| Last Name | First Name | Institutional Affiliation | Session | Paper Title | Paper Abstract | |
| Ali, | Seemee | SMU | samcshane@mail.smu.edu | 6d | The Secret of Oedipus at Colonos | Sophocles’ “Oedipus at Colonus” imagines the disgraced, vagrant Oedipus appearing on the periphery of Athens and demanding sanctuary at the end of his mortal life. Oedipus insists that although he is a pariah, his presence — his body — will be a gift to the city. He promises to reveal to Athens’ ruler, Theseus, a secret that may only be shared with “the most excellent one” (τῷ προφερτάτῳ μόνῳ) at the end of Theseus’ own life. This paper proposes that Oedipus’ secret is shared with the audience in plain sight. It proffers a new myth of leadership. Rather than biological lineage, Sophocles proposes an imaginative lineage — steeped in the lessons of tragic drama — as the basis for civic authority. |
| Allen, | Elayne | University of Notre Dame | sallen22@nd.edu | 2d | Augustine’s Hopeful Transformation of Leisure and Political Action in The City of God | My paper examines Augustine’s treatment of the classical debate over the philosophical life and the political life in Book XIX of his famous work, The City of God. I briefly compare his arguments with Aristotle’s discussion of contemplation and action in Book X in the Nicomachean Ethics. I argue that, for Augustine, hope transforms classical treatments of both contemplation and politics such as Aristotle’s by placing them in the context of eternal life. Augustine recognizes political rule and contemplation as distinct ways of life (as the classics do). But he thinks that they draw upon one another in fundamental ways: the political ruler needs contemplation, and the leisured man must share his insights in a public and active manner. Furthermore, in Augustine’s thought, both leisure and action are unburdened from securing for human beings eudaimonia, perfect happiness or flourishing. This is because hope, the crucial horizon of Augustine’s thought in the City of God, affirms that perfect happiness can only be attained in the next life. In seeing leisure and action in light of hope, then, Augustine reveals their limits that the classics tended not to recognize. Political rule is no longer a path to eternal glory, and contemplation is no longer an attempt to glimpse the divine nature during one’s mortal life. Instead, both leisure and political life become ways of exercising charity and participating in the eternal order, which hope knows will one day arrive in its fullness. Augustine’s treatment of leisure and action provides salient lessons for public leaders: he reminds rulers of their need for contemplation, placing their work in an eternal context and tempering the urge to transform the public sphere into a premature paradise. |
| Allmaier, | Nicholas | Tulane University | nallmaier@tulane.edu | 3c | Rousseau’s Mosaic Moment: Religion and the Limits of Political Philosophy in The Social Contract | This paper will investigate Rousseau’s authorial intention in The Social Contract and its implications for not only the character of his thought, but for the status of political thinking in general. In particular, it will focus on the final two chapters of the work, those devoted to the civic religion and Rousseau’s concluding statements. While The Social Contract might be read as an earnest attempt at thinking through a kind of political life, these final chapters indicate rather that Rousseau does not consider himself – or his readers – potential citizens of the kind of political situation described. Careful attention to Rousseau’s requirements for belief in the civic religion will reveal that, like Moses, Rousseau and his readers as founders cannot enter into the nations they might hope to establish. In conjunction with statements from the Reveries of a Solitary Walker, the paper will also speculate concerning what Rousseau sees as the best course of action given this “Mosaic moment” in The Social Contract – or, what he understands to be the best way of life when political thinking and action fail to accommodate the full potential of the human soul. |
| Anders, | John | Trinity University | janders@trinity.edu | 8e | Kolmogorov, The Euclid of Probability Theory | In 1933 Kolmogorov solved one of Hilbert’s famous problems by axiomatizing probability theory. I put Kolmogorov’s 6 axioms next to Euclid’s 5 postulates. The last item in each list involves infinity and gives rises to counterexamples and paradoxes. Just as there are non-Euclidean geometries there are non-Kolmogrovian probability fields. |
| Anderson, | Robert | Saint Anselm College | randerso@anselm.edu | 3d | Aristotle on Sorrow in Book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics | In the first five chapter of Book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle explicitly talks about pleasure. But what is his account of pain, specifically, sorrow? If it follows the same contours as his account of pleasure (which I think it must), some surprising but consoling results follow. |
| Anthony, | Maxwell | Teachers College, Columbia University | ma4290@tc.columbia.edu | 7f | Plato’s Katabasis as Propaideia | How do we understand the guardians’ compelled descent (katabasis) back into the cave in Plato’s Republic? The guardians’ katabasis is often pointed to as the locus classicus of a tension between philosophy and politics. I argue, against such “tension readings,” [Ludwig] that the katabasis should be understood as part of the guardians’ overall education. Specifically, the katabasis is necessitated by the general suppression of becoming and therefore death in the regime’s construction and education. There are two poles to becoming: genesis and passing-away (phthora). In the Republic, becoming is shut out from the city, so much so that the suppression of generation becomes an occasion for interruption [449d], setting off the discussion in Book V. Although passing-away does not receive such explicit attention, the suppression of becoming with respect to death should inform our thinking about leadership because the guardians’ education culminates in the guardians’ belief that they have moved on to the Isles of the Blessed despite being alive [519c]. The perfect guardians cannot distinguish between life and death and, believing they are enjoying the pleasures of the afterlife while still alive, must be forced to “go down” into the cave [520c]. If we treat the katabasis as simply illustrating the tension of politics and philosophy, we ignore the equally intelligible reading of the katabasis as propaedeutic to philosophy. Moreover, we tend to commit ourselves to the view that leadership is either to philosophy, or simply a political duty in tension with philosophy. Reading the katabasis as propaedeutic to philosophy, therefore, suggests the view of political leadership as not simply philosophical or political but as a preparation for philosophy. |
| Arndt, | David | Saint Mary’s College of California | dda2@stmarys-ca.edu | 8e | Astronomy as a Liberal Art: Time and Number in Aristotle and Heidegger | The liberal arts are often equated with the humanities, but this equation forgets the four traditional liberal arts of number: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Astronomy in particular is now seen as a science. How to teach it as a liberal art? I will argue that astronomy as a liberal art is best taught on three levels. On a practical level, by observations of a gnomon’s shadows, and through the construction of sundials. On a theoretical level, by exploring the link between astronomy, sundials, and Aristotle’s concept of quantifiable time in the Physics: “For this is time: number of motion with respect to before and after” (219b). On a sapiential level, by asking what the quantification of time both illuminates and obscures, following Heidegger’s reflections on sundials in section 81 of Being and Time. I will argue that this threefold approach (practical, theoretical, sapiential) should guide the way we approach all the liberal arts of number. |
| Atnip, | Lin | University of Chicago | lmatnip@gmail.com | 3f | The Politics of the Pequod | Moby-Dick may be and has been read as an allegory of American democracy and the threats thereto, with Captain Ahab standing as the demagogue and tyrant who through the force of rhetoric and bribery usurps the proper mission of the Pequod and persuades the crew to sign on to his monomaniacal quest for vengeance against the White Whale, steering the Ship of State to its doom. Such a reading, however, fails to reckon with or account for Ahab’s (distinctively American) nobility and the signs of his natural authority, as Ishmael recognizes from the beginning, and how it is intrinsically related to his personal power and commanding competence. By looking at these unique traits of Ahab’s moral exceptionality, I will argue that Moby-Dick not only illuminates potential dangers to American democracy but also reflects deep and perhaps irreconcilable tensions within the democratic project itself, suggesting that without a shared conception of the real depths and darknesses in the world, both the exceptional individual and the public mass are differently susceptible to being stove in the pursuit of phantoms of that darkness. |
| Barrus, | Roger | Hampden-Sydney College | rbarrus@hsc.edu | 1e | Dante’s Ulysses | In Inferno 26, Dante presents an account of the death of Ulysses that differs greatly from that found in Homer’s Odyssey—that he would die peacefully, far from the sea—or from the acccount that was current in Dante’s day—that he was killed by Telegonus, his son by Circe. In my paper, I present an alternative account of Ulysses’ death that I argue fits the details of the scene in that canto, as well as in the cantos immediately preceding it. |
| Bartl, | Tony | Angelo State University | tbartl@angelo.edu | 7b | State Constitutions as Core Texts: Texas | Many states require a course which covers their state constitution. Yet, students rarely encounter these constitutions except obliquely through the study of institutions as presented in textbooks written by scholars who seem to have only a passing interest in the constitutions themselves. This paper will seek to show how a course in Texas Government can use the Texas Constitution as a, if not the, primary text, which students can read directly and discuss fruitfully in class. |
| Bayles, | Martha | Boston College | martha.bayles@bc.edu | 5f | How to Stream Shakespeare | “How to Stream Shakespeare: Why The Hollow Crown is a Perfect Match for Our Media, Our Politics, and Our Times” By Martha Bayles Paper proposal submitted for ACTC 30th conference: “Leading Between the Lines: Core Texts and Public Leadership,” April 3-6, 2025, Madison Concourse Hotel, Madison, Wisconsin, 01/10/25 While teaching core courses for the past 30 years, I have also sustained a career as a music, film, and TV critic. So I have long been preoccupied with the fuzzy, shifting, occasionally meaningless distinction between elite and popular culture. (I much prefer the terms “elite” and “popular,” which connote audience size, to the oft-used “high” and “low,” which mistakenly connote artistic merit.) And no classic author has preoccupied me more than Shakespeare, because even the British, who make some of the best film and TV on Earth, have never managed to do even his best-loved plays full justice on the screen. Until now. The exception, superior to every precedent I can name, is The Hollow Crown, BBC2’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s English history plays. The first season, which debuted in 2012, leads off with what is sometimes called the “Henriad” tetralogy: Richard II, Henry IV (Parts 1 and 2), and Henry V. The second, which debuted in 2016, adds the Wars of the Roses sequence: Henry VI (Parts 1, 2, and 3), and Richard III. My paper will have three parts. First will be an appreciation of the multifaceted artistry involved in the production of The Hollow Crown, which leaves all but a few previous efforts in the dust. Second will be a reflection on the political wisdom contained in these plays, which despite its focus on monarchy is strikingly applicable to our increasingly fragile democracy. And third will be some suggestions, based on my own and others’ experience, about how best to use The Hollow Crown in the classroom—not as a substitute for reading one or more of the plays, but as a supplement able to bring to life both the power of Shakespeare’s poetry and the poetry of his reflections on power. |
| Behling, | Evelyn | University of Notre Dame | evelynmbehling@gmail.com | 7b | Aristotle, Populism, and Defining the Political Need for Expertise | This paper analyzes contemporary populism and anti-populism using Aristotle’s account in the Politics of the causes of stasis, or intra-regime conflict. Whether in the form of anti-EU demonstrations, Trump rallies, or farmer or trucker protests in places as differing as Poland, Canada, and India, contemporary populisms have in common a distrust of and backlash against “elites” and “experts” who are considered by populists to wield political power in insufficiently representative ways. Conversely, critics of populism warn of “democratic backsliding” and distrust populist aims, worrying that populists undercut societally necessary forms of expertise. At contest are the meanings of democracy and representation, or what it means for the many to be involved in politics, and conversely, the role of experts in politics, who are few. In Politics Book Five, Aristotle argues that the most just and stable regimes must balance the rule of the many and the few, integrating both “arithmetic” and “proportional” equality. Yet, akin to the dynamics between contemporary populists and their challengers, integrating these multiple kinds of equality is a fraught endeavor. I argue that Aristotle supports roles for expertise in governance but warns against using inequality in one area to justify broader unqualified inequality, as this leads to democratic discontent. Such a misapprehension promotes in Aristotle’s oligarchs a “grasping for more” of both honor and wealth which in turn promotes just anger in the many democrats. This process of oligarchic overextension is characterized by Aristotle as possibly the greatest spring of intra-regime conflict. At the same time, Aristotle would warn the many to not forget the need for the few for any political order to succeed, encouraging them to welcome the expertise of the few in promoting a just regime. Thus, Aristotle poses challenges both to today’s populists and anti-populists. |
| Bell, | Laura | Mercer University | Bell_lp@mercer.edu | |||
| Beneker, | Jeff | University of Wisconsin-Madison | jbeneker@wisc.edu | 1a | ||
| Bevacqua, | Jack | University of Notre Name | jbevacqu@nd.edu | 5a | Alexis de Tocqueville on the Crisis of Modern Love and Friendship | This paper offers a new reading of Alexis de Tocqueville’s account of the moral and psychological changes produced by equality in his Introduction to Democracy in America. Specifically, it focuses on his view of the transformations wrought in society and, most importantly, within the self. My argument is that the heart of these transformations is a reorientation of self-consciousness, which Tocqueville argues threatens civic friendship and love, and which he reveals public leaders must address. Using a close reading approach, my paper identifies the major factors that Tocqueville indicates gave rise to these changes, most of which scholars have overlooked in Tocqueville’s account. These include the shift from unchangingness and “rest” to change and “motion;” from great social distance between individuals and classes to diminished social distance; from homogenous to heterogenous social relations; and from a bounded imagination and restrained desires to an expanded imagination and unrestrained desires. The primary result, for Tocqueville, is the loss of devotion and rise of self-interest—which threatens lovelessness, friendship-lessness, and smallness of soul. In turn, I argue that Tocqueville’s Introduction reveals one of his deepest yet most overlooked goals in writing Democracy in America: addressing this “crisis of modern love and friendship,” including through politics. In so doing, I offer a new interpretation of Tocqueville’s thought, which I claim he intended to communicate not only to political scientists but also to democratic statesmen and other public leaders. The heart of his message is the need to confront the crisis of modern love and friendship within the context of the psychological changes produced by equality. In other words, Tocqueville is clear: there is no “going back;” rather, ennobling souls and strengthening love and friendship in democracy demands servicing democratic man’s distinctive psychology—one shaped by equality. |
| Beverage, | Cana | University of Dallas | cbeverage_adj@udallas.edu | 6g | “And Glaucon Laughed” (And So Did We): Pedagogical Laughter in Plato’s Republic | Despite its apparent dismissal of the comedic (i.e., comic poetry), Plato’s Republic contains both its own humorous moments and insights into the nature and benefits of laughter. By examining these somewhat peripheral moments of the dialogue, this paper investigates one such benefit of laughter: its power to educate. It concludes that, in the right context, laughter (particularly derisive laughter) has the power to educate insofar as it prompts the educated to consider their own epistemic position in relation to whatever they are tempted to laugh at (whether or not actual laughing occurs), thereby initiating the definitive ‘turning of the whole soul’ that lies at the center of Platonic education. |
| Black, | Jay | Mercer University | black_je@mercer.edu | 4g | Wit and Satire in Lin Yutang’s My Country and My People | Lin Yutang was a prolific writer of a wide variety of works in Chinese and English. He also founded several Chinese magazines specializing in social satire and Western-style journalism. In 1935, Lin finished and published the first of his many English-language books, My Country and My People. It was widely translated and for years was regarded as a standard the primary international text on China. He covers a variety of subjects such as the Chinese mind and character, religions and science, village systems of government, politics, and literacy, but he does so with a constant sense of satire and wit. The book, of course, is not about the China of Xi Jinping but of the somewhat lesser-known Lin Sen. It describes a China of almost 100 years ago, a China which was oppressed, conquered, and in a state of political and economic disintegration, yet many of his observations are parallel to the modern era. My Country and My People is a fearless, brilliant page turner for anyone who is interested in how China acts on the world stage today. |
| Bortz, | Sean | Concordia University Irvine | sean.bortz@cui.edu | 7e | Cardinal Thomas Wolsey and His Critics: Leadership in Henry VIII’s England | In this paper, I will examine Rede Me and Be Not Wrothe, a sixteenth-century polemical text written by William Roy and Jerome Barlow, two Protestant critics of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. As Lord Chancellor of England from 1515-1529, Wolsey was one of Henry VIII’s most important advisers and a staunch defender of the church against Protestantism. Primarily a dialogue, Roy and Barlow present a scathing critique of Wolsey and other ecclesiastical leaders as the Reformation began to take shape in England prior to the king’s official break from Rome. I will argue that it is a good core text not only because it is accessible to students and includes fascinating examples of polemic and satire, but in a larger sense it sheds light on the religious conflict in Reformation England during Henry VIII’s reign and includes important themes such as truth versus error, freedom versus tyranny, and the issue of virtue as it relates to leadership. (N.B. : this paper could be part of a panel with Prof. John Norton from Concordia University Irvine). |
| Boyle | Brendan | St. John’s College, Annapolis | brendan.boyle@sjc.edu | 3a | ||
| Brash, | Ruth | Tommy G. Thompson Center on Public Leadership | rbrash@wisc.edu | |||
| Bryant, | Veronica Mayer | American Council for Trustees and Alumni | vbryant@goacta.org | 3a | ||
| Breyer, | Daniel | Illinois State University | dbreyer@ilstu.edu | 4g | Cross Cultural Philosophy as a Great Converstaion | In this paper, I’ll explore the nature of cross-cultural philosophy, contrasting it with superficially similar approaches to doing philosophy (like comparative philosophy, intellectual history, and world philosophy) and making the case that we should view cross-cultural philosophy as a great conversation. To make that case, I’ll also explore a few different ways of thinking about what philosophical conversations are, what might make them great, and how this helps us think about and expand our notion of a “core text.” I’ll offer an approach that finds its footing in the early Buddhist notion of “right speech.” |
| Burkett, | Christopher | Ashland University | cburket1@ashland.edu | 6d | The Problem of Representation in Madison’s Debates at the Federal Convention | Among the many important contributions of James Madison is his Report on the Debates of the Federal Convention, commonly referred to as “Madison’s Notes.” But these are not notes in the sense of minutes taken, jottings scribbled, or thoughts randomly recorded. Instead Madison provides a thoughtfully written narrative account of a political dialogue that takes place among founders of a federal republic. The volume and density of the account can at times be confusing to readers. By considering the debates in four key stages – how to create republican representation, how to build consensus by compromise, how to provide government with adequate powers, and how to safeguard liberty through proper institutional means – Madison’s account becomes much more accessible, allowing readers to discern the successes and challenges of framing a political constitution in a democratic manner. This paper will mostly address the initial difficulties of the Convention in working toward agreement on the meaning of republican representation. Through a careful reading of the text, focusing on important moments in the debates, readers can discern the different opinions of delegates on what representation should be like under the Constitution – opinions that were influenced by a variety of understandings and personal motives on the part of influential figures at the Convention. For example, delegates debated whether representation on the national level should imitate traditional understandings of republicanism in the particular states, or under the Articles of Confederation, or whether delegates should be free to introduce new and improved plans for representation. Through a careful reading of this challenging text, readers can see why the question of representation was so important, and how delegates were able to arrive at a kind of consensus through compromise on this question. |
| Carico, | Andrew | John Adams Academy | andrew.carico@johnadamsacademy.org | 4f | American Patriotism: A Contested Virtue | This paper addresses Alasdair MacIntyre’s essay, “Is Patriotism a Virtue?” The heart of his essay provides a contrast between what MacIntyre calls “liberal morality” and “patriotic morality.” Liberal morality understands patriotism as a vice since the liberal moralist believes there are rational standards of judgement independent of any country. The rational individual is thus abstracted from a particular place and freely proffers criticism of any regime. The patriotic moralist identifies patriotism as a virtue based on membership of a particular community where morality is cultivated, and certain fundamental structures of that community’s life are exempt from criticism—specifically what MacIntyre calls a nation’s “project,” meaning its shared history and moral commitments. MacIntyre set out, as he states explicitly, to clarify the differences about patriotism but not settle the debate over which form of patriotism is best. His essay engenders the important questions in the American context of (1) what American patriotism is and (2) whether it is, indeed, a virtue. This paper will assess MacIntyre’s thesis and compare it to the American Founders’ different conception of liberalism: a natural-rights republicanism (to use their idiom). For the American Founders, it was the “experiment” in self-government (not a “project”) that required every generation to cultivate the virtues—and learn the constitutional principles—necessary for a free people to maintain their freedom. Such a contrast helps provide a foundation for Americans to understand patriotic citizenship and to develop a proper championing of America’s principles. Finally, this paper provides a contribution to the conference theme of “Core Texts and Public Leadership” by examining a topic (patriotism) that bridges both theory and practice. MacIntyre’s essay provides a classic treatment on the topic of patriotism and one worthy of further analysis, providing lessons for both scholars and practitioners today. |
| Carl, | David | St. John’s College | dcarl@sjc.edu | 5f | The Politics of Visual Literacy: Teaching Visual Arts in a Liberal Arts Context | No one can deny we live in world increasingly dominated by visual images—from the popularity of cinema and TV to the computer-cameras we all carry in our pockets (yet insist on calling phones) to the image-obsessed world of the internet and social media. Yet outside of certain art, art history, and media classes, the visual image is rarely treated as an object of critical study in a liberal arts context. Liberal education rightly focuses on the study of great books; yet courses which teach these books, essays, stories, and poems exclusively do little to prepare their students for how to respond thoughtfully, critically, and with intelligent awareness to the images which we both create and consume with increasingly fervor. I will discuss some of the challenges and advantages to expanding our understanding of liberal education to include the study of visual art as a way of preparing students for a more active, thoughtful, and critical role in those social, cultural, and political interactions which are increasingly shaped and determined not by the word but by the image. |
| Carty, | Jarrett | Concordia University | jarrett.carty@gmail.com | 1d | Pascal’s Pensées, the Jews, and the Bible | While Blaise Pascal’s Pensées has long been recognized as a “great book,” this is not so much due to its Christian apologetics than to its philosophic merits. Yet an enormous portion of the text is dedicated to Pascal’s theology and scriptural interpretation, which is often neglected in scholarship. But there are major interpretive problems within that neglected portion. This paper introduces one such problem: the bewildering treatment of the Jews. Between its repeated supersessionsism, its use of tropes such as “carnal Jews” and yet its puzzling praise of “true Jews,” the Pensées verges on incoherence. This paper offers a possible reconciliation of these contradictions in Pascal’s biblical hermeneutic, which asserts that the Bible, in its contradictions, interprets itself. |
| Charney Colmo, | Ann | Dominican University, River Forest, IL | charneca@dom.edu | 7g | Prudence in Aristotle’s Politics | In Aristotle’s works, prudence (phronesis) has various meanings and uses. This paper will explore the use of “prudence” in Aristotle’s Politics, discussing its meanings there, with some references to its use in others of his works. |
| Chiariello, | Michael | St. Bonaventure University | mchiarie@sbu.edu | In defense of “a most wretched idiot”: reflections on Glaucon’s tale of the Ring of Gyges. | In Plato’s Republic, Glaucon relates the story of Gyges who discovered a magical ring that gave him the power of invisibility. Glaucon asserts that one possessing such a ring, even or especially, a person of virtue, would use its power to achieve their ends unjustly. This he argues illustrates that virtue is merely a convention valued for its extrinsic benefits, such as a good reputation, or, otherwise, the avoidance of punishment. It is not something that is intrinsically valuable, and only “a most wretched idiot”would believe otherwise.(Plato,Republic Book 11, Jowett,trans.) But the presuppositions of this question-begging thought experiment are less about virtue than about individual rationality. This interpretation invites comparison to other classic accounts of rationality such as in Hobbes’ “state of nature” and Rawls’ “original position.” As we contemplate the wisdom of immunities, pardons, and raise questions of accountability in matters of public leadership, I argue, reflection on Gyges’s ring assumes a new relevance. | |
| Cleveland, | Thomas | Jack Miller Center | tcleveland@gojmc.org | 6a | ||
