it said of the repertoire of Gregorian chant that it is abstract, ethereal, above the world and its relations, out of time in its simple temporality. I don't believe that any example of this most human of arts can be like that, nor do I think that we endow it with any greater dignity or spirituality in so asserting. The goal is to let a sacred text speak out as simply and eloquently as possible, and again the 2's and 3's do the work. The text of the Latin hymn I have chosen, in unrhymed Latin verses, is from the Easter Mass, and it is a meditation on the miracle of the Resurrection. Let It reads, in part: Christians off er their thankful praises to the Paschal Victim. The Lamb hath ransomed the sheep: the sinless Christ reconcileth sinners to the Father .... Tell us, Mary; what did you see in your wayfaring? I saw the tomb of the living Christ, and the from the glory of Him rising .... We know that Christ has truly risen dead; have mercy on us, Victor King. Amen. At the center of this text is an act of human witness, at the conclu- 28 �sion one of human celebration. At no time does the chant call atten- tion to a particular phrase--it never makes "word pictures"--but the whole is animated with human pulses and human breaths. The rhythm of the poetry is primarily trochaic--a stress on the first, third, syllable, etc--and the musical rhythm by and large follows this grouping into 2's: "Victi~ paschali laudes irnrnolent Christi~ni." The 2's and 3's of pitch- order the ebb and flow of the melody. The octave is the limit of rest, the fifth (our 3, remember) the limit of tension. These seemingly narrow melodic limits set the theater for a narration without a story, for a dramatic mimesis of the condition of the human soul. When we hear the third phrase begin on the 5 and rise up to the octave above, our chests swell, our pulses race, at this brave effort against the center of gravity, the 1. On the return we compose ourselves, fold our hands, reflect, always in sympathy with the passion objectified in the music. We haven't here the histrionic swelling breast of the operatic soprano, but the effect is only dissimilar in its restraint. Above all chant is singing: is breath and how long one can hold it, the tightening of the vocal chords in order to attain a higher pitch: [Ex. 12] . posed this music is, and ordered, but inhuman it is not. Corn- For it is never without passion, if passion can be defined as the suffering or tolerating of the physical and emotional effects that devolve from the exertion of our human equipment. Hanslick, in his efforts to make mock of musical imitation, turns one memorable phrase that might seem in its sarcasm to put an end to the question altogether. "The animal to which music is most indebted," he says, "is not the nightingale but the sheep." 29 The song �of the sheep is, of course, that of the gut, the taut string, and we are being reminded to turn our attention away from frivolous thoughts of connections between music and nature to the sober practicalities of the making of pure musical sound. But, as I've tried to say tonight, I think his example contains in it the very image that is • his undoing, for it is the physics of the taut string that makes Aristotla say the There musical makes following~ seems to be tunings some also in the Politics: in us a sort of (harmoniai) and kinship rhythms, philosophers say that the soul to which is a tuning, others, that it possesses tuning. I submit that this music is an imitation of "wondrous Nature," our nature, as it uses musical number in the act of prayerful praise. further submit that very little music is not like this in some way, if we but look and listen. 30 I �., Allanbrook Example- t> ~ Example- 2 ~-a ,, ? 0 - -0- 0 0 t I. -e- 0 0 () 6 Ii II ea Exampl~s -e-· ~ ~0 l) 11 0 .g.. Examplt3 -· . " . A ~~- ? I a :oi).._ - r I ~' I I - Exanrple 4 C~n 1:::1:: 1:;; I Exampk 5 . -~ - I . -....... ~ I I --..-.. I I .....- .. - - Example Exan1ple 6 '~ r..r r . I 7 - - �Examplt 8 · ~Aria - (Chorus I) Exampl~ , 9 L A .... I ..... - I l m.2 --. ·, ., 1- I ' Example to m.2 ., II ~ m.3 .-. m.+ m.'1 �Examp~ II 00 Basso Cc:Jion• n B..~~~~~~~~~ Ma. - che dich,mein Her - ze, ben, _ ma-Che dicb,meinHeJ1.ze,rein,icb_ will Je- IWD selbat_ be- gra-ben, ich willJe-sum aelbst be- gra.-ben. �Example- 12 Victimae paschali laudes Sequence for the Solemn Mass of Easter Day .. I _. 7;· ~,i.~~..~~...~.~~,,~~.5.~.~~-~~·~·~.~~·~i-~.~-~11 5 Vic·ti·mae pa.·sch..li Lau·des •im·mo-lent Ch:i·sti • a·ni. -& • 4 • -- ~ • • 4 I • 0 • • • 4 • . .. .. II re-<on-ci ·Ii· a·Yit pec·c:a·to·res. • - • • • • It • - .. 2. A-gnus red··e·mit .c-Yes: Chri·stus in·no-cns Pa·tri J. Monet vi· ta du·eho con· ru · xe· re mi ·ran-do: dux Yi-tae mor-tu·us. re-gnat Yi·vus. 4.Dic S.An ~y .. • " no . bis . se . • " • . Ii ... Ma cos .. • •:=:; . ri . •• te - stes, • quid SU .·I f [6. • jl Cre • den • dum est 1. s..; · mua Qui • stum § ;a . Yi da . . 4 • 0 ma • gis 511r • iz • " Ii so • xis • se ""'* "w •a; • Ms • .. ~ re • sur • gen • tis: ·OS • . • vi . a? . Ye • stes. in et • • • • o:::Z =• pne·ce • det su .. • • . sti . um, di ri • • • • " glo • ri • am Yi • Yen • tis, et a Se-~ul·c:rum Oni • sti Sm- n= • xit Cui • stus spes me • a: &~ • d . in Ga· Ii · Lae • am. • ri ff mor ·tu Iii-;; • . ve . is • ii ra Ye . . " ci re: • Al - le • lu • ia. II �Victimae paschali 1. Victimae paschali laudes . laudes immolent Christiani. ~angs 1. Ta the Paschal Victim let Christians offer cf praise. 2. Agnus redemit oves: pe•=•=atares. 2. The Lamb has redeemed the sheep. reconciled sinners to the Father. 3. Mars et vita duelo conflixere miranda: regnat vi \ILts. 3. Death and life have en~aged in miraculous combat. of life is slain, <ye"t") liv.ing he reigns. 4. nob is Mari a.,. quid vidisti in via? Die vi vent.is, et gloriam vi di resLU-genti s: 4. Tell LlS, Mary, what YOLl saw on the way? I saw the sepul 1.:hre of the living Christ and the glory of his rising. Christus innocens Patri 5. Angelicas testes, sudarium; et vestes. mea: praecedet sues in Galilae~m. 5. Tt1e angel is risen. 6. i·= reconciliavit Sinless has Christ dux vitae mortuus, The leader Christi Sepulc:rum Surrexit Christus spes '"'i tni::s:;;e ·: ~~ th(;: ·= hr-cud and v·e·'5tur•::. Christ ;ny He will gc before his own into Galilee. C1'-edend1_tm est mag .l. s ·:;cJl i Mari ae ve1·-ac i qua1u .J1_1dae·~n..1m l · ;;:Jp~ ti_tt-b.::<.e fallac:i.• 6. Mary alone is more ta be deceitful crowd cf Jews. 7. S·=im1_:s Cl1ri ·: ;tum ·: ;urr···::?;: , mi st:ir· ere. -r I ~·~e know that Chr i ·;t has tr1_1l y r-i ·:;en f ram conqueror and king, have mercy en us. o believed th;? than vi ct;~r - the Je:ad. 1..\Ji pi::J •::f Bur-,dund\' Celeve~~h c~ntur y) � 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/. 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. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts. 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Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis 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. 35 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 Music: The Representative Liberal Art Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on September 2, 1988, by Wye Allanbrook and Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Brann, Eva T. H. Allanbrook, Wye Jamison 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 1988-09-02 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 Education, Humanistic Music Relation A related resource <a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/7970">Recording</a> Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Allanbrook 1988-09-02 Deans Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/ce0f82dc2f1d45c0048175d2f31da18f.mp3 58e3ccbff00e96ba0f7614ffe2920498 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/. 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. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts. For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:14:02 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 Music: The Representative Liberal Art Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on September 2, 1988, by Wye Allanbrook and Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Brann, Eva T. H. Allanbrook, Wye Jamison 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 1988-09-02 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 Education, Humanistic Music Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_Allanbrook_Wye_1988-09-02_ac Relation A related resource <a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/7971">Typescript</a> Deans Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/8dbd4c4937cf731077be6088c7a01dec.mp3 41ce622b496843832bea04787665ffc2 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 Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Description An account of the resource Speeches, presentations, and other lectures given at St. John's College. These include convocation addresses delivered in both Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM. Click on <a title="Speeches, presentations, and other lectures" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=15">Items in the Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context speechespresentationsotherlectures 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 mp3 Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:08:35 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 Memorial Service for J. Winfree Smith Description An account of the resource Memorial service for Annapolis tutor J. Winfree Smith, April 20, 1991. The service includes eulogies by John White, Eva Brann, William Darkey, Joseph Cohen, Francis Mason, Brother Robert, Curtis Wilson, and Douglas Allanbrook. Please note that the recording quality is poor and some speakers are difficult to hear. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource White, John F., 1942-2020 Brann, Eva T. H. Darkey, William A. Cohen, Joseph Mason, Francis Smith, Robert, Brother Wilson, Curtis Allanbrook, Douglas 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 1991--04-20 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 Smith, J. Winfree Eulogies Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Tape_358 Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/ce3a9ed332c90b715b71d14715c57c17.mp3 33745127913b97db28e96c3536e8231a 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/. 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. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts. For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis 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 audiocassette Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:58:28 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 Leibniz's New Geometry Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered November 30, 2007, by Annapolis tutor Brendon Lasell as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Lasell, Brendon 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 2007-11-30 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College 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 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Freiherr von, 1646-1716 Geometry--History Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_Lasell_Brendon_2007-11-30 Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/8ecefb87d028b8d993d42f15beab8dab.pdf ae2f694b6263387e98b6f7ea35e47c3a PDF Text Text Leibniz’s New Geometry Brendon Lasell July 26, 2007 In February of 1682, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz published a paper giving the ratio between a circle and a circumscribed square. In fact, he claimed that (see diagram) when the circumscribed square BC is 1, then the circle is equal to 1 1 1 1 1 − + − + etc. 1 3 5 7 9 The announcement appeared in the second issue of a new journal, the Acta Eruditorum, the Acts of the Learned. The journal was intended to give learned men a way to announce their new discoveries, and it was the first such journal in Germany. Leibiniz’s paper does indeed present something new: nothing like the equality he gives had never been seen before. Leibniz’s paper thus serves to introduce readers to new mathematical knowledge. At the same time, the paper introduces its readers to its author. But the paper is only an introduction. A reader struck by the novelty of its claims would not be satisfied with what he can learn there about the new mathematics and its new author. The paper neither gives a argument for its main assertion, nor does it explain how the author came to it. Instead, he only gives an enunciation of a theorem, seen from several points of view. Intrigued by the mathematics, we may want to know something about the author who is boldly making such claims; but here too we are frustrated. The author only gives his initials, G. G. L., and if we investigate, we only find out that he is a relatively unknown court historian for a Duke in northern Germany. He is a new man among the learned just as his assertions are new in mathematical learning. In February of 1682 we cannot let what we think about Leibniz guide our thinking about Leibniz’s mathematics. Readers of Leibniz’s paper are thus left with no choice but to begin by looking at the enunciation of his new theorem from the points of view he gives us, neither looking ahead to a demonstration or analysis, nor looking back to an established body of work by the same author. Leibniz presents his new theorem above all from the point of view of tradition. His essays begins as follows: Geometers have always tried to investigate the proportions of curvilinear figures to rectilinear figures, but even now, after applying algebra, they still have not succeeded — at least with the methods they have published: for these problems cannot be reduced to 1 �algebraic equations, but they are beautifully useful, especially for reducing mechanics to pure geometry. Leibniz is doing what geometers have always done. He is trying to find the proportion of a curvilinear figure, the circle, to a rectilinear figure, a square. But geometers have not always succeeded at these tasks, even now in 1682, after they have learned from Descartes to apply algebra to solve geometric problems. Leibniz, however, succeeds at his task. Leibniz goes on to say more about the problems that geometers have solved, about their aims in solving these problems, and how his new solution satisfies these aims. Thus, when he gives us the proportion between a circle and a square, he asks us to look first of all not at circles or squares, or even at curvilinear and rectilinear figures in general, but rather at what geometers have always tried to do. His own work belongs not so much directly to geometry as to the history of geometry. It is a step forward in the progress of geometry. Now if we look at Leibniz’s new theorem as a solution to one of many problems that have been solved in the history of geometry, then it is natural to ask what light this new solution sheds on the process by which one comes to solve such problems in general. In an earlier letter where Leibniz presents the same theorem on the proportion between a circle and a square, he writes that “nothing is as important as seeing the origins of discoveries — they are worth more than the discoveries themselves in my opinion.” In a much later essay, he writes that seeing the origin of discoveries is important in that it helps “the art of discovering.” From the point of view of the art of discovery, geometry is not about circles or lines so much as about the general art of coming to new truths. When we look at Leibniz’s claim that the ratio of a circle to a circumscribed square is 1 1 1 1 1 − + − + etc., 1 3 5 7 9 we should then think first about the general art of finding proportions between curvilinear and rectilinear figures, and about the light this theorem sheds on that art. This is the point of view from which we will look at Leibniz’s mathematical work tonight. Starting from this new theorem about the ratio of a circle to circumscribed square, we will look at how Leibniz presents the art of discovery that is behind this theorem. We will begin by looking more closely at how Leibniz presents the tradition that his discovery about the circle belongs to, a tradition whose most prominent member is Archimedes, and how he breaks with that tradition. Next we shall broaden our scope to look at some of Leibniz’s later papers, where he presents more discoveries and lays out the method behind them. Here it becomes clear that Leibniz defines his new contribution to the art of discovery above all in opposition to Descartes. In particular, he introduces new objects into geometry that Descartes could not deal with, and a new way of representing these objects. Finally, we will return to the problem we started with and sketch how Leibniz’s new understanding of geometry leads him to discover the proportion between a circle and its circumscribed square. 