| Colman, | John | Ave Maria University | john.colman@avemaria.edu | 6h | Montaigne and Plutarch on Socrates’s Daemon | Despite celebrating the life of Socrates throughout his Essays Michel de Montaigne ends his final essay with a parting criticism. Montaigne notes that Socrates’s “ecstasies and possession by his daemon” is one of those “transcendental humors” that most frighten him. In an earlier essay Montaigne had remarked that Plutarch’s dialogue ‘On Socrates’s Daemon’ shows how when philosophy is “tired and worn out by examining all things to their utmost” it tends to merge with the “mysteries of poetry” and fall into a kind of “childishness.” Plutarch’s dialogue is in fact two dialogues carried on simultaneously. One dealing with its titular subject, the other a conversation between the conspirators attempting to free Thebes from Spartan domination. Connecting the two is an unspoken question regarding philosophy; does Socrates’s daemon point to a kinship between philosophy and the art of divination? Plutarch’s essay, together with Montaigne’s remarks on Socrates’s daemon, raises two further questions. First, does Socrates’s daemon render questionable the notion that Socrates brought philosophy down from the heavens and into the city? Secondly, what does Socrates’s daemon reveal about the limits of philosophy especially with regards to its ability to direct human affairs? |
| Conti-Easton, | Cristiana | Austin Community College | cristiana.conti-easton@austincc.edu | 2c | Truthful Speech and Leadership: Lessons from Machiavelli and the Book of Jeremiah | Can we find an overlap between Machiavelli and Jeremiah? Could Jeremiah’s hardcore commitment to truth-telling actually fit into Machiavelli’s political framework? Or does Machiavelli’s prince need a Jeremiah to keep the system honest? Some may contend that Jeremiah’s admonitions if recognized, may have saved the Kingdom of Judah (Israel) in 586 BCE—truth, in this instance, serves as a strategy. Others might argue that Machiavelli would dismiss Jeremiah, seeing him as a failure for his inability to adapt to the political circumstances of his time. So, what’s the takeaway for leadership today? Is truth-telling a luxury to people of faith, a tool for the powerless to fight back, or something else? How do we teach these sensitive subjects to our students in the classroom today? What is the best way to discuss with our students the tension between the need to steadfastly uphold the ethical standard of honesty in politics, while simultaneously keeping our gaze fixed on the horizon of a reality that presents politics as inherently murky and dishonest? This paper explores political theory and ethical leadership by bringing together two unlikely voices: Machiavelli’s The Prince and the book of Jeremiah. |
| Corry, | Patrick | Villanova University | patrickcorry@gmail.com | 5e | “Let There Be One”: On Many Readings of Homer’s Appearance in Metaphysics Lambda | The sole quotation of Homer in Metaphysics Lambda is that book’s last word: “it is not good to have many kings: let there be one lord.” Here Aristotle claims for the first time that the first principle on which heaven and earth depend is unique. The matter was very much in question: earlier in Lambda Aristotle counted dozens of pure intelligences moving the heavens. But why the appeal to the poet? This question imposes itself because Aristotle never attempts to demonstrate his final claim. This fact might imply that he is not as confident in the conclusion as its triumphal ring suggests. In this paper I present two current readings of this passage, and propose a third. First, the Deflationary reading: Aristotle simply quotes the Iliad for straightforward rhetorical effect at an intense moment. For elsewhere Aristotle can be observed to quote Homer without much care, making obvious misattributions. Second, the Subversive reading, supported by a committed minority: here as elsewhere, Aristotle chooses verses for which context qualifies prima facie meaning. For example, this line in Iliad II is delivered (1) by deceitful Odysseus (2) to uncomprehending commoners (3) to prop up an inadequate leader, Agamemnon. Aristotle signals to the astute that he plays a similar role here. Third, I propose the Internecine Polemic reading: Aristotle’s invocation addresses not the readers, but the Platonists of his time who make numbers first principles. And that critique is repeatedly connected to Aristotle’s affirmation of the good as final cause. Homer’s words are indeed chosen carefully. Odysseus begins: “not good [ouk agathon].” I conclude by suggesting a source of underdeterminacy in this debate: Aristotle’s own reading of Homer. While Aristotle’s Homeric Problems is lost, fragments find the philosopher vindicating Agamemnon when he might seem to us to be at his worst. |
| Craig, | Tobin | Michigan State University | craigt@msu.edu | 4e | The Classical Case Against a Technological Science: Notes on Seneca’s Letter 90 | Seneca’s Letter 90 takes the form of a sustained response to an argument, attributed to Posidonius, that Philosophy importantly contributed to the development of the arts (technai), and therewith the melioration of the human condition. Seneca denies both claims, arguing that the relationship between philosophy and the ‘useful arts’ is altogether different than what Posidonius proposed. The present paper is an effort to recover the reasoning informing Seneca’s response, and thus his understanding of philosophy on the one hand, and technai, on the other. Throughout, the intention is to explore how familiar the ancients were with the possibility of an argument legitimating natural philosophy by means of the promise of its practical/technological utility and on what basis they opted not to pursue it. |
| Crawford, | Laura | Samford University | lauraschrock1983@gmail.com | 3d | “Solving the Body Problem: The Role of Resistance in “Revelations of Divine Love” | In Stoic literature, the body presents as obstacle to the ideal—its passions derail the willed project of the rational mind. Drawing on Platonic dualism, this treatment of the body as problem continues in Medieval literature; St. Augustine, for example, argues that the body’s resistance to the divine will reflects its corruption by original sin. Augustine insists, however, on the ultimate redemption of the body—that the spiritual body raised from the dead will conform without resistance to the will of God. In this life, however, the problem remains: the body resists the will. In “Revelations of Divine Love,” Medieval mystic Julian of Norwich faces the problem of the body when she wills the goal specific to affective piety: mystical union with Christ. Julian seeks to suffer bodily in order to identify with the humanity of Christ and discovers—somewhat to her surprise—that her body is not on board with this project. At first, Julian identifies with its resistance, stating that she regretted her pursuit of suffering. Gradually, however, through a process of cognitive defusion, Julian distances her “self” from the body’s resistance and determines that its resistance to her will is what makes her suffering possible, and that her suffering is what makes possible her ideal of identification with Christ’s humanity. In so doing, Julian creatively undoes the problem of the body as posed by Platonic dualism, recasting the body’s resistance to the will as the means to the will’s end. |
| Cutler, | Ethan | Boston College | cutleret@bc.edu | 3d | Compassion False and True: Nietzsche on the Praxis of Nihilism | This paper treats Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of compassion, a line of his thought which seems to most of us especially perverse, not to say evil. In his “Götzendämmerung,” Nietzsche argues that compassion, or perhaps a spurious version of it, is “the praxis of nihilism.” And in the Preface to “Toward the Genealogy of Morality,” he puts forth “the morality of compassion” as his essential starting place for the reflections that led him to his famous critique of “morality” as such as well as his attempt to “overcome nihilism.” The paper itself, however, simply asks, ‘what, according to Nietzsche, is questionable about compassion?’ and ventures a few answers, which can be stated in brief as follows: compassion threatens to level essential differences; compassion undermines its own conditions and presuppositions; compassion (of a certain sort) presumes the worthlessness of suffering. The paper ends with a clarification to the effect that Nietzsche has great admiration for compassion of (what he claims to be) a higher sort. |
| Davidshofer, | Claudine | High Point University | cdavidsh@highpoint.edu | 7d | Kierkegaard’s Prefaces: Lessons in Effective Communication | Soren Kierkegaard’s Prefaces is a curious text in which he writes a series of eight standalone book prefaces—i.e., just the preface, with no accompanying book attached. While this book might seem like a mere frivolous literary experiment, it actually contains an important message about how the author should communicate with their reader—or, more broadly, how a leader should communicate with the public. In general, the book preface is where the author communicates most directly and personally with the reader. In the preface, the author might explain why they took up this book project, why its subject matter is worth the reader’s time, how the book fits within the broader scholarly, literary, societal context, etc. In short, the author uses the preface to prepare the reader to engage the work that follows and even to direct how the reader will receive this work. In the first part of this presentation, I will analyze what lessons Kierkegaard’s Prefaces conveys about how the author should communicate with their reader. In the second part of this presentation, I will apply these lessons of effective communication to public leadership. To be an effective leader, the leader must effectively communicate with their public. They must employ the strategies of the book preface: the leader must engage their public’s attention and even direct how the public will receive their message. As the author (a kind of leader) must communicate with their reader (a kind of public), so too must the leader communicate with their public. |
| Davis, | Jeffry | Wheaton College (IL) | jeffry.davis@wheaton.edu | 8c | Dreaming and Debating About the Purpose of Life in The Parliament of the Three Ages | The English alliterative poem The Parliament of the Three Ages (14th c CE), comprised of three sections, addresses a vital question: “How shall I live my brief life?” In the first part, the trespasser-narrator defies the established law and stalks the king’s deer, butchering it and hiding it; he then takes a nap, concealed in the woods. In the second part, the poacher dreams of an encounter with three men—Youth, Middle Age, and Old Age—who engage in a substantial “parliament” or debate about what pursuits matter most. And in the final part, the plunderer wakes up from his dream and anxiously heads back to town without his ill-gotten gain, saying a prayer contritely. As J. A. Burrow explains, “Medieval writers inherited from classical and patristic times several different schemes of the ages” (Essays 27). For example, the Greek Hesiod described five ages of life in his Works and Days (c 700 BCE); and the Roman Ovid presented an artistic innovation from that of his predecessor, with four ages portrayed in his Metamorphoses (c 5 CE). Yet, in this poem, triadic structures—progressions of three—reinforce an overall movement from utility, to mutability, to futility. As the title suggests, a “parliament” or rhetorical debate among “the ages” about what the best course of action is for living a fulfilled life, revealed through the plunderer’s dream story, affords the reader of the text a vicarious realization: whatever we accomplish in the short span of our existence will not be permanent, so we ought to behave with a tempered awareness of our own mortality, which should promote humility and right action. Interpreted by some as a moralistic sermonic work, the poem contains more complexity and weight in its presentation of successful social influencers than a quick reading might suggest. |
| Davis, | Lanta | Indiana Wesleyan University | anta.davis@indwes.edu | 4d | Putting music into classroom rhythms | Music can be so powerful, Ovid’s “Orpheus and Eurydice” tells us, that it makes all the Underworld stand still. After drawing upon Orpheus’s story as a foundation for understanding beauty, this presentation will primarily offer practical methods for incorporating music into classroom practices and assignments, so that students, too, can train their attention with the power of music and begin to notice the rhythms of beauty. |
| De Chiara-Quenzer, | Deborah | Boston College | deborah.dechiara-quenzer@bc.edu | 3h | Good Decision and Prudence in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics | In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle’s account of the nature and function of good decision and prudence overlap considerably. Both entail deliberation or reason, both are used by an ethically virtuous person to determine the ethical action – the means – to achieve the good end, and both move the person to do a virtuous action. This paper will discuss how are they different and why Aristotle prefers to define a full ethical virtue as a decisional state and not a prudential state. |
| Dean, | Matthew | Tulane University | mdean3@tulane.edu | 1c | Philology as Philosophy: Gadamer’s Critique of Heidegger | Heidegger’s philology is one of the most striking and one of the least accounted for aspects of his thought. Gadamer’s account of language reveals Heidegger to fundamentally share the assumption with modern philology that decline and oblivion of being renders the languages of classical antiquity unable to speak to us. It is only with this oblivion that Heidegger’s interpretations can appear as oracular as they do. His hermeneutic approach to Ancient Greek depends wholly on Ancient Greek’s inability to speak for itself, its remoteness and foreignness. Heidegger recognized and wished to overcome man’s degrading relationship to language in the age of technology, which came about partially because of a raging philological battle whose origins lie in the approach to classical languages of the 18th and 19th century. Heidegger initially turned his student Gadamer away from philosophy, so Gadamer pursued philology. The two figures developed different relationships to language. Heidegger committed to the death of classical languages (“God is death”) while Gadamer partook in their life. Heidegger is well known for his location in the history of philosophy, but the same cannot be said of his location in the history of philology. Gadamer’s discipline in philology opened to him an understanding of language proper to the exercise of man’s speaking capacity. Heidegger did not, as a fundamentally 19th century German philologist, treat classical languages as languages, as a practice. Gadamer did. I will inquire into Heidegger’s treatment of language in his later writings, and into the philological prejudices that make his project possible. I will present Gadamer’s corrections of Heidegger. I will then discuss language acquisition. |
| DeVries, | Annie | Samford University | adevries@samford.edu | 7b | A Core Texts for Nationalism? The Practice and Theory of Giuseppe Mazzini and Ernest Renan | Nationalism has profoundly shaped modern politics, so deeply informing how we see the world that the lines on a political map often feel natural to us. Yet, while other “—isms”—communism, socialism, even post-colonialism—have clear connections to core texts, nationalism lacks a straightforward means of being integrated into our curriculums. Given nationalism’s persistent significance for the last two centuries, core texts faculty should look for ways to thoughtfully and critically engage the question of nationalism. This paper examines two possible options for doing so. First, it looks at Giuseppe Mazzini’s “On Nationality” (1852). Mazzini fought ardently for Italian independence and was a contemporary of Karl Marx (both were exiles in roughly the same London neighborhood), and while Mazzini shared Marx’s radicalism, he rejected his geopolitical universalism. Second, it considers the more reflective analysis in French historian Ernest Renan’s “What is a Nation?” (1882). Considering these authors together is especially useful because it offers both a concrete example of nationalistic thinking as well as a more theoretical approach to the concept. These authors also help root a discussion of nationalism in nineteenth century Europe—when most of the political map was colored in by large, multi-ethnic empires rather than individual nation-states. Neither of these authors could have fully conceived of the twentieth century world map that emerged after World War I. While Marx became the household name, this paper asks whether we might actually live in Mazzini’s world. |
| DiBiasio, | Becky | Assumption University, Worcester, MA | bdibiasi@assumption.edu | 2f | Mary Shelley, Twenty-First Century Influencer | “Mary Shelley, Twenty-First Century Influencer” Mary Shelley did not set out to be a public figure, although she was a central figure in the social centers of both revolution and romanticism. Her 1818 novel, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, had a first print run of only 500 copies. Many people still think of Frankenstein as a pop culture reduction– the Mad Scientist, the Creature, the murdered Bride– but the novel is so much more, as I will explore in a passage from Volume Three. Mary Shelley wrote a marvelous story with a complex narrative structure full of imagination and invention in which archetypal characters act out a universal struggle that takes place in a particular cultural space and ideological moment. It has been in print continuously for more than 200 years and the characters are known to us through nearly every medium: more than 175 film or television versions; over 75 plays and radio programs; numerous other texts, and the focus of recent exhibitions at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Morgan Library, and the British Library. As Victor Frankenstein and his Daemon stalk each other across Europe and into the Arctic wastes, we learn their stories and those of their victims through journals and letters that are sent by a young Englishman, Robert Walton, to his sister Margaret in England. We never meet Margaret; we never know if the letters reach her, but they do reach us and the story the letters provide has had a profound impact on many aspects of modern life, especially in education reforms and social justice movements. Mary Shelley didn’t set out to influence people for the next three centuries, but we still heed her voice and her beliefs. |
| Diduch, | Paul | University of Colorado Boulder | paul.diduch@colorado.edu | 4e | “Techne and the Idea of Nature in Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Politics” | In the first book of Metaphysics, Aristotle identifies the human development of techne as a crucial step in our emerging awareness of causality. He then shows how the techne-based notions of cause led to various conceptual problems for the first generations of philosophic thinkers. In Politics 2.8, Aristotle uses Hippodamus to illustrate some of the practical consequences of this naive approach to natural cause. |
| Dinan, | Matthew | St. Thomas University | mdinan@stu.ca | 5d | Ravelstein’s Convalescences | The scant action of Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein takes place during the fatal illness of its title character. But after Ravelstein dies, we get a second convalescence narrative about the novel’s narrator, Chick, who has a scrape with death in the face of cigua toxin poisoning. This final section of the novel features meditations on the immortality of the soul juxtaposed against Chick’s rehabilitation by his neurologist. Can Chick’s defence of the persistence of “the pictures” withstand the implicit critique that the poison in his brain might be responsible for producing them? This section ofRavelstein recalls Plato’s Phaedo, where Socrates presents similar arguments in light of his own imminent death by poisoning. This paper examines Chick’s Socratic illness in light of the question: Can philosophy afford to simply reject “highly unrespectable facts” like the belief in the immortality of the soul, and inter alia, the claims of revealed religion? I argue that Bellow’s presentation of the question is much more nuanced than his narrator, Chick’s. |
| Dink, | Michael | St. John’s College, Annapolis | michael.dink@sjc.edu | 2c | Citizen Virtue in Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy | How Does Machiavelli understand the virtue or goodness of citizens of the Roman Republic? “…it is necessary to whoever disposes a republic and orders laws in it to presuppose that all men are bad, and that they always have to use the malignity of their spirits whenever they have a free opportunity for it.” (DL, 3.1) If this presupposition were true, then good behavior would only be the result of forces which constrain this human malignity. Machiavelli often speaks as if this is the case, so that good behavior from citizens, magistrates, or princes proceeds only from constraints or “shackles,” including the fear of punishment, human or divine. On the other hand, in the Discourses, Machiavelli often praises the virtue or goodness of the Roman people during the eras of the Roman Republic in which they were “uncorrupt.” Does such praise imply that these Romans have acquired some internal disposition to good behavior, rather than merely restraining their malignity out of fear? If so, what might this disposition include: love of fatherland, love of a free way of life, concern for the common good, even a belief that self-restraint in the service of these things is an excellence choice-worthy for its own sake? If so, how close does the Roman citizen virtue praised by Machiavelli come to Aristotelian virtue? |
| Dodd, | Susan | University of King’s College, Halifax | susan.dodd@ukings.ca | 2e | On the Tyranny of the Normal | By the time of Durkheim’s death in 1917, the opposition of the “normal” to the “pathological” ruled sociology and its application in public policy. This paper explores the role of “normality” in early 20th century public policy, especially in residential institutions that were intended to “break the cycles” of social “pathology” associated with racial, intellectual, class, and ethnic difference by targetting the transmission of cultures between generations. |
| Dolence, | David | Dominican University | ddolence@dom.edu | 5c | The (Science) Fiction of Leadership | Ender’s Game is an award-winning work of science fiction that frames fundamental questions of leadership throughout. From the opening question of whether leaders are born or made to the closing question of what happens to leaders when their time is up, Ender is a poetic, practical, and philosophic exploration of leadership. Centrally he sits between his sister Val who is the model of the vita contemplativa and persuasion and his brother Perer who is the model of the vita activa and force. As a long-standing book on the U.S. Marine Corps professional reading list, Ender’s Game is proof that the poet’s have much to offer a society in search of leaders. |
| Dolgoy, | Erin | Rhodes College | dolgoye@rhodes.edu | 3b, 4b | The Good Life in The Good Place: Socrates on the role of the philosopher | What is the role of a philosopher? Does knowledge of philosophy and philosophical questions lead to moral goodness? This paper examines different interpretations of philosophy, understood as the love of wisdom, and contrasts these with the character and actions of those who engage in philosophical study. Focusing on Plato’s Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, and Republic, the paper applies the discussions of philosophy, Socrates, and the sophists to the character of Chidi Anagonye in The Good Place. As a philosophy professor, Chidi possesses an extensive understanding of philosophical texts and ethical dilemmas. However, he frequently struggles to apply his philosophical knowledge to make ethical decisions in his own life. His expertise does not seem to translate into virtuous action or a fulfilling life. As the character evolves over the course of the series, Chidi becomes an effective leader as he learns to forego ethical perfection. his journey illuminates the potential tensions between those who labor in philosophy and those who seek to live a good life, guided by the love of wisdom. |
| Dougherty, | Janet | St. John’s College Annapolis, MD | janet.dougherty@sjc.edu | 6f | How to Hunt for Friends | Crito’s son Critobolus wishes to find friends, and Socrates offers to help. But first, Socrates says, he must try to become good. Underlying their conversation is a sort of erotic competition: while Critobolus wishes “to kiss those who are beautiful” and “tenderly kiss those who are good,” Socrates “longing for others, sets out “to be longed for in return.” He will serve as a go-between for Critobolus, but he will praise him only with true praise. Socrates’s hopes for Critobolus developing the virtues befitting a friend are supported by little else than Critobolus’ admission that he would be ashamed to contradict Socrates when he asserts that learning and practice serve the development of virtue, and that the best way to be thought to be good is to be so in truth. For his part, Critobolus is more attracted by beautiful bodies, and he is confident in his own beauty. Yet he seems to appreciate Socrates’ s attention, too. The problem that Critobolus sees only dimly if at all is the lack of a correlation between beautiful (kalos) bodies and good souls. Critobolus hopes to learn how to track down friends who have both. He is not alone in thinking that the two qualities should go together. A gentleman (kalos k’agathos) must be both noble (kalos) and good (agathos). But what does it mean for a gentleman to be kalos? And what does Socrates long for in his friends? Is it enough for his friends and himself to long for the same things? How much can one know the things that are longed for and not, or not yet, attained? Does it matter whether they are even attainable? In general, Xenophon’s recollections of Socrates represent him addressing concerns of ordinary life which point to problems only the wise can solve. |
| Dow, | Melissa | University of West Florida | mdow@uwf.edu | 7h | Educating for Hospitality: Robert Capon’s The Supper of the Lamb | Robert Capon’s The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection offers a vision for the post-college life of a liberal arts student. Capon’s own genial familiarity with the classics is clear throughout; he demonstrates it in, for example, his retelling of Grushenka’s story of the old woman and the onion from The Brothers Karamazov. The book is shaped by a recipe: Leg of Lamb for Eight People, Four Times. In other words, from the very beginning the book is about generously sharing, welcoming, and inviting others to participate in the goodness on offer. In this he models not simply a pleasant approach to material life, but an approach to the life of the mind which is the outworking of a liberal arts education. Books are meant to be opened and shared just as much as food is; conversation is cultivated over texts as well as over the table. Capon does not so much build an argument for this life as much as he amasses an example, figuring in the process a modern outworking of the principle of hospitality which undergirds all study of core texts in the liberal arts tradition. |
| Duff, | Alex | University of Texas, Austin | alexander.duff@austin.utexas.edu | 6a | ||
| Dugginapeddi, | Avi | Stanford University | akumar98@stanford.edu | 5a | Captain Delano in Benito Cereno: American Hero or American Idiot? | Melville’s Benito Cereno describes, among other things, a doe-eyed, high-minded American’s encounter with the sins and absurdities of the Old World. By the end, Captain Delano arguably retains his sense of order and justice, while the titular hero—despite being saved from peril—remains a lost and broken man. Is it then a tale of the indomitable American spirit, or one of irredeemable childishness? The answer may lie in a close reading of Delano’s leadership. Within the first few paragraphs, Melville describes the stark contrast between St. Maria’s gray, desolate, and foreboding coastline and Delano’s sunny disposition and steadfast belief in custom. Despite Melville pushing Delano deeper and deeper into a Hobbesian state of nature—first by thrusting him into a deserted corner of South America, and then into a lawless ship where up is down—Delano largely retains his sharpness of his inductive powers, his command over his own crewmembers, and perhaps most importantly, his benevolent heart. There is something deeply American about this trio of virtues. The elephant in the room, of course, is that Delano is dead wrong. For all the elaborate accounts of how Delano weaves together his myriad observations in a narrative approaching Euclidean certainty, he simply did not realize till late in the story that Babo and his compatriots are in charge. Delano’s refusal (or failure) to recognize “malign evil in man”—something Melville warns us about in the first page—may be the proximate cause of his fatal error. Perhaps the greatest testament to Delano’s leadership is his third-act heroics: by capturing Babo and making him stand trial, he return order to the seas. But in doing so, is he resetting the world to a clean slate of Pax Americana, or is he merely sweeping the evils of the Old World under the rug? This paper asks whether his leadership is a model to be emulated in public life. |