2 �1 1.1 The tradition of the curved and the straight Archimedes Let us return to the opening sentence of Leibniz’s paper. There he writes that the problems of finding the proportions between curvilinear and recitlinear figures are “beautifully useful, especially for reducing mechanics to terms of pure geometry.” He continues, “Those who have looked more deeply into such things know this; few have done so, but they are among the most outstanding mathematicians.” The only example Leibniz gives of a “most outstanding mathematician” is Archimedes. Leibniz gives an example of a problem solved by Archimedes. Archimedes found the proportions between a cone, a sphere, and a cylinder constructed on the same circle. Here is a diagram. As Leibniz points out, Archimedes showed that given a circle AB, a sphere with the same diameter DC, touching the circle AB at the center C of AB, a cone ADB whose base is AB and whose vertex is D, and a cylinder ABF E whose base is AB and whose top EF touches the sphere DC at C, then the cone ADB is to the sphere DC as 1 is to 2, and the sphere DC is to the cylinder ABF E as 2 is to 3. Archimedes’ problem is an example of the kind of beautifully useful problem that Leibniz himself intends to solve. Why are these problems beautifully useful for Leibniz? It is easier to begin to see its beauty than its use. The beauty of the problem is first of all visible in the diagram itself. It is a simple diagram: only a few straight and curved lines traced on a sheet of paper. It is balanced perfectly between left and right. Again, as we go up and down the diagram there are repeated elements: the curved lines that are the circumferences of the circle at the top and bottom of the cylinder, along with the equator of the sphere. The straight vertical sides of the cylinder also add to our impression of vertical symmetry. Yet the vertical symmetry is not perfect. It is sharply broken by the straight diagonal sides of the cone, culminating in a point. The surface simplicity of the diagram is broken in other ways as well. Our imagination leads us beyond the simple plane surface of the drawing to a solid depth, and the sphere, cylinder, and cone then come to life and separate from each other. When we thus start to see the complexity behind the simplicity in the diagram, we begin to perceive its beauty. It is not merely simple, but rather gradually alludes to the complexity it is drawn out of. Our attention is drawn to the diagram because of its striking emptiness and stays with the diagram because its finitude offers little to distract us and its symmetry gives our attention a way to move without leaving the diagram, circling over its surface; yet as our attention is held fascinated by this surface it gradually opens up, leading us to into depths that were not at first seen. The theorem is, of course, more than simply a diagram. Archimedes proves that the cone is to the sphere is to the cylinder as 1 is to 2 is to 3. When we consider the statement of this theorem our attention is drawn away from the diagram to the simple numerical ratios of 1 to 2 to 3. The simplicity here is of a different kind. These numbers are not visible, and do not call on the 3 �imagination. While the cone, sphere, and cylinder are among the simplest things in geometry, 1, 2, and 3 are the simplest things in arithmetic. In contrast to the cone, sphere, and cylinder, these numbers are strikingly empty, and when we turn our attention to them there is little to hold it in place. The only movement we are led to follow is a movement onward: we go from 1 to 2 to 3 to 4, and continue to infinity. There is no natural circling of our attention back to where it began at 1. The simplicity of 1, 2, and 3 togther is thus not a beautiful simplicity. When Archimedes then identifies the simple geometric relations between the cone, sphere, and the cylinder together with the simple arithmetic relations between 1, 2, and 3, we are astonished. We would not expect these two very different kinds of relations to be identical. There is nothing about a sphere and a cylinder as they present themselves to our imagination that would suggest that they are to each other as the number 2 is to the number 3. But Archimedes can prove this. Step by step, in a long argument, he takes us to a point where we must admit the identity. This surprising identity, and its demonstration, are beautiful. They are beautiful not only because of the beauty of the diagram, but because as we follow the proof we move our attention back and forth between arithmetic and geometric simplicity, and unexpected depth gradually emerges. As the geometric diagram has a kind of beauty of its own, independent of any connection with arithmetic, what happens is primarily a beautification of arithmetic. By being linked to an elegant geometric configuration, the numbers 1, 2, and 3, which by themselves appear rather empty and uninteresting, acquire an unexpected depth. We can now see the relation between 2 and 3 in the relation between a sphere and a cylinder, and 2 and 3 thus become worth dwelling on and wondering at in a way they were not before. Following Leibniz’s lead, we have been looking how Archimedes discovery of the ratios between a cone, sphere, and cylinder is beautiful. Now to see this beauty well we would have to look not only at the enunciation of Archimedes’ theorem, but at its demonstration. Leibniz does not do this, and we do not have time to do it tonight. But I hope we have seen enough to glimpse something of the way Archimedes’ theorem spreads something of geometric beauty over arithmetic. Now Leibniz does not merely say that problems of finding proportions between curvilinear and recitlinear figures is beautiful, but that these problems are beautifully useful. But it is hard to see what is useful about Archimedes’ theorem. Once we know what the ratios between a cone, a sphere, and a cylinder are, there is nothing obvious we can go and do with this knowledge. Leibniz suggests that such problems are useful for “reducing mechanics to terms of pure geometry,” that is, for reducing the study of machines to terms of pure geometry. But this theorem hardly appears to lend itself to designing machines. We might turn to Archimedes other works in hope of finding some clue to the usefulness of the theorem Leibniz gives and others like it. But here again, we would be disappointed. It is true that some of the techniques Archimedes uses to find the ratio between a sphere and a cylinder do appear elsewhere in his mathematical works, and perhaps he even uses this ratio as a step in another 4 �argument. But there is, I believe, little in his mathematical works to indicate that he finds these kinds of problems useful. But Leibniz may not only be thinking of the extant writing of Archimedes. We know something of Archimedes not only through his writings, but also through the writings of historians. Here we are told that Archimedes was in fact a wonderful engineer. His mechanical ability plays a central role in one of the most striking episodes of the story of the rise of the Roman Empire. Archimedes built machines that were able to drive a powerful Roman army from his native city of Syracuse. The best telling of the story is in Plutarch’s life of Marcellus. It is worth spending a few minutes here to try to bring Plutarch’s telling of the story to life before us, so that we may see better how Leibniz’s invocation of Archimedes’ name may shed light on the tradition he is taking up in squaring the circle. Archimedes appears in Plutarch’s life of the Roman general Marcellus. Marcellus was involved in three great wars, stretching from his youth to his old age. The bulk of Plutarch’s life is concerned with the last of these three wars, a war between Rome and Carthage. These two great cities fought each other to decide who would be the dominant power in the known world. Rome, of course, eventually won, destroying Carthage completely about sixty years after Marcellus’ death. But during Marcellus’ lifetime the question was very much in doubt. Carthaginian armies were moving through Italy, threatening the city of Rome itself, and battles were also fought in Spain, Africa, and Greece. Not long after this war with Carthage had broken out, Marcellus was in charge of a Roman army in Sicily trying to defend Roman interests. Rome had come to rule Sicily in a war during Marcellus’ youth, but the new war with Carthage had emboldened some Sicilian cities to try to break free of Rome. Syracuse, the largest and wealthiest city in Sicily, was one of these cities. Just before Marcellus had arrived, a Syracusan general, Hippocrates, had “gratified the Carthaginians and acquired tyranny for himself by killing many Romans.” When the Roman army came to Syracuse Hippocrates, by spreading lies about Roman cruelty among the Syracusans, encouraged them to refuse to listen to Marcellus’ ambassadors. Marcellus than attacked by both land and sea. Marcellus was confident of his success, relying on the size and splendour of his preparation and on his own reputation. But to Archimedes and the