| Duplessie, | Derek | Assumption University | dn.duplessie@assumption.edu | 5d | Philosophical Palliatives in Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy | In his Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius personifies philosophy as a goddess-healer. Philosophy is thus presented as a pharmakon uniquely suited to assuage the sting of private misfortunes and of the global, theodicean questions those experiences churn up. My paper seeks to examine both Lady Philosopher’s “weaker” and “stronger” medications in order to understand how or whether philosophical insight can treat or inoculate us against life’s suffering. I will suggest that Lady Philosophy’s medications amount to euthanasia; she is only able to reconcile Boethius—and us—to misfortune and injustice by denying the goodness of goods most of us would insist are conditions of happiness, the supreme good. Lady Philosophy reconciles us to our circumstances, I argue, by implicitly denying the goodness of life. |
| Eastby, | John | Hampden-Sydney College | jeastby@hsc.edu | 7c | Algernon Sydney and the Republican Need for Politcal Virtue | Two of the most prominent British thinkers of the 17th Century, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, provided what is perhaps the fundamental conception for the American Revolution (a century later) when they laid out (Hobbes) and then developed (Locke) the modern understanding of natural right. But neither Hobbes’ or Locke’s conception of nature left much ground for polical virtue and, particularly statesmanship. The Dcclaration presents principles of right (paragraph 2) and a long list of particulars demostrating how those principles had been violated by the British colonial authorities. But the Declaration also recognizes that independence required action and virtue behind that action. This move does not seem to be particularly Lockean but to derive from alternate sources–and particularly Algernon Sidney. Jefferson made clear that Sidney was prominent (with Locke) in inspiring his revolutionary ambition and it is this connection, or rather the thought establishing this connection that I wish ot explore. Sidney argues that virtue is vital to any decent politics and it is this argument I wish to explore, Insofar as the Declaration declares a set of violated rights it may be said to be Lockean, But, insofar as it demands duties, which it does, it seems to me to depend more on Sydney. I will lay out in a page the argument that the Declaration outlines moral duties. Then I will investigate Sidney’s thought as a likely source for Mr. Jefferson. I do not see this paper uncovering new ground. Rather, the paper suggests that the classroom, and, ultimately the republic, can usefully draw from Sidney, not only a defense of rights, as we have from Locke, but an important argument for corresponding virtues. |
| Edelman, | Christopher | University of the Incarnate Word | edelman.cj@gmail.com | 6h | “Montaigne’s Mitigated Stoicism” | The general consensus among scholars seems to be that if Montaigne ever aspired to anything like the Stoic way of life, he did so early on in his career, and those aspirations were quickly supplanted by sympathies for a more skeptical and hedonistic philosophy. Here I offer a reading of the Book Three chapter, “Of husbanding your will”—where he defends his record as mayor of Bordeaux—in order to argue that Stoicism remained important to Montaigne throughout his life. I conclude with the suggestion that further research could lead to the conclusion that in the Essais, Montaigne develops a uniquely livable and loveable form of Neo-Stoicism. |
| Ferszt, | Elizabeth | Oglethorpe University | eferszt@oglethorpe.edu | 7d | Enkidu is Neanderthal? Reading Gilgamesh as Literary Anthropology | ABSTRACT: The Epic of Gilgamesh is considered to be the oldest recorded or written story in the world, circa 1600-1900 BCE. Part myth, part history, part religion, part poetry, composed by unknown authors or scribes, it was carved on stone and/or into clay tablets, using the Sumerian or Akkadian alphabet. Scholars believe there were twelve tablets or chapters, which over the many years, were smashed and shattered, causing their reassembly to be problematic and contested. But in general, the chapters tell the heroic yet hyperbolic story of Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, who reigned in that Mesopotamian city-state sometime between 3200 BCE and 2700 BCE. This location is in modern day Iraq, a country which now boasts the highest richest concentration of Neanderthal fossil skeletons anywhere in the world. And paleoanthropologists are still digging, still making finds. Besides the eponymous character of King Gilgamesh, there is also his sidekick and bosom-friend, Enkidu, whose appearance is described as oppositional to Gilgamesh, in terms of his body size and shape, his excessive hair-cover, his coloring, his strength and speed, his illiteracy. This paper will provide an analysis of the Enkidu character through an anthropological lens, arguing that this ancient literary text is also evidence of the merging of the Homo Neanderthal species into Homo Sapiens culture and genome. |
| Flanagan, | Borden | American University | gbflanagan@aol.com | 2c | Metaphysics from out of politics–in Machiavelli? | Having made virtue the antagonist and (where it exists in sufficient force) master of fortune Machiavelli pauses in chapter 25 of the Prince to raise a question the previous 24 treated as answered: can fortune be conquered? What follows is a strange equivocation: yes it can, no it can’t, yes it can (maybe, for some). The chapter announces an intention to defend free will and then denies or severely limits it; fortune wins because we cannot overcome our nature or habits. The chapter ends famously in the brutal analogy of assaulting Lady Fortuna. This seems to restore the possibility of mastering fortune, but only against Machiavelli’s own argument; is the violence of that image meant to distract us? First I show that attempts to explain this contradiction away fail. Then I look at Machiavelli’s key example of virtue undone by fortune: Borgia’s failure to suborn the College of Cardinals. When faced with his own mortality (during illness) Borgia flinches from the impiety of reducing the Church to his instrument. Virtue required that he beat down all resistance in himself to the usurping of God. I argue that this would have meant an assertion of existential autonomy, as with Moses’s act of founding. Borgia’s failure and Machiavelli’s doubts about human agency in 25 suggest that even Machiavelli’s project of radical agency did not understand itself as having done away with questions of first causes. Machiavelli’s strange pause-giving pause shows that even for him political questions lead to metaphysical questions. |
| Flores-Rabasa, | Mariana | Universidad Panamericana | mfloresr@up.edu.mx | 3h | The Philosopher-King: The Pursuit of Knowledge and Justice in Leadership | Leaders play a crucial role in various aspects of social life, including schools, neighborhoods, universities, management, and politics. They are distinguished by their ability to integrate diverse elements, skills, and capacities towards a shared vision that gives purpose to the team’s collective efforts. Consequently, leaders should possess social and psychological skills to achieve this objective. However, it is also worth considering whether leaders should embody certain virtues to accomplish their goals. Over 2,400 years ago, Plato provided intriguing insights into this question. An ideal community requires not only efficient leaders but also virtuous individuals who can govern with knowledge, justice, and guidance from the Form of the Good. In Book VII of “The Republic,” where Plato introduces the famous Allegory of the Cave, he reflects on the philosopher’s quest for knowledge. In his dialogue with Glaucon, Socrates argues that the ideal rulers of a city should be philosopher-kings, who have ascended to the highest level of understanding and are thus best equipped to govern wisely and justly. The philosopher’s role is to comprehend the Forms, particularly the Form of the Good, and to guide society based on this elevated acknowledgement. Beyond the controversial aspects regarding the city’s structure and the roles and responsibilities of each social class, in this paper I review the key points of Plato’s reflection on a leader’s duty to seek truth and share it with others to benefit the city or any social group where leadership is essential. |
| Ford, | Bryn | University of Houston | beford@uh.edu | 3e | The Art of the U-Turn: Backflipping Philosophically with Cicero (and Plato) | In recent years, U.S. politics has seen a wide variety of ‘backflips’: that is, public figures reversing their positions on an issue of significance. Such actions are usually taken as evidence of the backflippers’ hypocrisy and venality, which lead them to prioritize their careers at the price of philosophical consistency. But perhaps we can approach these U-turns in ways that go beyond reflexive condemnation. In this paper, I use a backflip performed by Marcus Tullius Cicero to reflect on the philosophical justifications for such actions. In 54 BC, Cicero reversed his position on the Caesarian politician Publius Vatinius. Cicero had attacked Vatinius during his tribunate in 59, further condemned him in the In Vatinium of 56, and campaigned against his election to the praetorship for 55. Observers were therefore shocked when, the following year, Cicero agreed to a request from Pompey to defend Vatinius in a bribery trial. In Letter 1.9, Cicero defends this apparently spectacular backflip. The letter makes a few references to Plato, and recent scholarship has therefore attempted to read it as a developed piece of Platonic philosophy. In my view, though, the letter’s Platonism is overstated. Plato instructs the philosopher-politician to act in accordance with fixed philosophical principles, and withdraw from politics if he cannot; in contrast, Cicero actively defends his lack of constantia, and denies that this is a virtue for a practicing politician. I will argue that Cicero in fact tries to dispense with the Platonic ideal of rigorous consistency and advances a variety of prudential justifications for doing so, like personal duties, realistic assessment of the political circumstances, and the desire to avoid conflicts that are damaging to the state. Perhaps, I will suggest, Cicero’s self-defense can help us interpret the prudential judgements of our own backflipping public leaders. |
| Frazier, | Simon | Independent | sf1@posteo.de | 7b | Socrates via Spengler: Toward Philosophic Life and Education in 2025 America | Through the Enlightenment, and particularly in the United States, the mortal dangers to philosophic life and education posed by political regimes have – for now – been largely eliminated. Yet, as Bloom predicted in his Closing, philosophic education has continued to diminish. Through Spengler’s remarkable works, I endeavor understand the causes of this diminishment, and to show that these contemporary obstacles to philosophic life and education can be resolved through the comprehension and application of his technics, particularly the economic. |
| Gan, | Quan | University of Texas, Austin | ucraqg@utexas.edu | 2e | Intellectual Tradition as the Locus of Human Nature: Kang Youwei and the Path for Collective Transformation | This paper examines three essays written by Kang Youwei a few years before 1898, when he led a shortlived reform movement to make the China a constitutional monarchy. To justify his radical agenda, Kang argued that China’s intellectual tradition always translated a political crisis into an opportunity of addressing the everchanging need of the society. Underneath his advocation of experimenting with new, even foreign, ideas, however, was an attempt to essentialize China’s intellectual tradition as a regime of exclusion anchored in the classics, which, for Kang, contained the unchangeable truth about human nature. In this framework, non-classical value or political systems were only examples to confirm the sacrality of the Chinese classics and, in other words, resources to strengthen traditional China’s regime of exclusion. |
| Gharibpour, | Aran | Austin Community College | aran.gharibpour@austincc.edu | 2e | Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil”: Towards New Articulations of Individuality | Despite its enigmatic style and baffling structure, “Beyond Good and Evil” offers a robust critique of systems of homogenization and regimes of exclusion in the history of Western thought. Nietzsche attempts to overcome dichotomic, pedantic moralization of the concept of value by revealing how conflicting but structurally similar ideologies make uncritical, dogmatic assumptions about human nature. Considering human beings as “a yet undetermined animal”, Nietzsche appropriates the Enlightenment understanding of human nature as self-determination without endorsing Kantian or Utilitarian moral convictions centered on this conception. Self-determination, for Nietzsche, is to claim the openness and plasticity of our species and refuse to accept false determinations proposed based on faulty conceptions of human nature. Once the dichotomic, moralizing treatment of the concept of value is substituted with a perspective-sensitive mapping of relative costs and benefits, even the dogmatic moral systems prove to have worth in preservation and expansion of humanity. Releasing ourselves from vacuous concepts of human nature, overcoming our tendency for moralization and dichotomic thinking, and engaging with the detritus of pedantic moral systems unleashed the unexhausted articulations of individuality. Nietzsche provokes us to think of educational leaders not as manufacturers of tamed, neat citizens that follow given paths of success but as cultivators of explorers who are courageous enough to look into the neglected values and uncharted physical, psychological, and emotional layers of themselves and their environment and create new articulations of individuality and excellence. |
| Gondelman, | Jonathan | Rogers State University | JGondelman@gojmc.org | 1f | Gulliver and the “Life of the Mind” | The Catherine Project is an endeavor, founded by St. John’s College tutor Zena Hitz, to create reading groups, predominantly (but not exclusively) online. It recruits any interested party willing to do the reading, of any age or educational background, and charges no tuition nor assigns any grades. Within the last year, the Project has also launched a “Core” sequence, meant to provide a guided curriculum and an introduction into liberal education for those who may have missed out on this education, or who have studied the Great Books in the past but would like to do so again. The sequence begins with a crash course in the liberal arts, entitled “The Life of the Mind,” where the readers study Parmenides, Sophocles, Lucretius, Galileo, and Jonathan Swift, among others. This paper examines what Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels reveals about the life of the mind and the program “Life of the Mind.” Of particular relevance to a panel on “Teaching Core Texts Where the Students Are,” it reflects on the extreme negative reaction that the readers had towards Gulliver in particular, the connection between that reaction and the book as a whole, and what it means to read a book naively with an interested but untutored audience. |
| Grabowski, | Francis | Rogers State University | fgrabowski@rsu.edu | 6b | Bound by Moira: The Tension Between Fate and Divine Will in Homer’s Iliad | In the introduction to his translation of the Iliad, Richmond Lattimore remarks that the gods possess “absolute power,” with Zeus, in particular, being “not subject to fate” and doing “as he pleases.” While it is undeniable that Homer’s gods wield far greater power than mortals, in what sense are they truly “not subject to fate”? As Lattimore notes, just before Sarpedon’s death, Hera acknowledges that Zeus could save his son if he wished, suggesting that Zeus has the capacity to override or alter predetermined outcomes. However, what Lattimore fails to mention is that Zeus ultimately does not intervene, which implies that he is, in some sense, still “subject to fate.” Our purpose will be to explore the relationship between fate and divine will, with specific attention to Homer’s understanding of fate (moira/aisa) not as a rigid sequence of events, but rather as a normative framework that governs both gods and men. |
| Gray, | Paul | Brock University | pgray2@brocku.ca | 2e | Marx and the Mastery of Nature | Marx refused ‘to write recipes for the cook shops of the future.’ His most elaborate account of communism, the comprehensiveness of which makes it a core text, is nonetheless brief and terse. In ‘The Critique of The Gotha Programme,’ Marx condemns the principle of distribution, ‘From each according to their abilities, to each according to their contribution.’ Since some are smarter or stronger, this principle “tacitly recognizes” unequal abilities as “natural privileges.” Furthermore, needs are unequal because some are married and have children. Marx affirms instead, ‘From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.’ Commentators criticize Marx’s example, the family, because it refers to chosen needs that do not parallel the natural inequalities in our abilities. Conversely, I argue that Marx regards these unequal needs as natural. There is a division of labour within the family that rests on natural inequalities, not only between parents and children, but also husbands and wives. Marx is not as much of a feminist as sympathetic commentators contend. Once the parallel between unequal needs and abilities is established, we can understand the principle underlying Marx’s overall critique. In the tacit recognition of the natural privileges of greater abilities and fewer needs, since the privileges are natural, they are based on chance, and since the recognition is tacit, it accepts nature as it is. Taken together, the natural is defined as the given. Therefore, in equal distributions that overcome natural inequalities, the underlying principle is freedom, defined as the refusal of the merely given. In other words, it is the mastery of nature. Marx takes the modern project begun by Machiavelli to one of its furthest reaches. Marx did not write recipes for cook shops, but he gave blueprints for the “dikes and dams” by which fortuna will be mastered. |
| Gross, | Benjamin Isaak | Jacksonville State University | bgross@jsu.edu | 3b | Animating the Presidency: Education through Comedy | |
| Guzman, | Brittany | University of Dallas | bmguzman@udallas.edu | 1c | Let’s Talk About It: Hesiod’s “Talk” in Book VII of the Nicomachean Ethics | In the Nicomachean Ethic’s discussion of pleasure, Aristotle quotes line 763 of Hesiod’s Works and Days, a poem that discusses the gods, virtue, labor, and advice regarding the practicalities of daily living. When Aristotle introduces Hesiod’s depiction of “Talk” or “Rumor,” he removes a majority of the quotation’s context and uses it to establish a certain understanding of pleasure as some kind of good. Aristotle recognizes that Hesiod correctly calls Talk a goddess, for Talk becomes a force of its own beyond the control of those who initially brought it into being, and it ought to be dealt with carefully, as one may negotiate with a god. At the same time, Aristotle is introducing his own voice into Talk as his arguments may gain traction as well and become part of the Talk that influences people. Aristotle cautions his reader to beware of Talk even as he joins it and makes use of its power. Thus, Aristotle’s allusion to Hesiod makes the reader consider the trustworthiness of general agreement and the power and danger of Talk’s influence, and in light of Hesiod, we may view Aristotle as entering and harnessing Talk to make listeners virtuous or curable. |
| Hadley, | Travis | Collin College | travhadley@gmail.com | 4e | “Technological and Moral Necessities in Thucydides’ “War of the Peloponnesians and Athenians” | Thucydides uses the term technē only 10 times in the History. He does, however, convey technological prowess in other ways, speaking of knowledge (episteme), intelligence (gnome), and alludes to general competence and prudence of both cities and men. What we would call “technological innovation” plays a prominent if subdued role from his “Archaeology” until the end of the war, establishing and forwarding a narrative of material progress. This favors Athens over Sparta. Yet Sparta’s own successes temper the degree to which technē can be the only variable in political flourishing. Technological progress necessarily affects the customs of the city, its moral compass, but Spartan success results from good laws (eunomia) and a stable regime. Evidence of a tension between morality and technology abounds: the seafaring Athenians were a different people than landholding Sparta; technē’s progress differs under cities whose customs promote or stifle innovation; the Peloponnesian War is brought on by imperial expansion leading to necessary technological one-upmanship for both Athenians and even Spartans. The former abandoned Old Athens to allow a New Athens to utilize its technological advantage, its navy, while for the latter, its old virtues and old practices were modified or abandoned by its most successful statesmen late in the war. This movement, more broadly, also entailed one from poetry to history, folk remedies to medicine, and aristocracy to democracy. This paper will consider whether one is able to draw any applicable lessons from Thucydides’ presentation of this tension to our contemporary debates on technology and politics. |
| Hadzi-Antich, Jr. | Ted | Austin Community College/The Great Questions Foundation | ted@tgqf.org | 1f | Beyound the Classroom: Community Seminars at Community Colleges | Community Seminars are gatherings that bring together students, faculty, staff, and community members throughout the academic year. Our goal is simple: to explore profound ideas and transformative texts through meaningful conversations. These seminars offer a unique space for intellectual growth and connection at community colleges. I’ll discuss the stucture of these gatherings and their success, focusing on one discussion of selections from the Book of Genesis and the Quran. |
| Hage, | Samuel | Tulane University | shage001@gmail.com | 5e | Beyound the Classroom: Community Seminars at Community Colleges | Community Seminars are gatherings that bring together students, faculty, staff, and community members throughout the academic year. Our goal is simple: to explore profound ideas and transformative texts through meaningful conversations. These seminars offer a unique space for intellectual growth and connection at community colleges. I’ll discuss the stucture of these gatherings and their success, focusing on one discussion of selections from the Book of Genesis and the Quran. |
| Hale, | Kimberly | Coastal Carolina University | khale1@coastal.edu | 3b | Bureaucracy and the Law in The Good Place: Machiavelli and Montaigne | A central theme in many core texts is the importance of judges, who have a duty to maintain order and stability. The impartial, consistent, and compassionate application of the law is an essential feature of any state. This paper will apply Niccolo Machiavelle’s and Michel de Montaigne’s discussions of justice, law, and judges to the Judge (Gen) introduced in season 4 of the television program The Good Place. Although the Judge in The Good Place only appears in the final six episodes of the series, she is essential to the philosophic and moral arc in the series. The Judge demonstrates the shortcomings of impartial leadership, and the value of remaining connected to the people under one’s rule. |
| Halper, | Mary Elizabeth | St. John’s College / Humanities at Hertog | mehalper@sjc.edu, maryelizabeth@hertogfoundation.org | 3e | On Not Giving One’s All: Rev. Farebrother’s Partial Ambition in Eliot’s Middlemarch | Ambition of many stripes may be found in the pages of George Eliot’s Middlemarch. High ambition, chastened ambition, misguided, nebulous, self-deceived, frustrated ambition — it is difficult to imagine a type of ambition not represented among the denizens of Middlemarch. Some, if not most, of the ambitions on display are for a kind of leadership, be it scholarly, political, or spiritual. But by my lights, the most effective leader in the novel is the Rev. Farebrother. This might seem a strange choice, as his ambitions are seemingly not very high and certainly not absolute. This paper considers whether the ground for Farebrother’s success lies just in his partial ambition. Is Farebrother so successful at leading the members of his unofficial flock because his true heart is with his pinned and labeled bugs? Does he give us a model of genuine care and commitment that is nevertheless not all-comsuming? |
| Harris, | Patrick | Rhodes College | harrisp@rhodes.edu | 1d | The Gospel According to Borges: Encountering the New Testament in the Secular Classroom | This paper highlights the pedagogical uses of paired readings and “contrapuntal” readings of contemporary literature with traditional core texts. In particular, it considers the short story “The Gospel According to Mark,” written in 1971 by Jorge Luis Borges, as a both a point of introduction to the New Testament for undergraduate students and a potent depiction of that encounter under the conditions of secular modernity, when, as Charles Taylor describes it, religious belief is “understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.” Borges’ protagonist Balthasar Espinosa is a cheerful young man with a freethinking outlook blended with remnants of Christian piety. His bizarre and ultimately tragic meeting with a family of atavistic peasants in the Argentine pampas, centered on their shared reading of the Gospel of Mark, underscores the strangeness of the Christian scriptures when unmoored from a comfortably post-Christian context. As such, Borges’ fiction serves as a spur to reflection for both students and scholars on how to read these texts as people who may find ourselves in the position of Balthasar: taking ancient texts for granted as part of the cultural background, and shocked by the ways their messages can still resonate, |
| Harrison, | Graham | University of Dallas | gharrison@udallas.edu | 3c | Nobility and Agricultural Responsibility in the works of Alexis de Tocqueville | Alexis de Tocqueville’s “The Old Regime and the Revolution” (ORR) and “Democracy in America” (DIA), together present a conception of nobility rooted in land ownership and governance. This paper draws from the DIA an early indication of Tocqueville’s critique of the French aristocracy of the 18th century in his treatment of the American Native, the American Negro, and the Southern American landowner. Tocqueville’s treatment turns on a central point: mores contrary to the regular and constant work of farming oppose the civilization of which agriculture is the backbone. The Natives, as hunter-gatherers, preclude themselves from civilization by refusing agricultural work. A similar disdain shows itself in the American South: the Southern landowner busies himself with duels and hunts while his slaves, their humanity stunted by mere labor without responsibility, work the fields without industry or efficiency. In all three groups their mores reflect a disdain for work which contrasts with the best parts of America wherein agricultural work is given its due. It is this same disdain for work which appears in ORR. Tocqueville recounts how, in the years prior to the revolution, the French nobles who formerly occupied estates in the country slowly sold off their responsibilities towards those who worked their estates. They retained their financial privileges and, naturally, their hunting rights, but all else passed into the bowels of an increasingly centralized and bureaucratic monarchy. Rather than mediating between the needs of the peasant farmer and the demands of the king, the noble sells off that responsibility to acquire those luxuries afforded by city life. Thus Tocqueville’s conception of true nobility, not one easily bought or distracted by luxury, requires owning land and care for those who work it. Without accepting his responsibilities towards agriculture and his farming community, a noble falls to mere idleness and luxury. |