machines of Archimedes all this was of no account. This man did not set out to make these as if they were worth being serious about; most of them were born as byproducts of geometry at play, after Hiero the king had become ambitious and had persuaded Archimedes to turn something of his art from mental things to bodily things, and by mixing its reason somehow or other through sense perception with use, to make this reason more manifest to the many. When the Roman army and fleet attack, Archimedes’ machines shot arrows, cast heavy rocks at them, inflicting heavy damage. When the Roman ships came up to the wall, the Syracusans used machines devised by Archimedes to 5 �grab hold of the ships with iron claws, lift them out of the water, and drop them again. The Romans quickly retreated in fear, giving up a direct assault, and settling into a siege that would last almost three years. Through Archimedes’ ingenuity alone the Syracusans had driven off Marcellus and the Roman army and fleet. Marcellus compares Archimedes to Briareus, a mythical hundred handed monster. According to Plutarch,“in reality, all the other Syracusans were a body for the preparations of Archimedes, while the soul moving and turning everything was one.” In driving off the Romans and preserving Syracusan freedom Archimedes has momentarily become a perfect tyrant over Syracuse. According to Plutarch’s description, it seems that Archimedes is not simply the ruling soul in Syracuse, but the only soul. Marcellus is right to find this situation both mythical and monstrous. Thus the geometry of Archimedes is wonderfully useful. It generates as a byproduct an amazing array of machines that are capable of repelling a mighty army. Even so, according to Plutarch, Archimedes held the art of making machines, mechanics, an art by which he had acquired a godlike reputation, in contempt: Archimedes possessed so great a spirit and depth of soul and such a great wealth of theorems that he chose to leave behind no writings about the things by which he had acquired the name and reputation of having the understanding of a god rather than of a man; instead, considering the business of mechanics and, in general, any art that grasps at what is useful, to be ignoble and base, he directed his love of honor to those things which have beauty and superfluity unmixed with necessity, things incomparable with everything else, and which furnish demonstration with a rivalry against matter, the latter bringing size and beauty, the former precision and enormous power; for it is not possible in geometry to grasp more difficult and weightier hypotheses in simpler and purer terms. Now remember that Leibniz, when speaking of the kind of problems Archimedes solved, calls them beatifully useful. They are both beautiful and useful. Earlier I tried to point to some of the ways Archimedes finding of the ratio between a sphere and a cylinder may be beautiful. We later turned to Plutarch’s life of Marcellus trying to find how Archimedes’ art might be useful. There we indeed see that Archimedes’ succeeds in turning pure geometry to mechanics, making his wonderful machines. But Leibniz not only attributes both beauty and use to Archimedes’ art, but says that the uses themselves are beautiful. In contrast, in Plutarch’s account, the mechanical uses of Archimedes’ geometry are contemptible in comparison with the pure beauty of geometry indifferent to use, to which alone he devoted his writings. Here then we begin to see a way in which Leibniz has broken from the tradition he sets before us. Leibniz suggests there is a harmony between beauty and use, while Archimedes (at least Plutarch’s Archimedes) turns away from use towards a pure beauty belonging to matter in a rivalry with demonstration. 6 �Before we finish with Archimedes, I should give the rest of Plutarch’s story. After being repelled by Archimedes’ machines, the Romans retreated, but they did not give up. They settled into a long siege, and after a few years found a way to take the city by strategem, without a frontal assault. When Marcellus had Syracuse in his power, he set his soldiers loose to plunder it. As the Roman army ran through the streets taking everything they could get their hands on, Archimedes was looking over a diagram, examining something by himself, and failed to notice that the city had been taken. A Roman soldier came up to Archimedes and ordered him to come with him. Archimedes did not want to go before he had finished his problem and established its demonstration. The Roman soldier became angry, drew his sword, and killed him. 1.2 Leibniz’s innovation Let us return now to Leibniz’s paper on the ratio of a circle to its circumscribed square. There, as we saw earlier, Archimedes appears as part of the geometric tradition of finding proportions between curved and straight things. After mentioning Archimedes and his theorem, Leibniz goes on to give a series of more modern proportions, found by nameless mathematicians, for other figures, and then turns to the unsolved problem of finding the ratio between a circle and a square. According to Leibniz, no one has yet been able to “bring the circle under laws such laws.” Others have found approximations, including first of all Archimedes, who showed that the ratio of a circle to a circumscribed square is greater than 21 to 28 and less than 22 to 28. But approximations are not what Leibniz is looking for; he is looking for an accurate expression. Now according to Leibniz, “many have not fully understood what they are looking for” when trying to find the quadrature of the circle, that is, the ratio between a circle and a circumscribed square. To clarify the what would count as a solution to the problem, Leibniz gives a classification of kinds of quadrature. A quadrature can either be done by calculation or by construction, and in either case it may be either accurate or not. There are therefore four different kinds of quadratures: accurate calculations, approximate calculations, accurate constructions, and nearly accurate constructions. No one has yet given an accurate calculation or construction for the quadrature of the circle, while Archimedes gave an approximate calculation, and others have given nearly accurate constructions. Leibniz claims his own quadrature is an accurate calculation. The simplest kind of accurate calculation would show that the ratio between the circle and the square is the same as the ratio between two whole numbers, just as Archimedes shows that the ratio between a sphere and a cylinder is the same as the ratio of 2 to 3. Leibniz calculation is not that simple. As we saw earlier, he shows that if the area of the square is 1, then the area of the circle will be 1 1 1 1 1 − + − + etc. 1 3 5 7 9 Leibniz goes on to explain that this means that in relation to the correct value for the area of the circle, 7 �1 1 1 1 1 1 1 will be − − − 1 3 1 3 1 3 + + 1 5 1 5 − 1 7 greater, yet with an error less than ...... less, .......................... ...... greater, .......................... ...... less, .......................... etc. 1 3 1 5 1 7 1 9 etc. Therefore the whole series contains all the approximations or values greater than or less than the correct one: for if it is continued far enough the error will be less than a given fraction, and thus also less than any given quantity. The whole series therefore expresses the exact value. And although we cannot express the sum of this series by one number, and the series may be produced indefinitely, nevertheless, because this series keeps to a single law of progression, we sufficiently perceive the whole with our minds. Here Leibniz has done something very bold. In looking at the table he gives, one might think he is only giving us more approximations. He gives us a series of expressions that each give an approximate value for the area of the circle. Each expression comes closer and closer than the last to being accurate, but none of them ever is accurate. And each expression is more complex than the last, so that we have to use long and complicated expressions to get a very accurate value for the area of the circle. If, for example, we wanted to find the area of 1 the circle with an error less than 100 , we would have to take the sum 1 1 1 1 1 − + − + ... − . 1 3 5 7 99 If we added and subtracted all 50 terms in this sum, we would get something equal to the correct value, plus or minus .01; we would therefore have a pretty accurate approximation of the correct value, up to two decimal places. If we wanted an approximation up to three decimal places, we could use a sum with 500 terms. Leibniz, however, sees more here than some rather laborious new ways to calculate an approximate value of the area of the circle. He sees a completely accurate calculation that gives the exact value of the area of the circle. This is the bold new leap Leibniz makes. To make it, he must see the series as giving a single value, rather than infinitely many values. This value cannot be contained in any individual sum of a finite number of terms; rather, it is contained in the “law of progression” that guides the whole series. This law tells us how to move from one sum to the next; it tells us, for example, how to move from the second sum, 1 1 − , 1 3 to the third, 1 1 1 − + , 1 3 5 8 �and then how to move from this sum to the fourth, 1 1 1 1 − + − . 1 3 5 7 The law of progession is the same at every step; no matter how far we go in the series, the way to move from one sum in the series to the next is the same. If anyone gives us a sum that occurs in the series, we can easily find the next sum by following the law. For Leibniz, we can therefore sufficiently perceive the whole series of sums, and it is thus just as good as a single number. Because the series gives us arbitrarily close approximations to the area of the circle, its value must be identical to the value of the area of the circle. Leibniz has thus given us a different kind of solution than we might have expected. When we first posed the problem, we were looking for a number that gives the area of the circle. But Leibniz tells us we did not understand the what we were really looking for: we were in fact looking for a law. Leibniz thus replaces numbers with laws. The primary mathematical object is a law. Now any law, in mathematics or otherwise, is universally obligatory. Everyone should obey the law. To obey the law, everyone must first understand what the law is. A law should therefore be something that is publicly declared and can be grasped by everyone . Accordingly, Leibniz introduces the law of progression of his series as a means by which we perceive the whole series. The law of progression is manifest to everyone. It becomes manifest here because Leibniz has presented it here in a table that makes us grasp it at a glance. By laying out the series of sums in a table, with neatly aligned rows and columns, we see just how we should move from one sum to the next, and how each new sum relates to the circle. The law of progression is captured in the visible relation between one row and the next. We thus grasp as well as we need to what is contained in the two “etc.”s at the bottom of the table, which contain the infinitely many unwritten sums and errors. Expressing the series of approximations in terms of words alone would not have been as effective as Leibniz’s table in making clear what the law behind the series is. In fact, any complicated mathematical truth is hard to grasp when expressed in words alone. We see this all the time in reading ancient mathematics. Even in the relatively simple propositions in Euclid, it is sometimes hard to understand what a proposition is about by reading the enunciation alone. Only after we see it set out in terms of a diagram does it become clear. The difficulty in understanding the bare enunciations becomes even greater in the more complicated works of Apollonius and Archimedes. Yet in all these authors there is a stubborn insistence on formulating everything in plain Greek, no matter how odd or unreadable the resulting sentences become. They do not resort to symbolic shorthands to try to make it easier for us to grasp the patterns behind what they are saying. In the resulting tension between the diagrams and the text in Greek mathematics we perhaps see the rivalry between matter and demonstration that Plutarch speaks of. The diagram is a kind of matter, lending beauty and size to the proposition, while the text is where the demonstration is found, providing power and precision. Each keeps jealously 9 �to its own domain, the diagram not trying to become a symbolic text, and the text not trying to become a picture. Leibniz collpses this tension. Text and diagram coalesce in a table expressing an underlying law. The strife of ancient mathematics disappears behind a new harmony. When Plutarch first introduces Archimedes, he writes that his machines are the result of King Hiero persuading him to turn something of his art from mental things to bodily things, and by mixing its reason somehow or other through sense perception with use, to make this reason more manifest to the many. When making his machines, Archimedes himself thus blurs the line between reason and sense perception in trying to make his geometry useful. He blurs this line in the interest of making his geometry manifest to the many, an interest that Leibniz shares. But as we saw earlier, Archimedes appears to hold the usefulness of his geometry in contempt. It is nothing compared to the beauty of the geometry on its own. For Leibniz, I believe, the beauty of geometry is not separable from its usefulness because he sees finding laws as its object. The theorems of a Leibnizian geometer reveal laws, and these laws are by their nature manifest to the many. These laws are naturally useful because they let us easily grasp powerful universal truths. It is only a bad geometer who fails to make himself perfectly clear, and only an idle pretence to suppose that there is some independent realm of pure theorems high above the understanding of the many. 2 Leibniz against Descartes In considering how Leibniz’s paper in February of 1682 is new, we have so far concentrated on how Leibniz’s solution moves beyond the work of Archimedes, the first geometer he names as belonging to the tradition of finding proportions between curvilinear and rectilinear figures. But this tradition has many later members, and Leibniz refers to their work as well. To be truly new, Leibniz’s solution has to go beyond not only Archimedes, but all previous modern mathematicians as well. Now in many places in his mathematical writings Leibniz gives the names of his important predecessors and describes their work, and it would be impossible here to give a complete picture of his understanding of the tradition leading up to him. But there is one mathematician with whom he contrasts himself more than any other: René Descartes. Descartes not only made important contributions to geometry that Leibniz depends upon, but also made some harmful errors that Leibniz tries to correct. In many of his published mathematical writings there are passages that point to these errors of Descartes. In this part of the lecture we will try to sketch how Leibniz saw himself as correcting the errors of Descartes. 10 �2.1 Descartes’ error Leibniz criticizes Descartes in a paper titled “On Finding the Dimensions of Figures” published in May of 1684, two years after his paper on the area of the circle. This paper sets forth a general method Leibniz uses to find the areas of figures. After briefly describing the method and some of the things it can do, he writes: I have many things of this kind by which Geometry is advanced immeasurably far beyond the boundaries set down by Viète and Descartes. For the ancients did not wish to use lines of higher degrees, and [they called] the solutions that were found by using them Mechanical. Descartes blames them for this and receives into Geometry all curves whose nature may be expressed by some Algebraic equation, that is, by an equation of a definite degree. He is right to do this; but there are infinitely many other curves that nevertheless can still be accurately described, and Descartes erred no less than the ancients when he excluded them from Geometry and called them Mechanical, evidently because he was unable to reduce them to equations and treat them by his rules. This is a criticism that Leibniz returns to again and a again in his mathematical papers. According to Leibniz, Descartes expanded the proper objects of geometry, including in it lines that the ancients rejected as mechanical. But Descartes himself does not go far enough. He introduces a new criterion for judging if a line is geometric, and his criterion is too narrow: he ends up rejecting some lines that are just as geometric as the ones he accepts. Leibniz tries to correct this error and include all lines that belong to geometry. As Mr. Burke puts it, there is an analogy: as Descartes is to the ancients, Leibniz is to Descartes. To understand better Leibniz’s criticism of Descartes, we will turn briefly to the text where Descartes makes the statements Leibniz is criticizing, the Geometry, which was published in 1637, about forty-five years before Leibniz’s first mathematical papers. There Descartes gives a way to simplify “all the problems of geometry,” by freely introducing “arithmetic terms into geometry, in order to make [himself] more intelligible.” He uses, for example, the term “multiplication” to describe finding a fourth proportional: if the line AB is a unit, and we have to “multiply” BD by BC, then Descartes simply constructs a fourth proportional BE for AB, BD, and BC, so that AB : BD :: BC : BE. BE is called the “product” of BD and BC. Descartes’ new arithmetic language enables him first to reduce all statements about geometry to statements about straight lines, but he quickly notes that “often one does not need to trace these lines on paper, and it suffices to designate them each by a single letter.” By designating geometric lines by letters and interpreting geometric relations in terms of arithmetic, he can use algebra to express geometric statements. For those of you who have not read the Geometry, I would say that the result is something like what you see in high school algebra, where geometric curves are expressed by equations using systems of coordinates. 