| Hazony, | Hadar | University of Notre Dame | hhazony@nd.edu | 5a | Nietzsche on the Paradox of Education and Leadership | Since Plato wrote the Politea philosophers have been aware that there is some tension between education and leadership. Namely, leaders are usually uneducated, and the educated rarely want to be leaders. So the Greek philosopher writes “do not be surprised that those who have attained to this height [of truth] are not willing to occupy themselves with the affairs of men, but their souls ever feel the upward urge and the yearning for that sojourn above.”[1] Friedrich Nietzsche follows Plato in this assertion, maintaining in many of his works that the farther one progresses in the search for truth, the less concerned one is with the affairs of men. Indeed, Nietzsche goes as far as to assert that loneliness is fundamental to any proper pursuit of the truth, writing that “whoever proceeds on his own path meets nobody: this is the feature of one’s ‘own path.’ No one comes to help him in his task: he must face everything quite alone.”[2] How then can Nietzsche assert that it is primarily those men who prescribe and proscribe who attain the highest levels of knowledge, that, “the philosopher as we understand him” discovers new evaluations that other men live by and “bears the weight of the overall development of humanity.”[3] How does Nietzsche believe truth seekers can be brought down into leadership? Furthermore, is there, in Nietzsche’s view, a way to avoid leadership’s destruction of the truth seeker, or is it the case that leadership is always the path of destruction, as he writes “Also begann Zarathustra’s Untergang.”[4] And as Plato said of the denizens of the cave, that “if it were possible to lay hands on and to kill the man who tried to release them and lead them up, would they not kill him?’ “They certainly would.”[5] |
| Hernández-González, | Sandra | Universidad Panamericana | sandra.hernandez@up.edu.mx | 5c | The Elegance of the Hedgehog (2006), by Muriel Barbery | The Elegance of the Hedgehog (2006), by Muriel Barbery, addresses the contradictions of contemporary Western society through the eyes of Paloma, a 12-year-old girl. Paloma possesses remarkable intellectual acuity and refined emotional sensitivity, allowing her to interpret and express her worldview with wit and insight. One of the strengths of this novel lies in its ability to identify some of the most evident yet less explored contradictions of today’s society (in my opinion, reminiscent of Huxley’s style but with a more contemporary approach). At the same time, it subtly proposes humanism—not explicitly named but expressed through an unusual yet authentic friendship—as a possible solution to these conflicts. This work highlights the role of critical and sapiential thinking in creating meaningful human connections that give purpose to existence. This aspect is crucial in a society marked by a wave of devaluation of life, as evidenced by the rising suicide rates among young people. Nonetheless, the novel is not moralizing; it is profound and bold in exploring human nature while being hopeful and straightforward. The purpose of presenting this work is also to share an experience from an Ethics of Virtues course, where students read, reflected on, and discussed the text, arriving at surprising and positive conclusions about the value of humanism and authentic relationships. |
| Honeycutt, | Kevin | Mercer University | honeycutt_ks@mercer.edu | 3g | Lectio Presentation on Machiavelli’s The Prince | A Lectio is a special conference format which typically spends an entire day presenting on and discussing a single text. In this panel, we’ll do this for two hours on The Prince. This is one of the four presentations that will present on and discuss each portion of the text in turn. |
| Hope, | John | Huron University | jhope24@uwo.ca | 3f | Anna Karenina and the Ladder of Love | Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina gestures towards Plato’s Symposium both explicitly and obliquely. Levin and Stiva reference the dialog when discussing Stiva’s infidelities, and the characters’ own conversation, set during a wine-soaked lunch, echoes Plato’s setting. Scholars have read this scene as establishing the terms of the novel’s exploration of sexual morality; Donna Orwin, in particular, finds that “The Symposium in the Restaurant” raises questions of judgement and compassion central to the novel as a whole (Orwin 1993, 171-78). Less commonly recognized is the place of the Symposium in the novel’s interrogation of epistemology. I contend that Tolstoy engages with Plato’s work not only in his examination of sexual and Platonic love, but also in his portrayal of Levin’s agricultural reforms, Kitty’s attempts at self-improvement, Vronsky’s phase as a genre painter, and Koznyshev’s support for Russian military involvement in the Balkans. In Tolstoy’s novel, to ask what is good is to ask what we can and should know, and in pursuing these questions Tolstoy considers and ultimately rejects the epistemic values that Plato has Socrates promote. |
| Houser, | Sarah | Benedictine College | shouser@benedictine.edu | 8c | “Roland is fierce, Oliver is wise:” Dilemmas of Leadership in the Song of Roland | What, if anything, can the Song of Roland, perhaps the most famous chanson de geste, teach contemporary students about the virtues of leadership? The ostensible hero of the poem, Roland, is brave and loyal to his king, but in the end bring about his own death and that of twenty thousand of his men by refusing to call for aid until it is too late. Does Roland’s fate represent a condemnation of the sin of pride, or of the heroic code which he lives by, or does it merely illustrate the tragic consequences of living in a fallen world? How, on the other hand, are we to evaluate the leadership abilities of Charlemagne? Does the failure of his vassal Roland implicate his own leadership abilities? Is there a difference between the modern concept of leadership and the idea of rulership present within the social and political systems of the early Middle Ages? This paper will entertain these questions in order to evaluate the appropriateness of this text for teaching students about the virtues of leadership. |
| Howe, | Justin | Clemson University | howe8@g.clemson.edu | 7c | The Excellence of Water: On the Principle of Yielding in the Daode Jing and the Zhuangzi | Chapter 8 of the Daode Jing begins, “The highest good is like water. The excellence of water is to benefit all things and, without contention, to inhabit the (low) places that people despise. In this it is like the Dao.” Simple yet profound, these few lines neatly encompass the spirit of the Daoist teachings and succinctly express what I call the principle of yielding: stepping back to make room for the world. This principle appears again and again throughout the Daoist classics the Daode Jing and the Zhuangzi, offering an ethos at odds with modern Western notions of success and recognition on the one hand, and on the other, the kind of authenticity and self-actualization that make one ‘stand out from the crowd.’ The Daoist sage instead disappears into the clouds and the crowds, at one with both the natural world and the “masses of men” (Zhuangzi, Legge). Such a “perfect [person] does not seek to be heard of” (ibid.). All the more does their virtue become a beacon for others. What insights might we glean from the ethos of yielding at a time when heedless straining at progress and success has led us headlong into ecological and cultural crisis? |
| Hreško, | Ján | Pavol Jozef Šafárik University, | jan.hresko@protonmail.com | 4c | Reading the Iliad as a Crisis of Leadership | The Iliad is often regarded as an epic of heroism and mortality, but its narrative also serves as a profound exploration of leadership in crisis. This presentation examines how Homer portrays leadership conflicts and explores the search for authority amidst the war. The main theme of the Iliad is the anger of Achilles and its transformations. Agamemnon had abused his position of power in the Greek army, and by appropriating Briseis he sought to increase his prestige at the expense of Achilles. Achilles did not back down to him but demonstratively withdrew himself from battle. This analysis will focus on the pivotal episodes that highlight the rivalry, demands and difficulties of the main heroes of the Iliad: Agamemnon, Achilles, Odysseus, Hector and Priam. The paper will also draw parallels between the Iliad and contemporary leadership dilemmas. Whether in politics, education or other contexts, the challenges of leading amidst conflicting priorities remain strikingly relevant. People long for heroic leaders, but individuals often become heroes through the difficult life situations with which they are faced. This reading of the Iliad invites us to reconsider the nature of leadership in times of crisis, encouraging a deeper engagement with the timeless questions that Homer raises about authority, responsibility and the cost of human action. |
| Hyatt, | Noah | Baylor University | noah_hyatt1@baylor.edu | 1c | Praising Bad as if It Were Good: Plato’s Phaedrus and the Importance of Truth in the Art of Rhetoric | This essay explores the significance of truth in rhetoric through an analysis of Plato’s Phaedrus, focusing on Socrates’ critique of rhetoric as a tool for persuasion that can be easily corrupted when divorced from a grounding in moral and philosophical understanding. In the dialogue, Socrates warns against rhetoricians who, lacking the ability to discern good from bad, manipulate public opinion by promoting falsehoods. Using the metaphor of “praising a miserable donkey as if it were a horse,” Socrates emphasizes the dangers of rhetorical skill without ethical guidance, arguing that such rhetoric misleads audiences into accepting harmful or misguided actions as virtuous. The essay examines the implications of this critique for contemporary understandings of rhetoric, emphasizing the importance of truth as an ethical foundation for effective and just persuasion. Ultimately, it argues that rhetoric must be anchored in the pursuit of the good and true to avoid becoming a destructive force in public discourse. |
| Iedt | Jacab Ivan | University of Dallas | jieidt@udallas.edu | 3a | ||
| Istok, | Alex | Samford University | alexandria.istok@samford.edu | 3h | The Legal Setting of Plato’s Apology: Helping Students Discuss Truth and Justice | There is a persistent fascination with the person of Socrates. Famously, he did not leave any writings behind. We know about his ideas, his life, even what his body looked like, from intermediary sources. Plato’s depiction of Socrates – particularly his presentation of Socrates in his Apology – has become one of the most enduring images of the man and it has had a profound impact on both ancient and modern understandings of philosophy and martyrdom. But scholars have routinely pointed out that Plato provides us with a Socrates – his Socrates. Socrates is a philosopher, a father, a teacher, and a martyr who died for the very philosophy he practiced. But was he a martyr? A victim of injustice? Did he pursue truth? In this paper, I argue that highlighting the legal setting of Plato’s Apology during a discussion of the text with undergraduate students encourages focused conversations about who controls what counts as truth and as justice in a community and the real limits of legal systems. First, I outline the legal setting of Plato’s Apology and situate Plato’s text and his use of a fictional courtroom space alongside other writers around Athens in the 4th century BCE. Then, I argue that Plato uses the juridical setting of his Apology to persuade his readers to view and to remember Socrates as someone whose pursuit of truth made him a victim of injustice in the courtroom. Finally, I analyze two passages of Plato’s text and suggest that brief reminders to students about the legal setting of the text (and about the degree of control Plato himself had in this literary courtroom he created) makes space for students to have pointed considerations about the role of laws, juries, and legal systems in manifesting truth and justice within both ancient and modern communities. |
| Ivan Eidt | Jacob | Core Texts, the Trivium, and Foreign Language Pedagogy | ||||
| Jackson, | Bradley | ACTA | bjackson@goacta.org | 4a | Studying Foreign Languages Through Core Texts | “But how shall men meditate in that, which they cannot understand? How shall they understand that which is kept close in an unknowen tongue? as it is written, Except I know the power of the voyce, I shall be to him that speaketh, a Barbarian, and he that speaketh, shal be a Barbarian to me.” –Introduction to the 1611 King James Bible Most core text instructors would agree that core texts should ideally be read in their original language. But how can we get our students to do this, when there is already so much to cover in a semester? Whether in a language course or a literature/philosophy/science course, truly engaging Great Books in a language other than English adds a new layer of difficulty. How do students of foreign language courses learn core texts most effectively? How can core texts fit into a language program? And conversely, can we fit language learning into a core texts program? And if so, how? Do we bring on foreign language experts, or train current faculty? Because it is so difficult to teach a language at the level necessary to appreciate a great work in it, great works are rarely studied in depth until well over a year of language coursework. This is a long ramp, one that typically only advanced undergraduates or language majors will reach. But do we want our students to lose out on this closest of all readings? As Keats notes of Homer’s world: “Yet did I never breathe its pure serene / Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold.” Even more than reading a superb translation, learning the original language of a work unlocks the power of the text for the student. Not only do traditional core text programs greatly benefit from students’ reading a text in the original. In great works of their language, language-focused courses can have students enjoy and analyze outstanding diction, style, and cultural referents that are distinctive to a people and its language—yet do this while tackling questions universal to all humans. This panel will draw from the experiences and ideas of those who have tried this, and we hope to draw from the audience as well. |
| Jennings, | Lisa | Valparaiso University | lisa.jennings@valpo.edu | 1e | Voice and Public Leadership in and out of the Classroom | Connecting voice and leadership is a new focus in our first-year writing class at Valparaiso University, and classroom text discussions ultimately lead to student projects of public leadership. In the classroom, students encounter a variety of texts, including Chinua Achebe’s “Dead Men’s Path;” Paulo Freire’s “Banking Concept of Education” in Pedagogy of the Oppressed; our Chapel’s land acknowledgment; a historical document, “Treaty with the Potawatomi, 1832”; several essays on voice; and a guiding text on student leadership. Outside of the classroom, students work on fieldwork teams to research campus spaces and student organizations. As a final project, students deliver their own message to the public sphere, which requires students to understand their audience and the genre or medium that best conveys their chosen message. |
| Johnson, | Tommy | Woods Charter School | johnsontommy1250@gmail.com | 4g | Autonomy, reason, and the theatre: Engaging Antigone in an Economics and Personal Finance Course | This paper explores Sophocles’ Antigone as a core text in the teaching of classical economic thinking to students. As Economics and Personal Finance becomes more and more common in public US secondary schools and Economics for Nonmajors courses are offered in greater numbers at colleges and universities, it is worthwhile to consider the reading list that might comprise a ‘great books’ or liberal arts approach to economics. Specifically, understanding the mechanics of economic modeling requires a deep understanding of and empathy for the many different manifestations of ‘reasonable’ behavior in human society. By paying close attention to Antigone, Creon, and Ismene, I argue in this paper that Sophocles’ Antigone raises enduring question about what reasonable people owe themselves, their families, and the state. Antigone illustrates, to tragic ends, how humans reason endlessly with themselves and one another to remake the world in their image. But, more compellingly, Antigone illustrates how reason alone is not enough for people to make sense of the world and themselves. Creon, Antigone, and Ismene each demonstrate how reasonable people differ substantially in their nature. Paired with their inability to know their own fate, these differences offer an excellent starting point for appreciating the complicated task of studying economics. If one is trying to model rationality, one must never lose sight of the interplay of moral, legal, personal, and religious beliefs that motivate one to act. In the endeavor to understand human behavior in the aggregate, Antigone reminds students and teachers alike that we must always keep the question of what one owes others in mind. Deliberating on the different answers to this enduring question that the play’s characters offer not only animates a texts-based Economics classroom but keeps liberal arts alive. |
| Johnson, | Erica | University of Dallas | epjohnson@udallas.edu | 4c | Odysseus’ Embrace of Mortality and Mutability | Calypso tries to persuade Odysseus to remain with her and become immortal, attempting to convince him that, if he knew the sorrows in store for him, he would prefer immortality, and further arguing that she, as an immortal, is superior to Penelope. Yet, rather than being persuaded, Odysseus rejects immortality and embraces whatever unknown trials may befall him on his journey homewards. In this rejection of immortality, Odysseus embraces his mortal nature, precisely as mutable. Both this acceptance of unknown misfortunes, and his preference of prudent Penelope over Calypso, are an embrace of the greatness of mortal man precisely as mortal and mutable and a preference of mortality over unchanging immortality and the foreknowledge that accompanies it. |
| Jones, | Anthony | Baylor University | anthony_jones3@baylor.edu | 2h | Monarchical Moderation: How the Prince Subtly Leads the People to Liberty and the Common Good | This paper will examine monarchy as Montesquieu presents it in The Spirit of the Laws, paying particular attention to the nature of the relationship between the prince and the people. First, the characteristic features of monarchy will be explained, starting with its animating principle, honor. However, the risks posed by an excessive pursuit of honor threatens the common good and can be countered by the inherent and positive limitations of monarchy. These must be combined with prudent efforts to counteract the people’s lack of understanding and erroneous judgements about their own welfare. Next, the paper will briefly consider the spirit of monarchy in relation to that of republics, which sets the stage for an extended study of how the latter, moderation, can help offset monarchical dangers to the common good. The prince is the agent of this moderation, which he conveys by attentiveness to, concern for, and honesty and clemency toward his subjects. The latter are thereby inspired to imitate these qualities in their interactions with each other, even as they continue striving for honor. Montesquieu’s portrayal of monarchy itself serves as a model, like the prince for his subjects, of how moderation can be applied to a government such that its citizens are indirectly tutored in liberty and encouraged in their ambitions and solicitude for one another. |
| Kalas, | Taddy | Augustana College | taddykalas@augustana.edu | 7e | Agrippina in the Hallway: Crises of Leadership in Racine’s Britannicus | Racine famously said of the hesitating, conflicted Nero he portrayed in Britannicus that Nero at this point was “un monstre naissant”: a nascent monster, not yet the fully realized monster he was to become. And Racine’s most densely political play does read like a kind of “origin story” of one of history’s most famous villains: we see Nero walk up to the brink of serious crime, shrink back and walk away for a virtuous nanosecond, then return and plunge. As he takes the irrevocable step of murdering his half-brother, it appears that he loses his soul but consolidates his power. Or does he? The interpersonal dramas woven through Racine’s version of history problematize the question of “choice.” The most intense of these dramas plays out between Nero and his equally famous mother, Agrippina – who, stationed humiliatingly outside Nero’s bedroom door as the play opens, is clearly in freefall herself. Unlike other Racinian tragedies whose characters reject logic in favor of passion, everyone in Britannicus seems to calculate endlessly – and to make endless mistakes. This nuanced and troubling play poses questions about ethical choice and political efficacy that still resonate chillingly. |
| Kamber, | Richard | The College of New Jersey | rkamber@tcnj.edu | 5f | Tolstoy’s What is Art? as a Revolutionary Text | In 1897 the celebrated Russian novelist Count Leo Tolstoy completed a book titled What Is Art? (Что такое искусство?) While no friend of the avant garde, Tolstoy reserves his harshest criticism for highbrow art created to provide “empty amusement for idle people.” His mockery of grand opera is scathing and funny. He also argues that Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and his own novels are bad art. His answer to the question “What is art?” is that art is the conscious communication of feelings from an artist to an audience. These feelings, he adds, must be sincere, individual, and clearly expressed—at least to some degree. The best art, he claims, flows from the religious perception of its time. This theory is still worth considering, but it’s not revolutionary. What is revolutionary is Tolstoy’s incisive attack on the theory of art as beaux arts. That attack and its implications for 20th and 21st century art are the subject of my paper. |
| Kapust, | Daniel | University of Wisconsin | djkapust@wisc.edu | 3g | ||
| Karam, | Sarah | Concordia University Irvine | sarah.karam@cui.edu | 8e | Revolution to Resistance: The Political Nature of Science from Copernicus to Feyerabend | A common refrain within the scientific community is to “stick to the facts” and be “apolitical”; science can be “politicized”, rather than “political”. A historical lens has helped students in our History and Philosophy of Science class see the political nature of science. This paper will focus on two core texts from that class: On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres (Copernicus) and How to Defend Society Against Science (Feyerabend). Copernicus challenges the established understanding of the planetary positions and thereby the authority of the church. Feyerabend puts modern science in the position of Copernicus’ church. Copernicus flatters the pope and implores him to consider the new scientific ideas. Feyerabend takes offense at science and scientific education and suggests disempowering science. Both do this for the sake of the truth. A comparison of the texts and the student responses to them will help illustrate both the political nature of science and what it means to be a good scientist, and thereby the value of this conversation in scientific education. |
| Kearns, | Kevin | Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi | Kevin.Kearns@tamucc.edu | 4b | Presidential Leadership in Locke, The Federalist Papers, and Mad Men | While the TV show Mad Men portrays the advertising world of the 1960’s, the real-world political debates and crises of the 1960’s find themselves depicted as well. Further, there are several examples of the characters engaging with and reacting to political advertising, media, electoral campaigns, elections, party conventions, political operatives, Congress and law-making, bureaucratic rule-making, and foreign policy crises. This paper examines two foreign policy crises as depicted on Mad Men: Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam War. Mad Men depicts presential leadership differently in both crises. This paper examines those depictions using core texts. The texts examined include John Locke’s discussion Of Prerogative in his Second Treatise and The Federalist Papers. This paper begins with an explanation of Locke’s view of the executive’s prerogative power and leadership in a liberal regime. Then, the paper examines The Federalist Papers’ ideal view of presidential leadership within the American Constitutional context. The paper finishes examining the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam War through the lens of Locke and The Federalist Papers. Both crises show the necessity of republican leadership within a liberal democratic constitutional regime. |
| Keegin, | Joseph | Tulane University | jkeegin@tulane.edu | 1g | Hegel’s Critique of Morality in the Philosophy of Right | This paper is a close reading and analysis of Hegel’s critique of the form of the will he calls “morality” in the Philosophy of Right. I will give a general sketch of what morality means for Hegel and why it presents a problem for the task of the Philosophy of Right, namely to give an account of the modern state and demonstrate how it overcomes the deficiencies both of ancient communitarian politics and its degradation of the individual and modern individualistic politics and its degradation of the political community. I will also give some thoughts about the critique of Socrates that Hegel offers in this section, as the example par excellence of what Hegel calls “conscience,” and spell out what this critique means for Hegel’s political philosophy more generally. |
| Kern, | Christine | Azusa Pacific University | ckern@apu.edu | 4c | Returning Leaders in the Odyssey: Valuing Connection in Community | Homer’s Odyssey is a Core Text that celebrates a leader who fails as a leader in several ways; after all, he gets home with none of his men. All through this epic, we see all the Greek heroes try to take their wartime leadership back into the contexts of their homes in peacetime. They must try to re-establish a new normal and to re-integrate the crisis periods of their war lives as they return to their palaces, families, and communities. I would like to discuss the ways in which the Odyssey examines the intersecting rings of community, and how their own connections can help them create community when they return. Kings returning from Troy receive hospitality and carry home the stories of their hosts along with their guest-gifts. Odysseus’ episodic adventures between leaving the war and arriving home all highlight the ways in which the fabric of community, with law and gatherings, rituals and mutual regard, make some lands a place where future leaders are hosted and connections are built, where others are predatory and lawless. I am interested in talking about how the practices in the Odyssey that build connection for those who become leaders can affect the whole community’s ways of valuing connection. America has been losing “third spaces” where people create community outside the workplace or private home, neutral community ground where connections are forged and the community might engage with those of different parties and beliefs. What elements of connection drawn from the Greek ideals of hospitality and community can influence current leaders’ support of public spaces and the exchange of ideas outside partisan echo chambers? How can we better show our students how these texts offer a precarious but treasured view of the communal experience? |
| Kern, | John | Pepperdine University | john.kern@pepperdine.edu | 7e | The Medieval Ruler in Two Registers: Thomas Aquinas and Niccoló Machiavelli on Virtú and the Morality of Ruling Well | In political philosophy, two thinkers who could not seem more at odds with one another are Thomas Aquinas and Niccolò Machiavelli. The former in his De Regno (On Kingship) understands the ruler or king as modeled on the divine government with the cultivation of the virtue of the people as one of his primary ends. The latter (at least in The Prince) presents a vision of a ruler who balances virtú against the winds of fortune and who must sometimes act unvirtuously in order to effectively rule. In my Medieval Great Books class, I consistently have students struggle with these two figures together and will attempt here what I attempt for them: something of a rapprochement between their writings. While their undergirding frameworks are different, I hope to show that Aquinas does seem open to the concept of virtú when it comes to establishing peace (especially through what is left unsaid) and that Machiavelli can teach Aquinas something about the need for the king sometimes to set aside personal morality if the public good demands it in a fallen world. Such a reading of The Prince will also open the possibility of understanding virtú in a ruler as a possible condition for virtue in the city. |