11 �Descartes claims that his new method was unknown to the ancients, who seem to have been held back by their scruples about using arithmetic terms in geometry because they did not see with sufficient clarity the relation between these two subjects. To prove that his method is capable of going beyond the ancients, Descartes solves a problem that the ancients could not solve, the socalled locus problem of Pappus. We do not have time to go into much detail here, but in very general terms, this problem involves finding curves that satisfy certain conditions. We are given some properties of an unknown curve, and we have to find the curve that has these properties. The form of the problem is thus the same as that of countless other ancient geometric problems: for example, the problem of finding a square equal to a given polygon, or the problem of finding a mean proportional between two given lines. What is unusual about Pappus’ problem is that we do not know in advance what kind of curve line we are looking for. When we try to solve the problem, we may therefore want to understand what kind of curves line there are; that is, we may want to classify curved lines in general. But ancient geometry never deals with curved lines in general. It only gives us a handful of examples, such as the circle and the conic sections. Pappus gives us a case where these well known curves are solutions to his problem, but he does not have a way to describe the curved lines that solve his problem in more general cases. According to Descartes, even in the simple case where the solution is a conic section “he does not at all try to determine or describe this curved line, any more than he tries to explain the curves” that satisfy the problem in more complicated cases. Descartes claims he can do all this, determining and describing the solution in the simple case where Pappus only asserts what the solution is, and explaining the solution in more complicated cases. Now the key to Descartes’ general solution of the problem is a new understanding of what it means to find a curve. The ancients did not understand the nature of curved lines, and therefore excluded lines that properly belonged to geometry. Among the lines they excluded are precisely those that solve Pappus’ problem. By broadening what counts as a solution to the problem, Descartes is able to solve it. His solution is thus a model for the type of solution which Leibniz gives for the quadrature of the circle, where he broadens the definition of number to find an accurate value of the area of the circle. According to Descartes one should no more exclude the complex curves than the simpler curves, provided that one may imagine them to be described by a continuous movement, or by many successive movements each of which is entirely regulated by those which precede it. Descartes is thus able to include within geometry lines described in our imagination by all sorts of complicated machines, lines that the ancients would have rejected as mechanical. A little later Descartes gives a somewhat different formulation of which curves may be called geometric, identifying them with those curves whose points necessarily have a some relation to all the 12 �points of a straight line, a relation which may be expressed by some equation. In what follows, Descartes makes it clear that he is thinking of an algebraic equation, that is, an equation formed by adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing known and unknown quantities; for example, y = x2 or x3 −2xy+1 = y 2 are both equations of geometric curves for Descartes. The equation of a curve determines what kind of kind of curve it is, and Descartes gives his solution to Pappus’ problem by using equations. It is this latter formulation of what counts as a geometric curve that Leibniz objects to. Leibniz sees no reason to limit ourselves to algebraic equations, since equations can express relations other than those that come from adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing known and unknown quantities. In addition to algebraic equations, Leibniz introduces new equations which he calls transcendent. These new equations are expressed in a new symbolism, which he calls a calculus. The curves corresponding to these equations are transcendent curves. They are the curves that Descartes mistakenly casts out of geometry. While Descartes was right to include all algebraic curves, and not just the few simple ones the ancients used, the circle and the conic sections, he was wrong to exclude transcendent curves. Just as by introducing algebraic curves Descartes can solve a problem the ancients could not, so also by introducing transcendent curves Leibniz can solve problems Descartes could not. 2.2 Leibniz’s new curves Leibniz at first only mentions the new calculus used for describing the new transcendent curves, without giving examples. It is only a few months later, in a paper titled “A New Method for Maxima and Minima, as well as for Tangents,” that he shows us the new calculus. By a “calculus” Leibniz seems to mean a symbolic system, that is, a collection of symbols and rules for manipulating them. Ordinary algebra is thus a kind of calculus for Leibniz. His new calculus is based on the old algebraic calculus, but it includes one new symbol, the letter d. Leibniz first introduces d using the diagram on your handout. We are given a straight line AX, called the axis, a curved line passing through V , a perpendicular V X from the curved line to the axis, called an ordinate and a tangent V B to the curved line. Leibniz takes an arbitrary straight line and calls it dx, and then defines dv to be the line such that dv : dx :: V X : BX. He calls dv the “difference of the vs.” Leibniz goes on to give the rules for manipulating this new symbol. For example, he writes that if y = xv, then dy = x dv + v dx. He does not demonstrate these rules when he first introduces them in the “New Method.” Instead, he gives some examples. As the full title of the paper suggests, the examples are concerned with finding maximum and minimum values of quantities, and with finding tangents to curves. 13 �Leibniz’s presentation of the new calculus is at first perplexing. He throws us into the middle of it without explaining why a new calculus is needed, what it is supposed to represent, or why it works the way it does. Instead, he gives us at least three ways to think about the new symbol d: 1. in terms of the proportion dv : dx :: V X : BX; 2. as something that represents “differences,” so that dv is the “difference of the vs;” 3. as a letter that is manipulated according to certain rules when combined with algebraic expressions. Of these three ways of thinking of d, I believe the second, in terms of differences, is the most fundamental. It can explain both the proportion Leibniz starts with, and the rules the new symbol must obey. Moreover, thinking of the new calculus in terms of differences most directly helps us understand why the new calculus helps us solve new geometric problems that Descartes’ algebraic calculus cannot. A few years earlier, in a letter to a friend, Leibniz writes of what he calls the “method of differences.” This method is based on the same method introduced in the “New Method”, but in the earlier letter Leibniz uses “differential figures.” According to Leibniz, a differential figure is one whose ”series of ordinates coincides with the series of differences from another series.” 1 The notion of a series of differences contains, I believe, the fundamental insight behind the new calculus. Consider again the figure in your handout. We could have taken any point V on the curved line and drawn an ordinate V X to get new values for both V X and AX, that is, for both v and x. There are therefore infinitely many possible ordinates for the curve through V . So far we have done nothing that the ancients did not do, as those of you who have read Apollonius know. But what Leibniz does that the ancients do not is consider these ordinates as a series; that is, he supposes that there is an ordered progression of ordinates, where every ordinate has an ordinate that immediately follows it. For Leibniz, after the ordinate V X there is a next ordinate V1 X1 . And immediately after V1 X1 there is another ordinate, and so on. These ordinates form an infinite series. It is in terms of this series that we can most easily see what Leibniz means by d: dv is the difference V1 X1 − V X between consecutive ordinates. Now Leibniz’s supposition is obviously absurd. There can be no next ordinate, because continuous magnitudes are infinitely divisible. Between any two points V and V1 there is always another point from which we can draw an ordinate, and therefore V1 X1 can never be the next ordinate. Leibniz is well aware of the absurdity, but it does not stop him. He is willing to embrace a way of thinking about geometry that he knows is false, in order to develop his new method. And this absurdity, this geometrical falsehood, is not something accidental to Leibniz’s new method. Leibniz indicates the centrality of thinking of differences of ordinates by the notation itself: dv is a shorthand for “the difference of the ordinates. As he develops his new calculus and its applications, 1 Letter to Tschirnhaus, p. 40 14 �both in the “New Method” and elsewhere, we see him again and again return to thinking in terms of series of ordinates and their differences. This thought is the engine that drives him to new discoveries, and we should try to follow Leibniz in embracing this way of thinking. We should resist the temptation to treat it straightaway as an error that needs to be corrected. But how can we embrace what looks like an elementary mistake? The idea of accepting false hypotheses in order to get at truth is not unknown in geometry. Every time we do a reductio proof we begin by setting down a false hypothesis. We then go through the proof, using this false hypothesis to derive in an orderly way other false statements until we come to something that is manifestly absurd. We then throw away the false hypothesis and embrace the contrary, true hypothesis once and for all. In Leibniz’s method, we also use the false hypothesis to derive in an orderly way other statements and finally end up with a true statement. But in Leibniz’s method, we do not throw away the false hypothesis when we are done. Leibniz’s method is not a reductio method, but in both methods we use false hypotheses in a carefully regulated way to come to true conclusions. The use of these hypotheses is bound by rules: they are not like Euclid’s definitions and common notions, or like the conclusions of demonstrated theorems, which we can freely introduce in whatever context we want. Rather, there are certain limited contexts in which reductio hypotheses or Leibniz’s hypothesis about the series of ordinates can be used. In both cases there are as it were laws to guide the way we incorporate false hypotheses in our arguments. Leibniz new geometry thus depends on new laws for the logic of geometry. To see more clearly what the laws are that guide Leibniz’s hypothesis about the series of ordinates, let us turn to a paper published a few months after the “New Method.” There Leibniz gives what he calls the “general principle” from which his method may may be deduced: that a curvilinear figure should be considered as equivalent to a polygon with infinitely many sides; it follows that whatever can be demonstrated about such a Polygon — whether in such a way that we pay no attention to the number of sides, or in such a way that it is more and more verified the greater number of sides we take, so that the error finally becomes less than any given number — can be declared to be true about the curve.2 To return to our diagram, if we draw a straight line between V and V1 , the points where consecutive ordinates meet the curve, and we do the same for every ordinate in the series, then we will get a polygon meeting the curve at the points V , V1 , etc. According to Leibniz, this polygon is equivalent to the curve through V . Now this polygon is not simply a single, fixed, polygon; it is a variable polygon that can have more and more sides. We can always take a greater number of sides. And when we prove something that is true about this variable polygon that becomes more and more true the more sides we take, 2 p. 62 15 �until it finally fails to be true by less than any given number, then we can say that it is true about the curve. This is the basic law that guides Leibniz’s use of the hypothesis that the curve is equivalent to a polygon. Here is a simple example. Suppose we are given a circle. According to Leibniz, we can assume this circle is a polygon with infinitely many sides. We can use this assumption to prove that the area of the circle is half the product of its perimeter and its radius. For if we take one of the triangles ACB making up the polygon, and drop a perpendicular DC from AB to the center C, then the area of the triangle is equal to half the product of AB and DC. If we sum up all the triangles in the polygon, we will see that the total area of the polygon is half the product of its perimeter and DC. This is true no matter how many sides the polygon has. Moreover, the more sides the polygon has, the closer DC comes to being equal to the radius AC. Therefore it becomes “more and more true” that the area of the polygon is equal to half the product of its perimeter and the radius of the circle. According to Leibniz’s principle, then, it follows that the area of the circle is half the product of its perimeter and its radius. There is a striking similarity between Leibniz’s treatment of a curve as equivalent to an infinitely sided polygon and his earlier treatment of an infinite series of numbers as equivalent to a number. Recall that as we take more and more terms in the infinite series 1 1 1 1 − + − + etc., 1 3 5 7 it comes closer and closer to the area of the circle. One could say that the equality between this series and the area of the circle becomes “more and more verified the greater number of terms we take, so that the error finally becomes less than any given number.” Leibniz argues that this series therefore expresses a single value that is equal to the area of the circle. Likewise, the infinite series of polygons that can be inscribed in a circle come closer and closer to the circle, and statements we make about these polygons that are “more and more verified the greater number of sides we take, so that the error finally becomes less than any given number” are in fact true about the circle. Leibniz therefore concludes that the circle is equivalent to a polygon with infinitely many sides. In the former case, Leibniz argued that we perceive the whole infinite series as one number because it keep to a single “law of progression.” The same argument would seem to apply in the case of the infinite polygon: we sufficiently perceive the whole infinite series of polygons as one figure because there is a law of progression that takes us from one polygon to the next. This law of progression is equivalent to the circle for Leibniz. Just as he earlier treated a law of progression as equivalent to a number, so here he treats a law of progression as equivalent to a geometric figure. We turned to Leibniz’s general principle to clarify the assumptions behind his introduction of the new calculus. The symbol d is supposed to mean differences of, when we make the assumption that there is an infinite series of ordinates. This assumption is obviously false. Yet it can be used to guide us to new truths when we use it legally. The laws that guide the use of the assumption depend on 16 �a general principle that curvilinear areas are equivalent to infinite polygons. An infinite polygon is in fact an infinite series of polygons, but it can be treated as a single polygon because this series obeys a single law. This law in effect becomes a mathematical object. There thus appear to be two kinds of new laws: the laws that guide the arguments using the new hypotheses, and the laws that become new geometric objects. But these laws are deeply entangled, and may in the end amount to only one law. The progression from one polygon to the next in the infinite series of polygons may be thought of as a series of steps in an argument. Or the special kind of argument that uses the