| Kerr, | John | St. Mary’s University of Minnesota | jkerr@smumn.edu | 1d | The Eumenides as a Model of Restorative Practices | Aeschylus’ Oresteia famously focuses on the problem of how one can stop the cycle of retribution. The concluding move is problematic on various fronts, most notably the way in which biological gender determines a masculine superiority. But while Aeschylus can be said to chart the mythological progression into patriarchy, as scholars like Fagles have noted the plays also devote a lot of space to the feminine. The final stage of the Eumenides takes place after Orestes and Apollo have left; Athena works out a resolution with the ancient, maternally-oriented Furies and the whole production culminates in a pageant led by girls, mothers and aged women. Athena herself is a somewhat ambiguous figure as a goddess born directly from (and siding with) “the father”. She has the capacity to dispense justice in the punitive and violent fashion—she makes the Furies aware that she knows where Zeus keeps his lightning bolts—but she sets that option aside and instead welcomes the Furies aboard by greeting them with respect and offering them a place in the new reality that comes with purpose and honor. Rather than dismissing the validity of the Furies’ values, she reincorporates them into a contemporary reality on terms that they find themselves willing to agree with. The final moves of the play can be said to manifest the benefits of a restorative justice approach, and even to move beyond the codifying notion of “justice” to a more relational and ongoing notion of “practice”. The result is not simply a thing decided and done but a relationship to keep doing. |
| Kirkland, | Paul | Carthage College | pkirkland@carthage.edu | 5d | A SicSickness unto Health: Recovering Philosophic Life in Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human | In the Human, All Too Human preface, Nietzsche gives an account of the figure of the free spirit as a development that begins with a revolt and transforms from wild freedom to more nuanced versions of freedom. The process not only gives an account of what Nietzsche means by the free spirit, but it also provides a reflection on freedom, health, and character of philosophic life. The goal of freedom turns out to be a necessary condition of the possibility of such a life, but not the sufficient goal for that of the genuine philosopher. The process involves sickness and convalescence in way that shows both to be crucial to process that begins with the goal of freedom. My paper argues that these develop toward a what Nietzsche calls “great health,” revealing the life of philosophy to be one containing opposition and even contradictions. This self-contesting condition differs from peace or tranquility of soul and includes both the path toward sickness and the path toward recovery in an ongoing dynamic. |
| Kleven, | Terence | Central College | klevent@central.edu | 8e | “Alfarabi’s Account of the Five Rational Arts: An Exposition of The Book of the Utterances Employed in Logic, sections 52-53” | It is a pity that Alfarabi’s precise and useful rearticulation of Plato’s and Aristotle’s intellectual Arts has never been translated from the Arabic book in which it was composed. It is fortunate, however, that we have M. Mahdi’s critical Arabic edition of the book which presents this account (Beirut: Dar al-Mashreq, 1968). Sections 52-53 (pp. 96-97) of Alfarabi’s The Book of the Utterances Employed in Logic (Kitāb al-Alfāz al-Mustaʽmala fī al-Mantiq) have not, to my knowledge, been translated into other languages, and, thus, the consequences of these formulations have not been adequately appreciated in philosophical and scientific inquiries. In these two sections, Alfarabi defines the five rational or syllogistic Arts, the Arts of Poetry, Rhetoric, Sophistry, Dialectic, and Certainty (Demonstration). He calls these five Arts the five “Compliances of the Mind,” inqiyādāt al-dhihn, because the disciplining of the mind in these five ways consists precisely in the creation, the liberation of bringing into being, of five faculties or capacities of mind in the mind’s learning of the Arts. Indeed, as the mind acquires the five Arts, it gains five powers for the comprehension of nature, oneself, and the political and religious worlds. These Arts are nothing less than, Alfarabi says, the completion of our humanity. The purpose of this short paper is to give an account of Alfarabi’s five rational or intellectual arts which are a summary of Classical Philosophy and the presentation of the foundation for all philosophy and science. |
| Knippenberg, | Joseph | Oglethorpe University | jknippenberg@oglethorpe.edu | 3c | “Elites and ‘Our Democracy'” | Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill were contemporaries and, in a certain sense, elite “friends” of democracy. Relying on Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and various texts by Mill (including his reviews of Democracy), I will draw a contrast between a Tocquevillian elite that shares with everyone a common human longing and that recognizes that bolstering our common humanity is a messy irregular business, and a Millian elite that looks forward to the governance of technocratic experts, who are certainly willing to coopt others into their ranks, but have no patience for the irregular desires and infinite longings of often “deplorable” (as was once said) ordinary people. Everyone will be “improved” to the extent of their capacity, at the expense, Tocqueville might fear, of their genuine humanity. |
| Kourkoulakos, | Stefanos | University West, Trollhattan, Sweden | stefanosofathens@gmail.com | 7d | Plato Daedalus Calling Forth an Ariadne-less Theseus Reader | Paper subtitle: Gift-Bearing Labyrinth as Novel Automaton, and Political Leadership as Minotaur in Plato’s Symposium Understanding takes time, slow moving time. Expressing understanding well in writing takes space. Seriously constraining either the requisite time or space augments the risks of obscurity, misrepresentation, and misunderstanding. Given its level of complexity, density, multifacetedness, intricate inner connections, inner genre heterogeneity, and puzzle ladeness, Plato’s Symposium offers strong corroboration-in-deed of this claim. Not least, because in a Platonic work the “how” (overt and covert ways in which themes and questions are approached, posed, and dealt with) is an integral part of the “what”. This paper adapts to, but does not condone, its serious logistical constraints. I deem the Symposium to be an uncircumscribable work. As if logistical constraints weren’t enough, traversing this text in any particular way, not only shuns other ways and aspects of it, but also foregoes their formative impact. My primary raw material and locus is the opening dramatic setting (172a-173e). “Reading between the lines” is homonymous. I define the twofold sense (narrow and expanded) in which I practice it in order to pursue a quadruple interpretive challenge, namely, reveal and address the interrelated existence and paradoxical nature of: a) a strategically placed hint that the text of the Symposium as a whole is a gift; b) the labyrinthine composition of its opening dramatic time frames; c) the crucial role these time frames play in uniquely casting the whole text as an “automaton”, akin to those attributed to the mythical character Daedalus; d) the relentless demotion, critique-in-deed, and de facto displacement of political leadership, a critique more embedded in textual structure, rather than any verbal remark therein. |
| Kowara, | Carol | University of Chicago | clewis7@uchicago.edu | 7f | The Guardian Class of Kallipolis: Political Deterrent to the Young yet Model City to the Old | Every autumn, college students assigned Book V of the Republic come into class wanting to argue against Socrates and Glaucon’s decision to make the Guardians of Kallipolis practice communism of women and children. “These proposals ignore human nature!” “Socrates doesn’t understand what he’s throwing away!” “How can the city be just? It’s unjust to force women to reproduce!” Those attempting to lead seminars can guide students to a reading offered by Bloom and Pangle in their Interpretive Essays on the Republic and Laws, respectively. To present it too simply, Socrates tells Glaucon and the others ahead of time that he expects to be laughed at, or worse. Perhaps he is trying to show his students the price of a perfectly just city and dissuade them from thinking that they can bring perfect justice into being. True justice is a condition of the soul, and just political actions can only come from a rightly ordered soul (443c-e). However, in Plato’s Laws, the Athenian Stranger asserts that a city like the Guardian class in Kallipolis – one that lacks private things to the greatest extent possible – is best (739b-d). And although he states that the inhabitants of such a city are “gods or children of gods,” he maintains that it is the only model lawgivers should use (739d-e). The best craftsmen do not always approximate models as closely as possible, and the lawgiver should not try to reproduce such a city exactly, but he should nevertheless hold onto it as the model city (746b-d). This paper builds from Bloom’s reading of the Republic and thinks about why the same model city that is supposed to turn Glaucon and Adeimantus away from politics is supposed to be a guide to Kleinias and Megillus as they undertake the task of designing a real city. |
| Krall, | Annemarie | University of Dallas | akrall@udallas.edu | 6e | Faith and Excess in The Gift of Asher Lev | In Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev, the spotlight is on Asher’s depictions of his family in crucified form; in The Gift of Asher Lev, the attention moves subtly throughout the story to a new painting Asher created prior to the events of the novel, The Sacrifice of Isaac. Potok weaves in details of this painting, which mirror the events of the story and provoke questions regarding the nature of faith. This paper will argue that at the start of the novel Asher sees faith in terms of the same sort of dichotomy between faith and reason in which Kierkegaard sees it, but that by the end of the novel he takes on a perspective closer to that of Jean-Luc Marion: that when we see faith in the light of gift and the excess it demands from us, we find a way that accepts the incomprehensible while leaving open the way for us to puzzle it out. |
| Kries, | Douglas | Gonzaga University | kries@gonzaga.edu | 5b | Robert Bellarmine’s Controversies on the Problem of Religion, Politics, and Writing | Although he was trained as a medieval and classical scholar as well as a Jesuit priest, Robert Bellarmine lived and thought in the midst of Reformers, Counter-Reformers, and Renaissance humanists. He understood himself first and foremost as a contemplative theologian who especially studied Patristic authors, but it is for his prudential political reflections that he is best known. The goal of this paper will be to explain Bellarmine’s thoughts on writing itself, which is a very complicated matter when undertaken against the backdrop of religious and political controversy. The principal text to be examined for this purpose will be the Controversies, which were written at a somewhat quieter time in Bellarmine’s life, prior to the polemical writings that would take up his later years. Nevertheless, in addition to his more theoretical reflections on the questions surrounding religion, politics, and writing, the paper will conclude with some brief comments on Bellarmine’s more practical work on the Index, on the Inquisition, and on celebrated cases such as that of Galileo. |
| Krom, | Michael | Saint Vincent College | michael.krom@stvincent.edu | 4d | Aristotle on Music for Citizenship and for Rule | Aristotle’s Politics concludes with a study of education for citizenship. Like Socrates in Plato’s Republic, he considers music to play a central role in the character formation provided for the city’s future leaders. Yet, whereas Socrates only concerned himself with the ideal music for the city laid up in the heavens, Aristotle looked to the less-than-ideal in two senses: music for the formation of citizens who do not necessarily aspire to philosophy and music for rulers to use in pursuit of the city’s common good. |
| Kushner, | Aaron | Arizona State University | arkushne@asu.edu | 4b | “We Are the End of the World”: Reforging America out of the State of Nature on The Walking Dead | |
| Laws, | Page | Norfolk State University (retired) | prlaws@aya.yale.edu | 7a | ” ‘To Be Young, Gifted and…Martian?’ Nikki Giovanni’s AfroFuturistic ‘Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (We’re Going to Mars)’ as Core Text Poem” | Nikki Giovanni’s recent 2024 passing calls for a re-evaluation/re-appreciation of her Black Arts and later work, all of it unified by her fiercely condemnatory but drole stance on America and Race. This is a reading of a poem from the early 2000’s that grows more pertinent with every U.S. space shot, especially as financed by the likes of Trump confidant Elon Musk (dubbed by some ‘Apartheid Clyde’ for the Southern African origins of his fortune). Giovanni’s thesis in “Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (We’re Going to Mars)” is that Black voyagers should be uniquely qualified to endure the rigors of space travel and colonization work due to their ancestors’ experience of the Middle Passage. Though critics such as Chanda Prescod-Weinstein have called Giovanni’s poetic comparison of the Middle Passage and space travel “foul,” another critic, Ethel Morgan Smith, has said, “No other writer can give us grief, sarcasm, anger, and humor, and wrap it with love.” This is a close reading of a poem that somehow manages to encorporate Space, Race, and the Space Race. |
| Lawson, | Kathryn | University of King’s College, Halifax, NS, Canada | kathryn.m.lawson@gmail.com | 1e | Stand and Unfold Yourself: The Philosophy of Hamlet | The 20th century philosopher Emmanuel Levinas suggests that the whole of philosophy can be found within the works of Shakespeare (TO 47). Nowhere is this more evident than in the lines and soliloquies of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy, Hamlet. The text itself (the first, and second Quatro, as well as the Folio) has a plot that mirrors the medieval Scandinavian legend Amleth and perhaps also another revenge tragedy playing in the London theatres a decade earlier, also entitled Hamlet and dealing with a murdering usurping Uncle (although that play is no longer in existence). Thus, rather than a novel plot, the contribution of Shakespeare’s text and its lasting legacy is perhaps more than anything else, a testament to his philosophical wonder and his ability to share this wonder with a theatre filled with people. In a sense, he takes the solitary existential investigations of Michel de Montaigne’s Essays and brings them to a lively communal theatrical event: the Elizabethan era theatre. This paper will suggest nine key elements of the philosophy of Hamlet: existentialism, ontology, theology (free will and predestination), epistemology, ethics and morality, temporality, subjectivity, appearances (as opposed to reality) and metaphysics. These philosophical subsections represent pathways for the curious reader or theatre-goer to explore these philosophical concepts without the esoteric jargon often associated with philosophy. This talk will engage directly with the Hamlet text from a philosophical perspective. Levinas, Emmanuel. Time and the Other. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987. |
| Lee, | J. Scott | ACTC–Co-founder, Retired Executive Director | jscottlee@prodigy.net | 2d, plenary speaker | On Augustine’s Confessions and Divine “Arts” | The liberal arts, especially in core texts, are shared instruments for inquiry, deliberation, perception, and production. These arts can be acquired through practice, or through texts which address their formulations – for example, Aristotle’s Organon, Rhetoric, and Poetics, and Cicero’s De Inventioni and De Oratore. Or, they can be acquired through analysis of texts that appear to employ the liberal arts. Such a text is Augustine’s Confessions. That work is artfully constructed not only in the sense that it comes together as a unified text exhibiting the capacities of the 43-year-old Augustine ranging from inventing a persuasive new genre and arguments concerning divinity to deploying considerable powers in Latin, but it uses analogies to the arts as ways to explore what otherwise might be inaccessible to human thought or accomplishment. Such is the case with both Creation and Confession. These are “arts” of God, Divine “arts,” analogies to human arts that make us what we are. As analogies within the Confessions, they exhibit what is possible for students who acquire the liberal arts to range over in future life, outside the boundaries of a given art, and, thus, they encourage students to pursue far wider fields through their artistry and their own accomplishments. As with Augustine, so with students: it is range of thought, power, produced in the book that leads other souls to better lives. |
| Levy, | Judith | Oglethorpe University | jlevy@oglethorpe.edu | 2a, 5c | Shining towards an Ethics of History: Spacetime, Race, and Motherhood in Beloved and The Shining | The folk saying, “It’ll shine when it shines,” serves as an epigraph in Stephen King’s The Shining (1977). In Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), shining is also a crucial element of Paul D’s fear of the physical manifestation of Sethe’s deceased child, Beloved. Yet every woman shines, according to Paul D, and every mother shines a little bit, according to Dick Halloran in The Shining. While the word shining is used slightly differently in each text (as it is also affiliated with sexual maturity in Beloved in a way that is not present in The Shining), comparing moments of shining in each text exposes nonlinear temporalities that emerge under the threat of painful historical pasts. While Beloved underscores the infiltration of the past pain of slavery into the characters’ present and future, contemporary pop-culture references to the haunting of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining often overlook its attention to historical pain in ways parallel to Beloved. As Jack Torrance becomes increasingly overtaken by the hotel and his own domestic history of parental abuse, he investigates the corrupt history of the hotel. Central to his discovery is a 1945, celebratory re-opening of the hotel, in which its owners and patrons have profited from the pain of World War II. Furthermore, an analysis of motherhood in each text carries the potential for both clairvoyance and dangerous overprotection in the act of caring for the next generation. In both texts, the folding of spacetime creates a responsibility towards history as the next generation takes steps of its own towards an ethical future. This essay will posit how these texts make readers contemplate which stories should be “passed on” (the words repeated at the end of Beloved), creating an ethical approach to history and a sense of responsibility for the next generation future leaders. |
| Lewis, | Paul | Mercer University | lewis_pa@mercer.edu | 1d | David: Model Leader or Failed Leader? | King David of Israel is often remembered as the greatest king of ancient Israel and the prototype of the Messiah. In this paper, I address the question of whether the narrative itself validates that assertion and argue that David’s reign starts off strong, but then soon falls apart. In making this case, I examine episodes from the text beginning with his anointing as Saul’s successor to the end of his reign and Solomon’s succession to the throne. I conclude with insights into leadership that can be gleaned from David’s successes and failures. My paper is based largely on a close reading of the text, but a reading informed by biblical scholarship. |
| Llovet, | José María | Universidad Panamericana | jllovet@up.edu.mx | 3e, 3h | Aristotle on Good Leadership: a reading of Politics I & III | In his Politics, Aristotle examines the various forms of rule that may arise among human beings and within human communities. His inquiry extends beyond the mere classification and description of political regimes; he also seeks to analyze other types of associations and relationships in which authority plays a central role. Accordingly, he differentiates between democracies, monarchies, aristocracies, and other forms of governance, while also exploring the types of authority a free man is expected to exercise over his wife, children, and slaves. To the wife, Aristotle attributes a form of governance similar to political authority; to the children, he assigns regal authority; and to the slaves, he ascribes despotic authority. Slaves, being neither free nor equal to their masters, are subject to a despotic power that exists solely for the master’s benefit. By contrast, the wife and children, as free individuals, must also share in the benefits of the authority exercised over them. In this paper, I analyze these distinctions to construct an Aristotelian conception of the good leader. Contemporary leaders often adopt despotic attitudes, using their authority solely to pursue their own objectives. Frequently, they neglect the fact that they interact with free and equal individuals, treating their subordinates as “practical instruments”—an Aristotelian term for slaves. A good leader, by contrast, embodies a style of leadership akin to what Aristotle terms “political rule.” The keywords of such conception of leadership are persuasion—eschewing manipulation and coercion; respect—treating followers as equals rather than inferiors; and communal perspective—inspiring followers to participate in a shared project that benefits the collective. Furthermore, a good leader exercises authority in accordance with normative principles, grounding their leadership in ethical and rational frameworks. |
| Lowe, | Evan | Arizona State University | emlowe1@asu.edu | 4b | The Impossibility of Civic Happiness? The Difficulty of Virtue and Persistence of Fortune | Machiavelli points to four outstanding princes as models for imitation on the grounds that prudent leaders ought to imitate those who are best, so that when they fall short their achievement will nevertheless at least be “in the odor” of that of the “happiness” produced by the most excellent (Ch. 6). The task is extraordinarily difficult. On the one hand, only regimes that subsist by “superior causes, to which the human mind does not reach” are both happy and secure (Ch. 11). On the other hand, times may change independent of a leader’s virtue such that the happiness they create is ruined if they do not change with them, if they are not simultaneously impetuous and cautious (Ch. 25). The suggestion that one should “seem” to be both impetuous and cautious overlooks a fundamental difficulty of leadership to which Machiavelli points, namely the perception of the public. While one might conceal one’s true nature, it is improbable that those who perceive what one is by sight alone could easily reconcile two opposing apparent natures in the same human being. In the final analsysis, Machiavelli’s advice is as impious as it difficult: a human being would need to successfully imitate God’s omnicience, omnipotence, and mystery to bring the happiness and stability we long for political leaders to establish — a task for which even the greatest foresight and exercise of prudence is likely insufficient. This paper explores the difficulty of exercising virtue and mastering fortune in connection with HBO’s farsical comedy VEEP. While the show’s characters are obviously inferior to Machiavelli’s examples, their striving and their failures may help us understand the difficulties inherent in the prudent leadership advised by Machiavelli, and to do so in connection to the American political system. Inferiority triumphs. Hubris is punished. Fortune reigns. |
| Lucchese, | Michael | Liberty Fund | lucchese@pipecreekconsulting.com | 7g | “A Good Heart is the Sun”: Immature Machiavellianism in Shakespeare’s Henry V | Prince Hal is one of the most enigmatic characters William Shakespeare ever wrote. Over the course of the three plays about his life, Hal semmingly begins as a wastrel prince but grows into a mighty Christian king — a tale no doubt inspirational to many young men who have read the plays over the centuries. And yet from his very first monologue in 1 Henry IV, Hal’s Machiavellian scheming unsettles the audience and undermines the narrative of his greatness. In this paper, I will explore the consequences of this Machiavellianism through a close reading of the final play in the Henriad, especially Hal’s rousing speech before the Battle of Agincourt and the comedy of his Wooing of Katherine. I will argue that far from promoting Hal’s plotting as a model for statesmanship, Shakespeare intended to expose it as a fundamentally immature approach to life. Hal’s true greatness is better understood not as his training for martial prowess, nor his skilled political maneuvering, but rather as his ability to grow out of base ambitions and capacity for true repentance. |
| Luke, | Brendan | University of Dallas | bluke@udallas.edu | 8c | Poetry in the Works of Thomas Aquinas | This paper proposes to discuss the ways and contexts in which St. Thomas uses the words poet and poetry. Specifically, St. Thomas seems to cite poets in the way that Aristotle does: in order to interpret their somewhat vague sayings, for which he provides clearer, statements, in the interest of truth. I propose to consider what that meant for St. Thomas in light of his and Aristotle’s understanding of the relation between poetry and theology. In doing so, I would like to look closely at St. Thomas’s word choices: “aliquid”, for example, is a word differentially applied to poetry as opposed to, for example, logic, and some of the ways in which St. Thomas thinks about poetry can be inferred from his word choice in his commentary on the Posterior Analytics. |
| Luke, | Hannah | University of Dallas | hmluke@udallas.edu | 6e | The Role of Place in the Creation of Art in My Name is Asher Lev | This paper will consider the relationship in My Name is Asher Lev between the artist and the places he captures in his art. From the beginning of the novel, Asher Lev sees the places around him as an artist. For Asher, space is layered with lines and shapes; this way of seeing allows him to represent places accurately. The powerful work of art with which the novel ends is grounded in a particular place: the window at which his mother has sat for years. Yet, Asher’s art does not simply represent particular places mimetically. Ultimately, in My Name is Asher Lev, the artist’s work is grounded in an analytical vision of particular places but ultimately changes these places to draw out an element of reality which is not easily perceived through our everyday vision. |
| Lutz, | Jay | Oglethorpe University | jlutz@oglethorpe.edu | 2a | The Individual, Society and Civic Responsibility in Ibsen | While Oglethorpe’s Core program involves 60% shared readings across the curriculum, this presentation will present a case for an alternative reading outside of these shared texts. Henrik Ibsen’s plays always focus on individuals in crisis and how their actions affect themselves and society. The lengthy epic Peer Gynt, now a Norwegian national classic, does so in bringing the protagonist’s search for meaning full circle after his exhaustive international career in business and activities of questionable ethical acceptability. It is, however, perhaps in the play An Enemy of the People where the conflict between the conscience of the individual meets unacceptable demands from society that this kind of confrontation is most apparent. The play was the subject of a well received musical adaptation in New York in the summer of 2024. It could serve as a useful starting point for discussion of how public leadership can intersect with dilemmas due to ethical considerations. |