new assumption may be absorbed within the object under consideration, so that Leibniz’s assumption is no longer false in the new geometry: if by speaking of the “series of ordinates” Leibniz simply means the law of progression for all finite series of ordinates, then there is no need to restrict the assumption to special arguments. It would be as true as any of Euclid’s postulates. Leibniz, fortunately, does dwell on these deep and difficult questions. Instead he simply introduces his new notation, tells us what the rules are, and moves on to solving problems. Consider again the diagram from the “New Method.” If we apply Leibniz’s general principle to the curve there, we can assume that there is a series of ordinates, so that V X and V1 X1 are consecutive ordinates, but only in the context of a certain kind of argument. We may treat the ordinates as if they form a finite series in order to prove statements about them that “are verified more and more” the more ordinates we take. Here is an example of the kind of argument we can make. Let V X and V1 X1 be consecutive ordinates of the curve through V . Then as we take more and more finely grained series of ordinates, the points V and V1 become closer and closer together, and the line through V and V1 becomes closer and closer to a tangent V B to the original curve. Therefore, according to Leibniz’s principle, the line through V and V1 is tangent to the curve. Leibniz gives his “general principle” in classical geometric terms, without any new symbols, and we have given our examples geometrically. But he is in fact following Descartes in trying to express the nature of curved lines with symbols. His new symbol d is precisely what is required to express as a curve symbolically as an infinite polygon. If we drop a perpendicular V T from V to V1 X1 , then V1 T will equal dv and V T will equal dx. If we are given dv and dx, we are given the infinitely small triangle V V1 T , and therefore the side V V1 of the polygon. Leibniz calls this triangle the characteristic triangle; it expresses the nature of the curve as an infinite polygon. To find dv and dx is to find the curve as an infinite polygon. As we saw earlier, Leibniz gives rules for finding dv in terms of dx, given the relationship between v and x. In other words, he gives rules for finding the curve as an infinite polygon, given the relationship between its ordinates and abscissas. Leibniz’s new calculus is a powerful new tool for solving geometric problems. Anything that can be expressed in terms of an infinite polygon can be expressed in terms of it. Since, as we saw earlier, both tangents and areas can be expressed in terms of an infinite polygon, they can also be expressed in terms of the calculus. Leibniz’s calculus can be used to square the circle, and Leibniz 17 �and those who came after him used his calculus to solve many new problems involving tangents and areas. The new calculus helps us solve these problems because it gives us a way of much more concisely expressing just the relevant relations for these kind of problems. More importantly, it gives us a way to express curves that we never would have been able to express before. Just as algebra let us write down equations for curves that we would never have had simple geometric expressions for, so Leibniz’s new calculus lets us write down equation for curves that would never have had simple algebraic expressions. These are the transcendent curves that he faults Descartes for excluding. They are the curves that can only be thought of as infinite polygons. 3 Conclusion Leibniz’s geometry is new because he has a new understanding of law in geometry. In contrast to Archimedes and the other ancients, Leibniz sees geometry as aiming at what is useful, and accordingly tries to find the most clear and concise way to express its underlying laws. With Descartes Leibniz shares the view that geometry aims at the useful and that one should try to introduce new symbols to make the underlying reasons as clear as possible. But in contrast with Descartes, Leibniz explicitly makes laws an object of geometry, and therefore is able to see a broader range of laws that might be clearly expressed by new symbols. Because Descartes was too attached to the symbols of algebra, he set up too narrow boundaries for what counts as a geometric curve. Descartes has no way to express the laws that curves give to the infinite polygons inscribed in them, and therefore rejects the transcendent curves that can only be expressed by these laws. In paper published in 1686, Leibniz offers some harsh criticism of Descartes and his followers. After giving a brief demonstration of an error Descartes made, Leibniz writes the following. Since nothing is simpler than our proof it is surprising that it did not occur to Descartes or the Cartesians, who are most learned men. But too much trust in genius led them astray: the former trusted his own genius, the latter another’s. For Descartes, having the usual vice of great men, finally became a little too confident. And I fear that not a few Cartesians are gradually beginning to imitate the many Peripatetics whom they mock; that is, I fear that they may be getting accustomed to consult the books of their teacher rather than right reason and the nature of things. Descartes’ text has become a dead authority to his followers. It is this dead authority that Leibniz frees himself from with his new geometry. Descartes’ geometry, like his physics, is prone to become rigid and lifeless, losing its connection to the original discoveries it made. The algebraic tools of Descartes’ geometry can come to seem too important on their own, and their function as 18 �expressing something is lost. Leibniz brings life back to geometry by once again letting its laws express themselves. 19 � 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/. 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. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts. For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a>. 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Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis 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. 19 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 Leibniz's New Geometry Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered November 30, 2007, by Annapolis tutor Brendon Lasell as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Lasell, Brendon 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 2007-11-30 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College 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 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Freiherr von, 1646-1716 Geometry--History Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_Lasell_Brendon_2007-11-30 Relation A related resource <a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/7968">Recording</a> Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/2a14f15c8c401de9c4e7e9dfb41e6874.mp3 519988d94f8d86832489e267240ba0b5 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/. 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. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts. For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:47:28 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 a Book? Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on August 30, 1991, by Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Brann, Eva T. H. 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 1991-08-30 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College 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 Books and reading Books Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Tape 377 Deans Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/919b797fbec913b540c0cbb393fe57a5.mp3 910da86aedefbdc513062b556798fb1d 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/. 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. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts. For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a>. Click on <a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:03:09 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 Perfections of Jane Austen Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on January 31, 1975, by Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Brann, Eva T. H. 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 1975-01-31 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College 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 Austen, Jane, 1775-1817 English prose literature Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Tape 262 Deans Friday night lecture Tutors