| Lyon, | Antony | UC San Diego | alyon@ucsd.edu | 8c | “To speak on their behalf in my own tongue”: Seamus Heaney on poetry and conscience | This paper focuses on the sense of conscience Seamus Heaney develops in his poetry. Conscience, for Heaney, speaks from experience with injustice and inequity, but it springs from the human experience of living a life. Heaney wrestled with holding a conscientious position on the Irish Troubles as both a private individual and as a public person – a poet. Though his sympathies rested with the Irish nationalists, he could not approve of their violent tactics. He, therefore, felt compelled to conscientiously refuse to participate in the either/or politics of the conflict. Over the course of the Troubles, Heaney’s poetry consistently served as witness to the historical oppression, but he was troubled by his own distance, feeling like an “inner émigré.” He eventually found a way forward. In “Crediting Poetry,” Heaney writes “I straightened up” and “began…to make space in my reckoning and imagining for the marvellous as well as for the murderous.” This new capacity for the marvelous allowed Heaney to find the hope from which to speak as a representative of the “republic of conscience,” not abstractly but in his “own tongue.” |
| Ma, | Hilda | Saint Mary’s College of California | hm1@stmarys-ca.edu | 8c | Night Sky and Ancient Seas: Ocean Vuong, Homer, and Expanding the Great Conversation | Core Texts Programs thrive when they foster dynamic, evolving dialogues between classic canonical texts and leading contemporary voices. In the spirit of ACTC’s conference theme, “Leading Between the Lines,” this paper focuses on contemporary writers who have taken the lead on collaborative dialogue by addressing it explicitly in their own work. In particular, this paper explores how Ocean Vuong’s poems “Telemachus” and “Trojan War” from his award-winning collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, critically engage with Homer’s Odyssey to further understand the human condition. Vuong’s poetry reframes Homeric narratives through the lens of personal and collective trauma, offering a contemporary refugee perspective that speaks to themes of war, displacement, and reconciliation. By positioning the speaker of his poems—a Vietnamese American refugee educated in America—within paradigms about enduring human experiences, Vuong also challenges dominant narratives about education and identity-formation. Drawing on theories of critical refugee studies, intertextuality, and epistemic disobedience, the paper examines how Vuong recodes Homer’s epic poem to engage with the institutional structures that shape refugee subjectivity. This analysis ultimately highlights how Vuong’s poems employ intertextuality as both homage and strategic disruption, and thereby reframes the literary landscape through a refugee optic. Through Vuong’s intertextual engagement with The Odyssey, this paper also makes a case for expanding “the great conversation” to include voices that challenge, pay homage to, and transform foundational texts, allowing them to evolve with the experiences of today’s students. Such integration fosters critical dialogues on war and its aftermath, the complexities of homecoming, and the multiplicity of human narratives, ensuring that foundational texts from our distant past remain vital in contemporary education. |
| Macfarland, | Joseph | St. John’s College | joseph.macfarland@sjc.edu | 5b | Demoting Metaphysics and Promoting the Vernacular: Connected Puzzles in Dante’s Convivio (The Banquet) | (I believe that Josh Parens has submitted this paper as part of a panel; I am submitting it here as a caution.) The Convivio presents two surprising reappraisals: first, although Latin is more “noble” than the vernacular and more fitting for philosophizing, Dante elects to write philosophy in the vernacular; second, although metaphysics was considered the most authoritative of the sciences (after theology), Dante esteems moral philosophy above metaphysics. The poet anticipates that this promotion of the vernacular will surprise his readers and strives to justify it. Of the demotion of metaphysics, Gilson said it was unprecedented for the Middle Ages. While many pages have been written about each appraisal separately, the two have not (to my knowledge) been understood in context with one another. In the Convivio philosophy is analyzed as a type of friendship (especially with oneself); amorous, vernacular poetry written to ‘lady philosophy’ illustrates how the practice of moral philosophy necessitates the use of the vernacular. |
| Maher, | Daniel | Assumption University | dmaher@assumption.edu | 2g | Constructing Modern Reason as Rule | This paper begins an exploration of a thesis by Francis Slade: “Reason understood as rule is what makes modern philosophy modern.” In various writings, Slade argues that modern philosophers repudiate teleology as the basis for constructing ideal forms, primarily, Machiavelli’s civil principality, which becomes the State as sovereign, and Descartes’s thinking thing, which is mind actualizing itself as independent of nature in order to master nature. On Slade’s view, reason itself is understood differently in modern philosophy because modern reason is not a natural power subordinated to the eros to know and the end of contemplation. Rather, reason is concerned with what it may effect, that is, Machiavelli’s effectual truth or Descartes’s practical philosophy in place of the philosophy taught in the schools. My paper explores Slade’s thesis principally in connection with Descartes’s Discourse on Method, but in connection with other core texts of modern philosophy. |
| Makin, | Mark | Biola University | mark.makin@biola.edu | 7d | “Save us from deceiving ourselves”: Reading as a Spiritual Practice in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice | In this paper, I consider what it means to read as a spiritual practice in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, focusing on Elizabeth Bennett’s reading of Mr. Darcy’s explanatory letter. Reading Pride and Prejudice intertextually with Austen’s own prayers, I argue that Elizabeth’s reading of Darcy’s letter is spiritual process through which God saves Elizabeth from deceiving herself, producing self-knowledge that leads to humility, repentance, and ultimately greater charity. For Austen, self-deception isn’t simply an epistemic and moral problem. It is a spiritual problem. When read alongside Austen’s prayers, Elizabeth’s vanity may be interpreted as a secret or unconscious sin. Unconscious of her vanity, Elizabeth deceives herself into ignorance of her own sin, a spiritual problem from which only God can save her. Elizabeth’s undeception begins with reading. Reading and rereading Darcy’s letter prompts Elizabeth to examine herself. Self-examination, while certainly an epistemic and moral process, is also a spiritual process that Austen models in her prayers. Elizabeth’s self-examination produces painful self-knowledge that leads to humility and repentance. In her humble acknowledgement of her secret sin, Elizabeth resolves to repent through confession, forgiveness, and amendment of life; she confesses to her sister Jane, seeks Darcy’s forgiveness, and resolves to judge others without prejudice and with greater charity. I conclude by drawing some practical lessons for how professors and students, like Elizabeth, may read as a spiritual practice. |
| Marsh, | Sarah | Seton Hill University | smarsh@setonhill.edu | 8b | Benjamin Banneker, Thomas Jefferson, and the Science of Human Equality | In 1791, Benjamin Banneker, a free black scientist from Maryland, wrote a letter to Thomas Jefferson, the United States Secretary of State who owned slaves in Virginia. Banneker’s letter made an argument for abolition and enclosed a set of calculations for a 1792 almanac. This paper proposes that Banneker’s letter to Jefferson is a core text that allows students to engage with fundamental questions about slavery, antislavery, and race. Of central interest is Banneker’s claim to Jefferson: “that one universal Father hath given being to us all, and that… however diversifyed in Situation or colour, we are all of the Same Family, and Stand in the Same relation to him.” Banneker was reminding Jefferson of the equal rights doctrine of The Declaration of Independence—but Banneker was also referencing his astronomical calculations, which he believed showed the equality of human beings in relation to the observable cosmos. Read alongside the Declaration, as well as selections from Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), Banneker’s 1791 letter gives students an opportunity to observe the intellectual conflicts between racism and equality following the American founding, and consider how antislavery arguments proceeded at the time by invoking universal ideals from both science and religion. Despite very different social locations—Banneker was free but enslavable and Jefferson owned slaves—both men believed that divine power, what Banneker calls “one universal Father” and what Jefferson calls a “Creator” in the Declaration and “the Almighty” in Notes, could not condone one human being’s ownership of another. The grounds of Banneker’s and Jefferson’s conclusions are a fruitful area of inquiry into the moral content of race in the early United States. Read together, and in a wisdom-seeking way, these texts disclose the complex human dimensions of American racial slavery that white supremacy sought to collapse. |
| Marshall | Kevin | University of Dallas | kmarshall@udallas.edu | 7a | “The Phenomenon of Islam in the African American Experience of Leadership: Reflections on Sherman Jackson’s Islam and the Blackamerican” | This paper is an analytical reflection on key sections of Jackson’s Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Toward the Third Resurrection (Oxford University Press, 2005), a watershed work on the African American experience, from the perspective of what it might contribute to a robust conversation regarding the interplay between strands of African American thought, on the one hand, and various “offices” of community leadership, on the other. In particular, this paper will introduce into our conference-wide discussion Jackson’s elucidation of the uniquely “Blackamerican” relationship with Islam as an intellectual force within American public life. This, of course, acknowledges the African American community’s own contentious position within American society as a whole, bringing to bear this text’s critical importance for common core educators committed to exposing to their students major perennial questions of the human experience through the particularities of core texts such as Jackson’s and of the shared experiences they document. |
| Mathie, | Mary | University of Texas at San Antonio | mary.mathie@gmail.com | 2f | All the Heroism of Principle: Jane Austen on the Judgment of the Young | |
| Mattern, | Stephen | Oglethorpe University | smattern@oglethorpe.edu | 2a | ePortfolio Pilot | In particular, this paper will introduce into our conference-wide discussion Jackson’s elucidation of the uniquely “Blackamerican” relationship with Islam as an intellectual force within American public life. This, of course, acknowledges the African American community’s own contentious position within American society as a whole, bringing to bear this text’s critical importance for common core educators committed to exposing to their students major perennial questions of the human experience through the particularities of core texts such as Jackson’s and of the shared experiences they document. |
| Matthews, | Margaret | Assumption University | ml.matthews@assumption.edu | 2b | Gabrielle Suchon on the Psychology of Tyranny | |
| McBrayer, | Greg | Ashland University | gmcbrayer@ashbrook.org | 4e, 5b, 6a, 8a | The Floating Phoenician Finds Physis: Recovering Xenophon’s Natural Philosophy | Xenophon gives subtle testimony that Socrates engaged in scientific and metaphysical investigation throughout his life. In this paper, I will hunt for evidence of the content of these natural scientific investigations. Does Xenophon give us any clue what Socratic science and metaphysics looked like? There are a handful of sayings and pieces of evidence scattered throughout Xenophon’s corpus: his discussion of the forms in Memorabilia (the thing itself), his discussion of class or kinds in the Oeconomicus (tribes), and two passing, inebriated references to topics that caused Socrates to wonder in the Symposium. For the purposes of this paper, I will focus on Memorabilia 1.1.10 and ff, and Oeconomicus 9. |
| McClay, | Bill | Hillsdale College | wmcclay@hillsdale.edu | Plenary speaker | Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Hebraic Strain in American Thought | |
| McCormack, | John | Aurora University | jmccormack@aurora.edu | 7c | What Would Mahavira Do? Governance and the Jaina _Acaranga Sutra_ in the Mauryan Era (3rd Century BCE) | This paper discusses the teaching of South Asian classics, especially the _Acaranga Sutra_ of Jaina tradition, in the context of a historical role-playing game set in the reign of Ashoka (c. 268-232 BCE). The game engages students in debate based on documents regarded as scripture by modern followers of Jaina, Buddhist, and Hindu traditions. Reading the _Acaranga Sutra_ not only as a guide to collective memory and religious practice, but also as an implicitly political text, raises difficult interpretive questions about Jaina life and thought. How did, or how could, a tradition of renunciation relate to the state in a time of religious change? How can we move from students’ creative application of Jaina scripture to a nuanced understanding of how that tradition historically dealt with internal disagreement? |
| McDonald, | Peter | Baylor University | petrusjm98@gmail.com | 4f | Feudalism and Liberalism in Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws | Though Montesquieu is well known for his praise of the English Constitution and liberal republicanism, the Spirit of the Laws shows a worry about liberalism’s tendency toward corruption and despotism. Montesquieu’s explicit concern about England’s precarious liberty, his concern for honor, and his attention to the decay of regimes, show a recognition that liberalism in morals and government is not enough to produce a well governed state. While scholars have noted this, few have remarked on Montesquieu’s treatment of the history and development of feudalism and Gothic Law in the Spirit of the Laws. These books provide a contrasting vision of government to the earlier books, showing laws based on localism, gift giving, and honor, instead of separation of powers, political liberty, and tolerance. In this paper, I argue this discussion of Medieval French law and history, though not explicitly described so by Montesquieu, functions as a counterbalance and compliment to liberalism. Specifically, the local and honor-based systems present in Medieval France provide a counter for the self-interest and centralizing tendencies of liberal republics. This is not to argue that Montesquieu is anything but a proponent of liberalism, but to show how that this is more substantial and nuanced than is often appreciated. |
| McDonald, | Daniel | Ashland University | dmcdona1@ashland.edu | 4g | Douglass’s Narrative: A Common Text Accross FYS | This paper will discuss the virtues of having a shared core text across all sections of First Year Seminar across a university. I’ll discuss the idea for the course, the justification for the course, and the recruitment of faculty. I’ll also discuss teaching “Core Texts” as a professor of Art, that is, as someone outside the disciplines of Literature and History. I’ll also discuss key passages and show how they speak to matters of enduring human importance, matters that should be relevant to us as humans, not merely as members of academic disciplines. For example, I plan to discuss Douglass’s account of how Music affects the human soul in Chapter 2, and the incongruity of how songs can represent the sorrows of the soul yet also be interpreted by observers as manifestations of joy. |
| McGlashan, | Ann | Baylor University | Ann_McGlashan@baylor.edu | 4f | “To Preserve, Protect, and Defend: Can Malory’s Pentecostal Oath still be a Blueprint for Leadership in the 21st Century?” | In Malory’s “Le Morte D’Arthur,” King Arthur gathers all the knights of the Round Table every year at Pentecost. Every year he has them swear an oath: an oath they unfortunately cannot seem to live up to. But repeat it they must. This oath is not an oath of allegiance to the King, but a series of vows that outline how a good knight should act. It is an oath that is inextricably tied to how the elite of the late medieval period saw the obligations of leadership. But does such an oath have relevance to our students today? Can our students use a 15th century oath to gain insight into what constitutes good leadership skills in the 21st century, or is it simply a relic of a bygone age? |
| McGrath, | Molly | Assumption University, ACTC President | mb.mcgrath@assumption.edu | Plenary speaker | Liberal Education as Antidote to Ideology | |
| McGuire, | Elizabeth-Jane | Villanova University | elizabeth-jane.mcguire@villanova.edu | 7a | Frederick Douglass and the Impact of Reading and Rhetoric | Note: this is intended to be part of Josh Parens’ panel, “ACTC and HBCUs: Thoughts toward Future Collaborations.” The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass consists largely of explicitly detailed accounts of the vile, inhumane treatment Douglass experienced and witnessed during his youth and young adulthood as a slave in the American South. These anecdotes evoke a visceral response in readers, particularly undergraduate students, who can struggle to figure out why such a text is considered part of the “canon” and/or what they can possibly say about it that would be meaningful. This talk will consider how undergraduate students can be brought into a productive conversation about slavery, liberal education, and the pursuit of justice using Douglass’ personal account of his experience as a slave and a free man. Douglass’ emphasis on reading and speaking highlight the centrality of a liberal education in maintaining a free society composed of individuals with equal rights. |
| McNamara, | Carol | Great Hearts America | carol.mcnamara@greathearts.org | 7g | Shakespeare’s Grasp of the Feminine: Power and Purpose – The Political Skill of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra | What do women want?” was the question Betty Friedan asked in her ground -breaking 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique. But long before Friedan posed this question, William Shakespeare was mulling over for himself the character and ability of women. We often focus on Shakespeare’s versatility in writing both comedy and tragedy, history and poetry, but less often do we examine his extraordinary ability to develop female characters and portray their longing and ambition clearly and fully. This essay will explore Shakespeare’s insight into the feminine nature, and political skill and ambition through an examination of his Cleopatra. Cleopatra is Shakespeare’s oldest female lead. She is in the prime of her life and long, powerful rule over Egypt. What does Shakespeare teach us about Cleopatra’s character and political wisdom and capacity that enable her to govern Egypt and maintain her throne for over 20 years, while Roman leaders rose and fell? |
| McNamara, | Peter | Arizona State Univerity | peter.mcnamara@asu.edu | 2h | Adam Smith on Leadership | Adam Smith on Leadership Beginning in the late nineteenth Adam Smith was portrayed as a zealous advocate of the night-watchman state and a critic of energetic government leadership. Recent Smith scholarship has made substantial steps towards correcting this caricature. But has the correction gone too far? This paper will consider Smith’s treatment of leadership in Wealth of Nations and especially Theory of Moral Sentiments. |
| McShane, | Michael | Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture at SMU | michaelmmmcshane@gmail.com | 6d, 8a | A Wedding in Another Key – A Dream of a Civil City in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream | This paper is about Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. Its thesis: Shakespeare’s play represents marriage laws as the epitome of law per se, while good marriage nomoi are both essential for and emblematic of civilization per se. |
| Merrill, | Thomas | American University | merrill@american.edu | 8b | The Bottomless Well under the Cathedral at Chartes: James Baldwin’s Reflections on Core Texts in “Stranger in the Village | Today core texts programs face a dilemma. On the one hand, our colleges and universities badly need some unifying thing that would allow students and faculty to talk to each other about important human questions across political and cultural boundaries—work that core texts programs would seem to be perfectly suited for. On the other, the idea of core texts (or “great books”) have long been entangled in America’s persistent culture wars, especially around the idea of race, such that many commentators think there is an unavoidable choice: core texts OR the study of race, Western Civ OR DEI. In this paper I offer a reading of James Baldwin’s 1955 essay “Stranger in the Village” to illustrate how one thinker grappled with and arguably resolved this tension. In the essay Baldwin finds himself in a remote Swiss village surrounded by villagers who have no experience with black Americans. Near the beginning of the essay Baldwin remarks that the “most illiterate” of the Swiss villagers are related to the Western tradition in a way that he is not: “the cathedral at Chartres says something to them which it cannot say to me.” By the end of the essay Baldwin reverses this claim: “but it is important to understand that the cathedral says something to me which it cannot say to them.” My essay traces this reversal and its implications and suggests that Baldwin wins a kind of independence from the tradition by first engaging with it in a spirit of critical appreciation and understanding. |
| Metzger, | David | Old Dominion University | dmetzger@odu.edu | 7a | Between the Lines or Within the Veil?:: the logic of speculation and “fancy” in Chapter X of Du Bois’ Darkwater | In Chapter X of Darkwater, Du Bois resolves his collage of essays, poems, and poetry with a work of speculative fiction (“The Comet”) and a poem, “Hymn to the Peoples.” Focusing on this conclusion, “Between the Lines or Within the Veil?” will examine both the vision that Du Bois creates andthe position from which he believes we might see it, as well. |
| Meyers, | Mark | University of Saskatchewan (Canada) | mark.meyers@usask.ca | 7b | Teaching the History of Democracy and Authoritarianism: Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny” as a Core Text | My paper will explore how historian Timothy Snyder’s _On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century_ might be integrated into an introductory core-text based course on the history of modern democracy and the challenges that have been posed to it by authoritarian ideologies and regimes, both in the past and more recently. The course will begin by examining fundamental ideals that have grounded liberal democracies in the Western world (rule of law, separation of powers, religious tolerance, basic rights and liberties, etc.), seeking to demonstrate the resilience of those ideals as well as ways in which Western liberal democracies have either lived up to or fallen short of them. The middle part of the course will look at historic challenges to liberal democracy, including fascism and communism, while the end of the course will use various national case studies to review the state of democracy and authoritarianism in the contemporary world. Snyder’s book would likely be assigned near the end of the course. It would offer a concise and accessible review of the history of authoritarianism in twentieth-century Europe (covered in more detail earlier in the course), as well as a practical guide to safeguarding democracies today. I will discuss the text’s potential to encourage critical thinking about the application of historical lessons to contemporary political challenges. I will also explore some of the challenges that might arise in teaching it. My paper engages the conference theme in that it foregrounds a text (and a course) designed to inspire the defense of democratic values in future citizens and public leaders. |
| Miller, | Jason | North Carolina State | wjmille3@ncsu.edu | 8b | Walking Harlem: Langston Hughes’s “Theme for English B” | After riding by train through North Carolina in February of 1949, Langston Hughes composed one of his most anthologized poems. In “Theme for English B,” Durham and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, were plucked from this trip as hypothetical sites in the speaker’s past. For overview, Hughes disperses his own personal experiences as an underrepresented student at Columbia University throughout a poem where an imagined speaker is made to complete an assignment where he explains his positionality to a white university professor. This paper maps the actual city blocks of Harlem mentioned in the poem to allow readers to succinctly filter the autobiographical from the archetypal. Invoking city maps from the 1940s, reading the original line drawing created for the poem by renowned artist Jacob Lawrence, and unpacking the complex nature of the poetic metaphor that centers the poem reveals how every allusion in the submitted poem subversively counters the assignment’s directive to create an essay based on narrative. While this poem is a core text used in many high school and college classrooms, sadly even conscientious instructors often fail to realize it is neither an example of the Harlem Renaissance | New Nego Movement, nor written from the actual perspective of the poet himself. With the black student and white instructor serving as representational emblems of America itself in the poem, Hughes’s lyric provides readers an opportunity to both examine the role of subversiveness in education and confront the continuing interdependence of race in America. |
| Minkov, | Svetozar | Roosevelt University | syminkov@gmail.com | 1b | Leo Strauss’s Notes on Dante’s “De Monarchia” | This presentation examines Dante Alighieri’s De Monarchia via Leo Strauss’s reading notes on the book, focusing on its argument for a universal temporal monarchy as the condition for actualizing the possible intellect: a secular, Averroistic ideal rooted in Aristotelian reason. Strauss’s is a deliberately incomplete analysis, halting before Dante’s shift to revelation late in Book II. Strauss explores Dante’s eleven arguments for monarchy, Rome’s natural and divine legitimacy, and the scholarly debate (Gilson, Nardi) on philosophy’s independence from theology. Strauss’s citations of De Monarchia in Thoughts on Machiavelli and his Marsilius chapter may reveal his intent: to highlight Dante’s adaptation of Aristotle’s closed polis in light of the emergence of universal religious and political claims. Yet, the world state’s impossibility—due to human diversity and conflict, despite its non-religious basis—becomes as a critical tension. |
| Moreira, | Natalie | Baylor University | Natalie_Smith2@baylor.edu | 3d, 7h | Bare Humanity: Arendt’s Lesson on Lessing | In Men in Dark Times, Hannah Arendt implicitly works out the insights of The Human Condition through the lens of several individuals whose lives serve to illuminate the world we shared in the twentieth century. The exception is her essay on G.E. Lessing, an eighteenth century figure whom she argues illuminates the relationship between the preeminent individual, the watching public, and the truth. In this essay, Arendt recognizes the bond of humanity felt by those who suffer together, but she also argues that this bond is insufficient for political action or, indeed, for real friendship. The bond of common humanity pales in comparison to the bond of political community, but the power that wells up out of a political community can be dangerous, as the world re-discovered through the Third Reich. In light of the power of the public, Arendt speaks of the debt a public persona owes to a community that honors their work, and, in doing so, she sheds light on an underexplored but central aspect of her political understanding— the pursuit of glory— and discusses its implications for the world. I argue that the epistemic and aesthetic sense Arendt explores through Lessing should be looked at again as a resource for contemporary defenders of liberalism. |
| Moser, | John | Ashland University | jmoser1@ashland.edu | Teaching Rousseau and Burke with Reacting to the Past | Reacting to the Past is a series of classroom-based role-playing games set at pivotal points in history, in which students take on the roles of historical actors informed by important texts. In Rousseau, Burke, and Revolution in France, 1791, students read lengthy excerpts from Rousseau’s Social Contract and Burke’s Reflections, and must engage with these thinkers’ ideas in attempting to establish a constitution for the new regime that their characters wish to create in France. Their success depends on their ability to persuade their fellow students that their applications of the texts are most valid, thus forcing them to engage deeply and thoughtfully with the ideas. [If I can have an entire session to myself, I would love to run a demonstration of the French Revolution game, but if part of a panel I would speak more generally about the Reacting method, and how it helps students understand and apply the ideas of thinkers such as Rousseau and Burke.] | |
| Murphy, | Daniel | Saint Peter’s University | dmurphy2@saintpeters.edu | 1g | Hegel, Mind and Norms | Hegel’s significance for contemporary philosophy of mind and related areas has been noted by some philosophers, including John McDowell, Robert Brandom, and Paul Redding. This has raised Hegel’s profile in certain areas of philosophy that are not typically seen as being influenced by him. This paper seeks to sketch out some foundations of contemporary views of Hegel’s philosophy of mind. It will also try to show how these views relate to Hegel’s on culture, leadership, and normativity. |
| Nelson, | Michael | Rhodes College | mnelson@rhodes.edu | 2h | Comparing Odysseus and Aeneas as Leaders | Along a number of dimensions of effective leadership, I compete the two epic heroes, much to Aeneas’s advantage. I draw mostly on the poems as well as, occasionally, modern writings on leadership. |
| Norton, | John | Concordia Irvine | john.norton@cui.edu | 7e | Confronting Wolsey | Shakeapeare invites his audience to consider a human perspective when watching Cardinal Wolsey fall from grace. A despicable leader, driven by greed, Wolsey designs his own fall from grace in Henry VIII’s court. Yet, Shakespeare forbids his audience from leaving the playhouse before it faces a humble, repentant church man. Wolsey’s humanity as a leader is most visible after his greed is exposed. I’d love to present this paper with Sean Bortz, who is also writing about Wolsey. Sean and I have been working on this project together. |
| Nylen, | Ethan | University of Oxford | ethannylen@gmail.com | 5a | Gentleness: The Preparation for Philosophy and Politics in Plato’s ‘Laws’ | In Plato’s Laws the Athenian Stranger provides preludes to the laws for his “city in speech,” Magnesia. The aim of these preludes is to prepare the citizens for the laws that they’re about to receive, by “taming” them, making them “gentle” [πρᾶος]. Like the Republic, this taming occurs on two levels: both the citizens in the “city in speech” and the interlocutors are made “gentle” toward the lawgiving. In the Laws, the Athenian illustrates how the preludes will prepare the citizens for the laws of Magnesia through the image of the free doctor, versus the doctor of slaves. While, equally, the taming of the interlocutors is illustrated through the image of wine drinking parties. My paper will, thus, seek to carefully dissect these two images in the Laws, pointing to the specific way in which the Athenian prepares both the citizens of Magnesia and the interlocutors for his lawgiving. How are drinking parties comparable to seeing a doctor, and more importantly, how do they achieve the same end: bringing the interlocutors in the dialogue and the citizens for the “city in speech” to this point of “gentleness”? In a dialogue where there is no mention of the eidetic forms of justice or goodness, it is especially strange for the citizens and interlocutors to submit themselves to lawgiving, drawing away from their thymotic dispositions. Thus, what is the Athenian’s goal in bringing the interlocutors and citizens to πρᾶος, and how do the images accomplish that goal? Through a close reading of these admittedly short passages, my paper will seek to pull on the tenuous similarities between the images in the Laws, while attempting to provide a clearer profile of the Athenian Stranger, his goals for lawgiving, and this strange need for “gentleness” in a citizen and a philosophical interlocutor. |
| O’Neil, | Sean | University of Nevada, Reno | oneil.sean@unr.edu | 4g | Teaching Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzān in a Core Texts Curriculum | Ibn Tufayl’s (1109–1185) Hayy ibn Yaqzān, a philosophical tale that narrates the life of a young boy who grows up alone on a deserted island and gradually acquires truth, is a landmark in medieval Islamic thought and one that also subsequently garnered interest in Europe’s republic of letters during the Enlightenment. Nevertheless, it does not often feature in contemporary curricula organized around core texts. In this talk, I will briefly introduce Hayy ibn Yaqzān before explaining both how I present it in a seminar format core text course and why I think a core text curriculum benefits from its inclusion. To start with, Hayy ibn Yaqzān presents a keen opportunity for students to reflect on our own understanding of genre and its limits precisely because, as a “philosophical tale,” it eludes tidy categorization. More significantly, Hayy ibn Yaqzān provokes interesting class discussion because, of the several premodern thinkers we read who meditate on the relationship between reason and revelation, Ibn Tufayl presents perhaps the most optimistic view of human nature and the capacity of the human mind. |
| Oberrieder, | Matthew | Rogers State University | matthewoberrieder@gmail.com | 3g, 5e, 6b | Prayer, Chance, and Fate in Plato’s Alcibiades II | Plato’s Alcibiades II depicts Socrates’ questioning Alcibiades about his intention to pray. Prayer is, Socrates argues, at best ineffective and at worst self-destructive–insofar as humans lack any sufficient knowledge of that for which they pray, as well as the uncertainties of: whether the gods exist; whether they are amenable or indifferent to prayer; and whether they are scrupulous or unreliable grantors of the object(s) of prayer, even, and especially, if the(se) object(s) are, in fact, evil, rather than good. Fraught as prayer is with contingency, it amounts to chance, as the indeterminacy of a prayed-for outcome. Chance, however, is the very future-uncertain phenomenon that elicits prayer. Prayer is future-directed, as seeking to determine a preferred outcome in advance of any activity. In this, prayer aims to self-direct and to secure one’s own “fate,” by enlisting the presumed superior agency of the gods. But if fate exists and operates as a future-determined phenomenon, and if even the gods are subject to fate, then even the most sympathetic or philanthropic of gods cannot affect the preferred outcomes of prayer. In brief, chance elicits prayer to determine the future, but fate nullifies all prospects of prayer. For prayer to be able to be future-determining, the future must be and remain indeterminate. Chance, as a future-undetermined phenomenon, paradoxically is necessary for prayer to be realized. Plato explores these issues using historical irony about the “fates” of Alcibiades and Socrates, but he grounds their discussion in the literary subtext of the Oedipus story. Socrates invokes Oedipus insofar as his prayers prove to be curses, from his ignorance of the implications of that for which he prays, as well as the scrupulousness, or vindictiveness, of the gods in fulfilling his prayers. Or was Oedipus already cursed by the gods as his fate, and so in fact, his prayers are fruitless? |
| Paddags, | Rene | Ashland University | rpaddags@ashland.edu | 2f | The Education of a Modern Man: The Three Musketeers and D’Artagnan | Alexandre Dumas’ novel The Three Musketeers takes its place among stories told to children. It is considered exciting and wholesome, but also a bit quaint and unserious. After all, what could one possibly learn from the exploits of a young, hot-headed, and uncouth Frenchman of the 17th century? Yet, I will argue that underneath the layers of contemporary culture lies Dumas’ question on how to properly educate a young man under the conditions of modern raison d’etat. In the novel, Dumas shows why the old ways of education are now insufficient, what can learned from their failures, and what new education should be provided. This will be particularly an education on how to love properly. It is D’Artagnan’s amourous affairs which will show how a young is directly properly or improperly. |
| Pagano, | Frank | St. John’s College | fpagano@sjc.edu | 6f | Liberal Education, Envy and Sophistry | In the Memorabilia (I.6) Xenophon describes Socrates engaged with his friends in reading the ancient books and searching for “something good” to share. Socrates seems to be the founder of liberal education as practiced in great books programs. The context of the description is the attack on Socrates mounted by the sophist Antiphon. He wants to steal Socrates student-friends largely because they are wealthy youths who can afford the sophist’s fee. It is not evident, however, that Antiphon has students of his own. His sarcastic criticism of Socrates seems to be more than a comparative sales pitch for his own wares of wisdom. He reveals his envy of Socrates. This paper considers the part that the sophistic envy of Socratic philosophy, and perhaps true philosophy in general, plays in the Socratic practice of liberal education. Does Socrates think that philosophy in some part is the cause of the rise of sophistry? If so, what responsibility does philosophy have for the corruption with which sophistry contaminates the most promising youth? In the context of liberal education what are the signs, according to Xenophon’s Socrates, of a sophist? How do liberal arts programs sift “something good” from sophistry? |
| Parens, | Joshua | University of Dallas | parens@udallas.edu | 3a, 5b, 7a | “Is Descartes’s Meditations a work of enlightened kalam?” | Strauss describes the genre of “enlightened kalām” as a way of characterizing Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed in Persecution and the Art of Writing. Strauss argues that Alfarabi is the thinker who set out the outlines of this genre. Another even more precise example of this genre is Alfarabi’s Political Regime, which Maimonides singled out for praise. What characterizes this art is what Strauss calls the defense of the Law or religion or city. It may be contrasted with the defense of philosophy. My brief paper will explore whether one of the most renowned works of modern philosophy, Descartes’s Meditations, is better understood as a foundational work of metaphysics, as it has historically been interpreted, or as a modern exemplar of the art of enlightened kalam. This paper will not attempt to argue for direct influence of Alfarabi (or Maimonides) on Descartes. |
| Patterson, | Stuart | North Central College | skpatterson@noctrl.edu | 6g | What is Power?: Hannah Arendt on Action in Public | This paper will review two ideas: “action” and “power,” both central to Hannah Arendt’s analysis of The Human Condition. I will argue that Arendt’s delineation of action and power justify discursive pedagogy. Arendt’s notion of the “public” as a “space of appearance” in which action and power can be realized in the formation of collective identities also suggests a pedagogy centered on “great books” or “core texts.” Such arguments are especially important to review today, given the deterioration of public – much less political – discourse. This is how core text programs are poised to lead. |
| Pfeffer Merrill, | Jacqueline | Council of Independent Colleges | jpfeffermerrill@gmail.com | 6c | Northrup Frye and the Imagination in Undergraduate Education | Northrup Frye and the Imagination in Undergraduate Education Colleges and universities are refocusing on the civic component of their mission and launching civics initiatives to prepare students with skills such as civil discourse; character traits, such as empathy and resilience; and knowledge of our history and governing institutions. However, often neglected as an aim of these latest collegiate civic education initiatives is developing the faculty of the imagination. Northrup Frye’s 1962 Massey Lectures, collected under the title The Educated Imagination, elucidates the essential role of the imagination in preparation for civic life and public leadership. Frye argues that literature informs our imagination and prepares us to live in a free society by fostering tolerance, open-mindedness, and the capacity to understand social change and envisage further changes. Frye’s lectures make the case that collegiate leaders, faculty, and the provincial and state governments that set university budgets should understand the study of literature not as a frivolity or a luxury but as a not-to-be-compromised component of education for public leadership. |
| Pichanick, | lan | Villanova University | alan.pichanick@villanova.edu | 2b | The Tyrant’s Soul in Republic 9 | In this talk, I will discuss Republic 9, in which Socrates presents an account of the tyrant’s soul that emphasizes his “lawless” desires. Such lawlessness reveals that the tyrant is motivated by a thumos (spiritedness) which drives him to transgressive longings for the sake only of expressing them. This comes to light in Socrates’s account of the tyrant as a wolf, a madman, and one who makes no distinction between his waking life and his dream life. Yet such a life culminates in an anarchy within his soul that threatens his very destruction. |
| Pope, | Kerri | Austin Community College | kpope@austincc.edu | 1f, 4c | Odysseus the Autocrat and Athena the Transformer: An Exploration of Leadship in Odyssey | A cursory glance at LinkedIn provides a wealth of articles on leadership models, all claiming to be the most effective, inspirational, and transformative. As a society, we are quite obsessed with the best way to lead others. Books, podcasts, articles, seminars, websites, and consultants all offer data-driven solutions and methodologies for leading your team. Higher education is not immune to this leadership fixation. My institution offers leadership cohorts, training seminars, certificate programs, and book clubs. I am suggesting we sidestep the modern pundits espousing leadership advice and suggest a thorough examination of various leadership styles and their efficacy already exists. Homer’s Odyssey serves as an excellent case study of diverse leadership. The styles vary greatly, and so do their success rates. I chose to focus on the markedly different leadership styles of Athena and Odysseus. Both have clearly defined goals and teams that rely on their guidance, yet their outcomes are very different. Their styles closely mirror modern styles of leadership based on years of research and data. I suggest that maybe leadership has not evolved as much as the pundits claim. |
| Post, | Matthew | University of Tulsa | mattdpost@gmail.com | 4d | Experiencing transcendence through music as core text | In Plato’s Republic, Socrates places the study of music and harmony at the beginning and end, respectively, of the educational process; only dialectic is higher. At the same time, Socrates argues that music is central to learning speech and reason generally. An important implication here is that to understand speech, reason, and also text, it is not enough to study music and harmony, but to understand their fundamental connection to speech. If speech and reason make us distinctly human, so too does our relationship to music. |
| Potts, | Grant | Austin Community College | grant@tgqf.org | 6g | Walking the Road to Larissa in an Age of Artificial Intelligence | In Plato’s Meno, Socrates famously explores the nature and value of knowledge with his interlocutor as they discuss the difference between true opinion and knowledge, using the path one would take between Athens and Thesellian city of Larissa, and providing a basic model for knowledge as justified true belief that has shaped analytic thought throughout the 20th century and into our current era. The question of the value of knowledge, as opposed to merely true opinion, becomes even more pertinent today as we confront unprecedented access to increasingly sophisticated tools, from the information systems that shape the internet to generative AI, that promise quick, easy access to true ideas and facts without the labor of getting there ourselves. In this paper, I will return us to Plato’s Meno, and the thought experiment of the road to Larissa, to discuss the issues we confront with both student facing and industry facing AI tools as a source of knowledge, taking seriously Socrates’ caution that “True opinions, as long as they remain, are a fine thing and all they do is good, but they are not willing to remain long, and they escape from a man’s mind, so that they are not worth much until one ties them down by (giving) an account of the reason why” (97.e – 98.a), discussing both my own engagement with analytic tools in scheduling software as a higher education leader and student engagement with generative tools like ChatGPT. My argument will be that we need to move away from an externalist understanding of justification as a post hoc account, and that it is the experiential dimension of seeking and finding knowledge that properly “ties it down” and provides its additional value to true opinion, a value that inevitably serves us as 21st century leaders both inside and outside the classroom. |
| Poyner, | Jordan | Catherine Project | jordan.poyner@catherineproject.org | 5e | Justice and Deception in the Court of Achilles | In Book 23 of the Iliad, the Achaeans bury Patroclus and are prepared to disperse, each to his own camp, until Achilles institutes funeral games. Presiding over these contests among the Greek leaders and heroes, Achilles adjudicates quarrels among the heroes, distributes honors and rewards, and consummates his reconciliation with Agamemnon. For this book at least, it looks like the most excellent of the Achaians rules. Insofar as Achilles has spent the bulk of the poem conflicted and enraged by questions of justice and right, his rule (temporary though it may be) presents an occasion to consider how Achilles’ understanding of justice and nobility has developed over the course of the Iliad. Achilles’ concern for justice comes to light in his understanding of his own excellence, Agamamenon’s deficiencies, and the failure—on the part of men and gods—to recognize and uphold this distinction. Agamemnon continues to rule despite his greed, cowardice, and decision to dishonor Achilles. This might lead one to anticipate the rule of Achilles as one in which distinctions of worth or merit are clearly observed; however, it is not at all clear that the best man wins in the contests over which Achilles presides. Furthermore, as the sophist Hippias notes in Plato’s Lesser Hippias (365a-b), Achilles’ concern for justice and the recognition of his own excellence appears bound up with a concern for honesty. Yet in Achilles’ final act of rule in Book 23, he lies magnificently, telling Agamemnon that the Achaean leaders “know how far you outstrip all others, / and how much you are the best in the strength of your throw[…]” (23.890-91). The stage is thus set for a reading of Book 23 which seeks to account for the discrepancy between what we might expect the justice of Achilles to look like and its actual expression. |
| Prather | Anika | Catholic University of America | dr.atprather@gmail.com | 7a, plenary speaker | Consolation on Captivity: How the Classical Tradition Brings Comfort in Our Darkest Times | |
| Priou, | Alex | University of Austin (UATX) | alexpriou@gmail.com | 2g, 8a | How to Beat Your Father: A Beginner’s Guide to Best Practices | Father-beating is both frowned upon and fascinating, and understandably so. For few would wish to follow in the footsteps of that father-beating mother-lover Oedipus, yet all the same we can’t forget his name, nor can we stop talking about…what he did. Even still, father-beating seems unduly maligned, an injustice to the venerable ranks of father-beaters, among whom we find Socrates, Aristophanes, Odysseus, Achilles—even Zeus. Father-beating may be a dire crime against the social order, but it addresses a real social need: it arises not in spite of but because of political life. In this essay, I will offer some guidance in distinguishing between father-beating well used and badly used. All attendees must sign a liability waiver and non-disclosure agreement. |
| Rawls, | Richard | Georgia Gwinnett College | rrawls@ggc.edu | 2d | Augustine of Hippo’s “Liberating Arts” | Augustine of Hippo’s struggles in converting to Christianity became well known thanks to the Confessions. Less well known is the struggle he had in nourishing the “liberating arts” as part of his coherent view of a liberated life. In examining the Confessions, On Christian Doctrine, and referring to one letter, this paper will suggest that Augustine continued to support and employ rhetoric and liberal arts despite criticism from Christians who saw rhetoric as something associated with paganism and evil. |
| Ray, | Andrea | University of Chicago | aeray@uchicago.edu | 5a | Geist and the Good Citizen | Hegel’s philosophical system is notoriously opaque to novices. This paper examines Hegel’s claim that Geist is the “I that is a We, a We that is an I,” as an entryway to the Philosophy of Right’s vision of the relation between self and society within Sittlichkeit. By doing so we can grasp both what Hegel believes citizens ought to be able to expect of their leaders and what leaders out to be able to expect of their citizens. |
| Reisert, | Joseph | Colby College | jrreiser@colby.edu | 7g | The tragic greatness of Caius Martius Coriolanus | Responsible for the capture of Corioles, Caius Martius incarnates Roman martial greatness, in recognition of which he is awarded the cognomen, Coriolanus. But his very greatness makes him contemptuous of the citizens and of their claim to share in ruling the state; thus provoked, they drive him out, whereupon he resolves to aid Rome’s enemies, the Volscians. Dissuaded from destroying his natal city, he is slain as a traitor by his new allies, his tragic fate demonstrating the inadequacy or incompleteness of marital greatness. |
| Renfro, | Josh | Purdue University | jsrenfro@purdue.edu | 6c | Horses, Homer, and Egyptian Philosophy in Plutarch’s Life of Alexander | Plutarch’s Life of Alexander famously uses casual actions, odd phrases, and jests in order to reveal character. I consider three such revelatory moments to shed light on some of Plutarch’s thoughts about leadership. First, I perform my own “parallel life” of Bucephalus, Alexander’s celebrated steed, with the black horse from Plato’s Phaedrus. Plutarch was a self-declared Platonist, and he suggests to readers that the virtue of self-control played an under-recognized part of Alexander’s leadership. Second, I explore the special role that Plutarch reports Homer’s Iliad had on the origins of Alexandria. After a dream in which Homer tells Alexander where to found the city, the remark that Homer was a clever engineer is at first sight puzzling (26.4-5). This may be due to a message Plutarch has for us readers about the importance of reading. This relates to my third revelatory moment. Tim Whitmarsh suggests that the impression the Egyptian philosopher Psammon made on Alexander is ambivalently treated by Plutarch because of Greek prejudice toward Egyptians (2002: 181). Whitmarsh is half-mistaken; this small vignette is just one moment, revelatory about Plutarch himself as author, where Plutarch leads us readers between the lines. At the end of the talk I digress toward larger questions about the art of reading. I speculate that the ways in which a writer can lead a reader have not fundamentally changed since Plutarch’s day. This should comfort those of us who serve liberal education, but it should also unsettle us. Reflecting on Plato’s myth of Theuth and Thamus can inspire ways forward for liberal education that are also ways backward. I keep my speculative digression brief. As Plutarch says, “perhaps impatient readers will complain less at digressions like this if they do not go on for too long” (35.8). |
| Reyes, | Elizabeth | Thomas Aquinas College | ereyes@thomasaquinas.edu | 6d | “I durst not so much as dare”: Ahab’s Ancient Wound | Immediately before Ahab finally, revelatorily smells the “living sperm whale” the leader of the Pequod has an experience with the air and sea, with himself, and with Starbuck on a “clear, steel-blue day.” These interactions poetically weave images of the air and ocean as divine influences together with a psychological exploration of the sea captain into himself, and provide a fruitful source of new insights into old inscrutable Ahab. |
| Ricca, | Giulia | Columbia University | gr2592@columbia.edu | 3d | Are stories good for us? Boccaccio and Manzoni on the beautiful and the public good | |
| Riveros, | Juan Ignacio | Universidad de Los Andes | jiriveros@uandes.cl | 7f | Socratic Leadership | This paper will ask dual intertwined questions. First, what moves Ahab to call himself “more a demon than a man,” making the final choice to embark upon the three days of chase? If narrator Ishmael is, as he styles himself, a “tragic dramatist,” (Ch. 33) and Ahab, his “poor old whale-hunter” tragic hero (and as Melville himself had soaked in Shakespeare’s tragic juices prior to writing his “whale book), a reader can ask what is Ahab’s impossible situation? As Oedipus and Macbeth seemingly bear on their human shoulders the weight of a culture and irreconcilable forces in the cosmos, each in their particular way, so perhaps might Ahab be in some tragic bind, carrying through his own personal wound some larger rift in the universe. If this is so, what is it? Second, what influence do the elements, figured as “the feminine air” and the “masculine sea,” and described as being wedded to each other in a cosmic marriage, have on Ahab’s inner and outer quests, his role as leader, and his pursuit of meaning in the white whale. |
| Robertson, | Neil | University of King’s College | neil.robertson@ukings.ca | 6h | Montaigne’s Critique of Renaissance Ambition | Montaigne’s philosophy of the “self” is best understood as an internal critique of Renaissance ambition. The paper will begin by considering the basic logical structure of Renaissance ambition as articulated in the opening pages of Pico della Mirandola’s ” Oration on the Dignity of Man.” It will then look especially at Montaigne’s final essay “On Experience” to see how Montaigne criticizes thus ambition through a critique of an assumed hierarchical order of creation. In this critique Montaigne does not retract or dissolve Pico’s account, but rather develops in disdolving the assumed hierarchy. Through this dissolution, Montaigne seeks yo give the proper object of Renaissance ambition to a focus on the “self”, which is called to be fully present to and in itself. In this Renaissance striving becomes transfigured into a self-aware worldly humanism. For a program, such as the one I teach in, this move to a self liberated from given, external ends, is a crucial crisis and turning point. In Montaigne we see a thouroughgoing articulation of the crisis of the Renaissance project together with an indication of the only way beyond this crisis in a new sense of a self-aware humanism. |
| Rodriguez, | Bretton | University of California, San Diego | bsrodriguez@ucsd.edu | 1e | Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the Classical Tradition | In her “Reply to Sor Filotea,” Sor Juana Inés de las Cruz—a seventeenth-century nun, poet, and intellectual from colonial Mexico—constructs a defense of her right to write literature as a woman. In her response, Sor Juana explicitly draws upon authorities from the Western intellectual tradition to support her position. In particular, she utilizes scripture and religious authorities as well as classical authors such as Plato and Aristotle. In doing so, Sor Juana not only engages with the Western intellectual tradition, but her work can be seen as a continuation of that tradition. Through her use of classical authorities and ideas to construct her larger argument, Sor Juana helps to bring this tradition into the Americas as well as into modern world through her engagement with fundamental issues of gender, identity, and power. |
| Rodriguez, | Jacob | Baylor University | Jacob_Rodriguez12@baylor.edu | 3c | The Spirit of the Laws: Human Nature and Regime Transformation | While a number of interpretations of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws take it to be a morally relativistic account of cultures and political regimes, one which takes persons and political outcomes to be determined by climate, geography, history, and culture, an alternative interpretation argues that Montesquieu is concerned with a defense of liberty, natural right, and free political determination. In this account, Montesquieu’s broader purpose for explaining the determinative elements of our social and political structures in the Laws is so that we may navigate them in the transformation of our own politics; rather than being lost amongst morally indifferent cultures and nations, there is a distinctive natural law which provides universal moral boundaries, which we must intuit and discover within our own cultural and political context. For such a project to succeed, however, and for this interpretation to be consistent with as careful and expansive a work as the Laws, one must give an account of how it is that such regime transformation is possible, given the deterministic constraints Montesquieu himself outlines. In particular, one must explain how Montesquieu’s conception of human nature and the individual would allow for us to be, on the one hand, deeply formed by our culture, climate, and passions, and on the other hand capable of orienting or overcoming those determinative elements in order to restructure our cultures and regimes, in pursuit of freedom and a just political order. I’ll argue that Montesquieu provides such an account of human nature in key passages throughout the Laws. His composite view of human nature as both physical, emotional, and “intelligent”, i.e. partially self-determining, will provide a framework for integrating culture, climate, the moral demands of the natural law, and the citizen or legislator’s capacity to reform their own political structures. |
| Rohmer, | Frank | Austin College | frohmer@austincollege.edu | 7g | To Be Caesar: Shakespeare on Greatness Surpassing Virtue | Shakespeare’s “Tragedy of Julius Caesar” has intrigued readers with the great issues and great characters it presents, leaving readers searching for the actual tragedy and whether the tragic character is Caesar or Brutus. Especially disturbing is Shakespeare’s artful contrivance of the play so that Caesar dominates the dramatic clashes between the characters, whether Caesar is on stage or off, speaking or not speaking, alive or dead. When Nietzsche celebrated Shakespeare for conceiving of the type of Caesar, he seems to have penetrated into Shakespeare’s character who transcends the imposing figures of Brutus, Cassius, Cicero, Antony, and that shadow of excellence lurking in the background, Pompey the Great. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar decisively embraces the tragic, thereby answering the “to be or not to be” question, dwarfing Rome, Roman virtue, and perhaps all human virtue in his imperative greatness. |
| Rohmer, | Le Dung | Independent Scholar | frohmer@austincollege.edu | 1e | Nguyen Tuong Thiet’s “My Mother An Dong Unit”: Making the Inaccessible Accessible | For the first time, Nguyen Tuong Thiet’s translated works allow non-Vietnamese readers to experience not only the concrete effect of war on life before and after the fall of Saigon, but also of wars and foreign dominations in general, particularly on the Vietnamese woman. Mr. Thiet’s works, whose excellence have been inaccessible to non-Vietnamese readers, further illustrate the struggle for independence in literature from the Chinese, achieved by the great writer Nhat Linh, Nguyen Tuong Thiet’s father, and his Self Reliant Literary Group’s colleagues, a seismic contribution largely unknown to the Vietnamese diaspora, who often can no longer read Vietnamese, and unheard of among younger generations in Vietnam, as Nhat linh’s works and all things related to him were banned and burned by the ruling Communist regime. |
| Rosental, | Creighton | Mercer University | rosental_c@mercer.edu | 3g | Lectio Presentation on Machiavelli’s The Prince | A Lectio is a special conference format which typically spends an entire day presenting on and discussing a single text. In this panel, we’ll do this for two hours on The Prince. This is one of the four presentations that will present on and discuss each portion of the text in turn. |
| Rozga, | Michele | Norfolk State University | michelerozga@gmail.com | 3e | Václav Havel’s leadership: the art of the struggle against transactional systems | The Czech playwright and essayist Václav Havel (1936-2011), President of Czechoslovakia during the Velvet Revolution (1989-1990), and elected President of the subsequent Czech Republic, combines complex sensibilities about leadership, public roles, culture, and morality. In this paper, the core text “The Power of the Powerless” (1978) will be examined for the questions it raises about the ways effective leaders listen and observe with an open-hearted stance during crisis. As this core text was written before the Velvet Revolution unfolded, a later text by Havel, “Politics, Morality, and Civility” (1992), will also be briefly examined because it represents an emerging post-revolutionary view of humanitarian leadership, what Havel calls a “higher responsibility”. |
| Russo, | Megan | University of St. Thomas | meganarago@gmail.com | 7h | “To the advantage of the liberal arts”: Josef Pieper and Property Ownership as Liberal Learning | In my years as a student and now teacher of the liberal arts, I have noticed a somewhat common trend: young men and women embrace the ideals of liberal education until they graduate and fail to achieve worldly success. Such disenchantment seems to contradict the detachment to worldly goods expressed by the lives and philosophies of the masters of the liberal arts (e.g., Socrates and Boethius), who exhort their students to neglect the extrinsic goods of fortune and embrace the goods of the soul. However, without endorsing the distinction between the banausos and the philosopher, Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture renews the ancient connection between property and freedom. A careful reading of Leisure has the power to help “[widen] the sphere of service work to the advantage of the liberal arts,” and prepare the attentive student to become “master of his own acts” (Pope Leo XIII) through the provident ownership of property. |
| Seal, | Carey | UC Davis | cseal@ucdavis.edu | 1a | ||
| Shmikler, | Joshua A | University of Mount Saint Vincent | joshua.shmikler@umsv.edu | 3c | Leading Workers, Warriors, and Philosophers against the Universal and Homogeneous State: On the End of Leo Strauss’s “Restatement” | At the end of his oft discussed “Restatement,” Leo Strauss issues a rhetorical call to arms against the universal and homogeneous state, the very state that his friend and interlocutor Alexandre Kojève asserts is the “end of history.” Strauss’s polemic begins with his denial that a world state, where all are recognized as free and equal, is “the simply best social order.” Strauss’ argument consists of two parts. First, Strauss argues that the universal homogenous state, as described by Kojève, fails on its own terms. This is because the world state is fundamentally unjust and cannot satisfy its worker-warriors, who will have nothing meaningful to do. Facing the prospect of becoming a Nietzschean “last man” and returning to the level of the beasts, Strauss maintains that real men (andres) will launch a nihilistic revolution against the universal and homogeneous state. Strauss even calls on workers and warriors to join this revolution, parodying the final words of “The Communist Manifesto.” Second, Strauss deploys the teachings of classical political philosophy against the modern philosophical premises of the universal and homogenous state. Strauss proposes that man’s humanity might be found in thinking (instead of in work and war) and that the end of human beings might be wisdom (not recognition). He then accuses Kojève of exaggerating most people’s capacity for wisdom, ignoring moral virtue, and lowering humanity’s goals. Strauss concludes his rejection of the universal and homogeneous state by asserting that it will likely be ruled by a Universal and Final Tyrant, who is not wise. Strauss predicts that this unwise Tyrant will suppress all dissent and effectively persecute genuine philosophers, who will be unable to employ esoteric writing or flee. Strauss concludes that “the coming of the universal and homogenous state will be the end of all philosophy on earth” (OT 211). |
| Skwire, | Sarah | Lliberty Fund, Inc. | sskwire@libertyfund.org | 1f | One Fell Swoop: Reading Shakespeare with Whomever Shows Up | For the past 18 months, I have been running a monthly reading group for a rotating group of volunteer learners of all ages and from all locations and backgrounds. The idea is very simple. Each month we gather to discuss a different Shakespeare play for 90 minutes, with the goal of reading all of the plays (and possibly some of the narrative poems and sonnets) in a little over three years. This paper will discuss some of the benefits and challenges of this kind of reading group, and will consider the gains for us as individuals and as communities from long term reading groups. The group’s recent discussion of Othello will serve as our central text. |
| Sloan, | Phillip | University of Notre Dame | psloan@nd.edu | 6g | “The Phenomenology of the Core Text Discussion Seminar” | In this paper I address the common criticisms and misinterpretations of the Core-Text discussion seminar. This is to be distinguished from the formal lecture, the French explication of the text, the German teacher-focused research seminar, and the Oxbridge tutorial. I will approach this through Edmund Husserl’s concept of “bracketing,” developed particularly in his Ideas I: General Introduction to Phenomenology (1913) as a way of suspending our knowledge of the massive scholarship that can surround any seminal text, in order to return directly to the text itself and engage this in an encounter through a group discussion that sees the professor also as a fellow learner. In this methodology it is reminiscent of the early Humanist movement that produced bare “commentary-free” texts to replace the heavily-commented received texts from the prior Scholastic tradition as a way of directly contacting the thought of the Ancient tradition without intermediary. The importance of this form of teaching in developing an inquiring and non-passive student culture necessary for democratic society will be emphasized as a practical outcome of this novel pedagogical style. |
| Snyder, | Christopher | Mississippi State University | csnyder@honors.msstate.edu | 5c | Finis Africae: Limits and Otherness in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose | This paper explores limits (geographical, epistemological, etc.) and otherness in Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose (1980). As a murder mystery the novel is both accessible to undergraduate readers and challenging, its labyrinthine layers engaging us in conversation with core texts in ancient philosophy, medieval theology, and postmodern semiotics. |
| Spiotta, | Daniel | Christendom College | djspiotta22@gmail.com | 7h | To Bear a Wary Eye: How Engaging Hamlet Habituates Revision | To a preeminent degree, the problems out of which Hamlet is composed demand that the audience actively remember and reflect. The play simultaneously invites and thwarts reductive readings–moral, political, and social. Through this problematizing, Shakepseare engages the methods and end-goals of Pyrrhonic skepticism, crafting a work of art which demands that each member of the audience fortify his heart and school his mind, in order to enable the attention, reflection, analysis, and trust necessary for an increase in wisdom and understanding. The attentive student will be moved to stake a position on the play; then, in after-reflection, he will be driven to deepen, modify, or revise this ‘reading’ — this habit of revision entails both humility and hope in the face of the unknown, and these are the habits which I hope students will form. |
| Spiro, | John-Paul | Villanova University | johnpaul.spiro@villanova.edu | 2b | The Psychology of Tyranny in Marlowe and Shakespeare | Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great is an influential portrayal of the psychology of tyranny, emphasizing the virtues of brutality and audacity, implying that Tamburlaine’s freedom from Christian morality renders him a kind of Superman or God on Earth. My paper explores Shakespeare’s rejection of this model of the Tyrant. Shakespeare’s Richard III and Macbeth, and figures from the comedies such as Duke Frederick and Angelo, are unable to sustain their will to power and instead are reduced by fear and guilt to self-defeating errors. |
| Spoerl, | Joseph | Saint Anselm College | jspoerl@anselm.edu | 8b | Race and Culture in Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be an Anticacist” | In his book “How to be an Antiracist,” Ibram X. Kendi embraces the cultural relativism of Ashley Montagu, according to which it is wrong to evaluate any culture as being inferior or superior in any way to any other culture. Kendi defines “cultural racism” as precisely the imposition of a cultural standard or hierarchy among cultures or racial groups, defing cultural relativity as the essence of cultural antiracism. However, Kendi’s book is a tacit critique of what he sees as racist cultures, so that his overall argument ends up falling into logical incoherence. |
| Stajkovic, | Alexander | University of Wisconsin | adstajkovic@wisc.edu | 1a | ||
| Stevens, | Jason | Ashland University | jsteven2@ashland.edu | 7d | The Gettysburg Address as Civic Education | All great texts ought to be read out loud, and the Gettysburg Address is certainly a great text. Moreover, the Gettysburg Address is an important part of the education of an American. Lincoln gave the address in 1863 as a way of educating the American public about the meaning and purpose of the Civil War, as well as motivating them to continue the fight. Today, the speech still resonates with students on many levels. For instance, as part of my job at a university, we often have students read the Gettysburg Address out loud. On one level, we want students to understand Lincoln’s view of the Civil War, which the speech certainly helps us to think about; but on another level, the Gettysburg Address also teaches that great texts, in general, speak across the generations, passing down important lessons for posterity, and that this great text, in particular, reveals Lincoln’s understanding of America and what it means to be an American. There is a power to the Gettysburg Address as civic education. |
| Stoner, | Sam | Assumption University | sa.stoner@assumption.edu | 2g, 5d | On Kant’s Platonism | In the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant characterizes his transcendental approach to philosophical probelms by comparing himself to Socrtates. But, Kant never mentions Socrates in his magnum opus, the Critique of Pure Reason. Instead, Kant proclaims that he carries forward an approach to philosophical rationalism initiated by Plato. And yet, Kant does not advocate for a return to Plato or encourage the careful study and interpretation of Platonic dialogues. To the contrary, he claims to have understood Plato better than Plato understood himself. My essay will attempt to clarify how and why Kant sees his critique of reason as a continuiation of Platonism and how and why he casts it as a culmination of the tradition of rationalism that Plato initaited. |
| Sullivan, | Vickie | Tufts University | vickie.sullivan@tufts.edu | 1b | What’s Wrong with Rome?: Machiavelli on the Ancient Republic | |
| Sutton, | Timothy | Samford University | tsutton@samford.edu | 1d | Dante and Ratzinger on Limbo | This essay will examine the Catholic teaching on limbo and suggest that doctrines are refined not only by formal councils and theological treatises, but also by imaginative works of art. In the early Church, most theologians joined Saint Augustine in consigning the unbaptized to hell, excepting only the limbus partum, the temporary limbo of the Old Testament Fathers. Saint Thomas Aquinas extends Augustine’s limbo to include limbus infantum, a more permanent limbo for innocent infants whose parents would have sought baptism. Aquinas mercifully proposes an absence of suffering despite the loss of eternal beatitude for those born with original sin who have not committed personal sin. In the Inferno, Dante goes beyond the Summa to include the virtuous pagans in his vision of limbo. This rather provocative inclusion actually anticipates the Church’s current position which more generously hopes for the full salvation of some of the unbaptized, and especially for the invincibly ignorant and infants. After centuries of uncertainty, Pope Benedict XVI in 2007 insisted that limbo was never a dogmatically defined belief, although it remains a potentially useful theological notion. This essay contends that the narrative history of limbo reveals the diverse epistemological dynamics that can influence how Church teaching is shaped and imagined in relation to more clearly defined dogmatic concepts. |
| Sweet, | David | University of Dallas | dsweet@udallas.edu | 6d | The Euthyphro: A Preface to the Republic | The Republic does not give a place to piety among the other virtues, in part, perhaps, because the Euthyphro has conducted a sufficient examination of piety as a virtue. Various definitions are proposed and rejected, although all the definitions reveal something about the kinds of the virtue. Among the kinds would be “traditional piety” (praying and sacrificing to the gods) and what might be called “radical piety” (doing what the best and most just of the gods does). In the course of the dialogue Socrates takes radical piety away from Euthyphro and leaves him with traditional piety. This leaves Socrates free to reintroduce radical piety in the Republic, where it is given the name of philosophy, the search for what is best and most just. Within the context of that broad view of piety as uniting the two dialogues, this talk will examine some controversial passages in the Euthyphro in an attempt to supply a clarification of them. |
| Tatum, | Lynn | Baylor University | Lynn_Tatum@Baylor.edu | 4f | “Le Morte d’Arthur” Redux: Tennyson (and other’s) Reappropriation of Thomas Malory’s Pentecostal Oath | Victorians were fascinated by King Arthur and his leadership in establishing an ideal social order. To this very day, at Westminster Palace, British monarchs don the royal robes and put on the Imperial State crown in a chamber decorated with heraldry and paintings from King Arthur’s Round Table. The Pre-Raphaelites produced scores of paintings and tapestries on Arthuriana. And in literature, Britain’s Poet, Laureate, Alfred Lord Tennyson produced one of the great icons of Victorian literature, the poem cycle, Idylls of the King. The Idylls are actually addressed to Queen Victoria and dedicated to her recently deceased husband, Prince Albert. Albert, so Tennyson eulogized, was fit for Arthur’s table: “Scarce other than my king’s ideal knight”. In the poem’s epilogue, Tennyson calls on Victoria, who was an ardent admirer of the poet, to continues to rule by the principles of Arthur. And what were those principles? In the penultimate, eleventh poem of the Idylls, cycle, “Guinivere”, Arthur recounts the oath sworn by all the knights of the Table Round. Here Tennyson’s encapsulates the essence of the values of his Victorian Table Round. This 19th century “Pentecostal Oath” looks distinctly than the oath sworn by Thomas Malory’s 15th century band of knights. What are these Victorian values? And can this Pentecostal Oath be updated for the 21st century? |
| Taylor, | Alexander | Christendom College | alextaylor.512@gmail.com | 6e, 7h | Education for the Politics of Spiritual Warfare: Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and the Impotence of Nietzschean Liberal Education | Some have argued that education is inescapably political. But what is politics? The tradition of modern political thought that stems from Hobbes has claimed that it is the rule of the sovereign over the body politic, or as Friedrich Nietzsche would put it, following yet modifying Hegel, the masters ruling the slaves. This claim stands in opposition to Catholic political thought, which, while accepting the existence of hierarchy and different degrees of competence when it relates to civic office, sees political power as arising from natural and supernatural duties bestowed by God, of fathers and mothers towards each other and their children, of statesmen and kings to serve their countries, and of priests and bishops to serve the people of God, the Church. A liberal education worthy of free men and women must prepare its students to exercise the latter form of power, in whatever form of vocation they find themselves called; but in order to do so, they must understand and embody the ordering of what is higher to the common good, rather than learning to incarnate in their lives either a left-wing progressive elitism which scorns the Western past (including Christianity) or a right-wing Nietzschean elitism which praises the Western past (excluding Christianity). This paper will examine the closing of a contemporary novel, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, whose ending on Ash Wednesday can help explain the larger vision of the novel to those fascinated by a work in which, to quote Michiko Kakutani, “the plot of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment [is] crossed with the story of Euripides’ Bacchae… told in the elegant, ruminative voice of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.” |
| Thant, | Minn | Michigan State University | thantmin@msu.edu | 3e | Leading Across the Line: Ernst Junger’s Lessons in Storm of Steel | Storm of Steel is the most famous work of Ernst Junger, a decorated German Warrior-Intellectual who was a titan of 20th century German literature. It is particularly unique among his works because it is a memoir about his experience in trench warfare in World War I, mostly devoid of philosophic musings that came to occupy his later works. Junger, with his objective prose, is able to describe the nature of modern war, hence Storm of Steel is worthy to be taught in courses based on core texts. Furthermore, Junger’s personal experience as a combatant shows us ways to be a leader during a war. I will be exploring Junger’s reflections on both modern warfare and leadership in this essay. |
| Thomas, | Charlotte (Charlie) | ACTC Executive Director, Mercer University | charlottethomas@coretexts.org | |||
| Thomas Elder, | Amy | University of Chicago | amythomas@uchicago.edu | 3f | Oh! That unfulfilments should follow the prophets. | I propose to offer a reading of Moby-Dick in light of the conclusion of the book of Job, beginning from Ishmael’s cry: “Oh! that unfulfilments should follow the prophets,” (chap. 81, “The Pequod Meets The Virgin”) since “Leviathan” has been fishhooked. I want to consider the ambiguity of this cry—whether we should read it as one of triumph or of terror, or both. It seems to me that the triumphalism is real–a celebration of American prowess raised even to the heavens, and, at the same time, a very real terror–that this prowess seems to dethrone God. I want to follow out both of these in light of other passages and, especially, those that seem to suggest the possibility of a new “great democratic God” and a democratic humanism as a new object of faith. Here too, it seems to me, lurks an ambiguity whose implication is rather dark. In one respect, we might see the whole novel as an attempt to show the whale, or leviathan, or Leviathan, as something incommensurate with human powers, both physical and intellectual, after all—even if the Pequod can fill it with fish spears. I am interested in how the novel does this indirectly—not just through Ishmael’s philosophical musings but by way of its analogical method, what R.W.B. Lewis has called “the transfiguration of figures,” and I would like to take a few moments to consider how this is done and with what effect. |
| Tingey, | David | The University of Tulsa | david-tingey@utulsa.edu | 6b | Joseph’s fate, divine will, and the refunctionalizing of myth | In his Joseph and His Brothers tetralogy, Thomas Mann retells the Old Testament story of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph to “refunctionalize” myth, to counter the prevailing backward-pointing myth favored by the national socialists with a “progressive” or forward-looking, humane myth. Mann said he put the myth back into the Old Testament account. He presents the patriarch protagonists as steeped in a view of the world in which mythic structures determine an individual’s identity, role, purpose, and fate. The development of Jacob’s, and then Joseph’s god and their religion progresses from human sacrifice to animal sacrifice (burnt offerings) to the God sacrifice (Jesus on the cross) to bread and wine on the altar of the church. Jacob’s project is to continue Abraham’s project of creating a monotheistic belief system, or worship of the “most high God,” in the midst of the polytheistic Egyptian and Mesopotamian culture. When Joseph’s brothers throw him into the dry well and plot to kill him, Joseph sees in his fate the hairy, red older brother (Cain, Set, the boar god) killing the younger smooth-faced brother (Abel, Osiris, Tammuz, etc.). His mythic pattern requires that he die. However, he sees the well as both a tomb and a womb from which he emerges reborn. He gives himself a new name, “Osar-seph,” linking himself to the hopeful mythic narrative of the slain and resurrected Osiris. He views his fate not as a defeat, but as a temporary journey to the underworld of Egypt, where he believes, based on the prevalent mythic patterns, he will find treasure, favor, and life-restoring and life-affirming power, as his ancestor Abraham did in Egypt and his father did in Haran. Thus, Joseph does not resign himself to his fate as prescribed to him by static mythic patterns. Instead, he chooses to act, largely out of necessity, to change his story and fate, and to reappropriate the mythic narratives of his time in order to preserve his life and that of his family and to continue the progression of the monotheistic god-project. |
| Townsend, | Mary | St. John’s University | townsenm@stjohns.edu | 5d | The Charms of Healing in Plato’s Charmides 155e-157d | The verb of convalescence in Greek, ὑγιάζω, is very rare in Plato. One of the most interesting place it appears is at Charmides 155e, where Socrates tells a tale about a healing charm for the wholeness of the body but primarily of the soul—at least in part to distract himself from the distraction of the erotic attraction witnessed just before of catching fire as “fawn before lion” (155d). This essay will consider Platonic distraction and charm as a matter of healing, and consider just what sorts of logos Socrates ultimately considers to be the best potions. By this, we can consider the ambiguities of health as a metaphor in the Platonic corpus. |
| Trepanier, | Lee | Assumption University | l.trepanier@assumption.edu | 2f | Public Leadership From Below in Tolstoy’s War and Peace | In the Second Epilogue of War and Peace, Tolstoy directly attacks the “great man” of history theory where elites direct historical events and instead proposes that history is directed from “below,” where the million of decisions made by ordinary people actually influence historical outcomes. This paper will examine Tolstoy’s theory of history and how the factors of causality, freedom can inform an account of public leadership. This theory of leadership is manifested in the novel of Tolstoy’s different portrayals of the public leadership of Napoleon and Kurtoz and their differing outcomes. |
| Troutner, | Timothy | Assumption University | td.troutner@assumption.edu | 2d | “Where Was Reason in the Garden: A Retrospective Solution to the Problem of Confessions 8.” | This paper addresses the interpretative problems raised by the famous conversion scene in Book 8 of Augustine’s Confessions, as well as the pedagogical challenges presented by this text. The injunction, in a child’s voice, to “pick it up and read” seems to be a key turning point in Augustine’s intellectual and spiritual journey. But although this seems to be the culmination of Augustine’s autobiography, it is notoriously difficult to find a rational explanation for this change of heart, unlike earlier transitions to Manicheanism and Neoplatonism. Does this indicate that this episode is an irruption of supernatural irrationality, corresponding to the intervention of predestination? Is this the movement of pure divine (aor human) will, without and beyond reason? Such is indeed a common interpretation of this text. But in addition to the potentially disturbing philosophical consequences of such a reading, students in core classes tend to find it an anticlimactic and unrelatable end to a story they otherwise find deeply compelling. This paper suggests that reason *is* at work in the garden at Milan. There is a potential intelligibility to this episode; it need not be read as sheer voluntarism. The arbitrariness of the fig tree incident dissipates if the Confessions is read as an integral whole, with Augustine’s “conversion” recontextualized in the light of the last few books of the Confessions (10-13), which are rarely taught due to their philosophical difficulty. As pure autobiography, book 8 can only appear irrational. But when set within the metaphysics of the late books, a perspective shift is suggested; Augustine’s conversion is intelligible on the deeper level of God’s own self-conversion. This paper will conclude with the pedagogical challenges of such an interpretation. How can one convey to students this deeper perspective, given the fact most classes stop after book 9? |
| Udwin, | Victor | The University of Tulsa | victor-udwin@utulsa.edu | 5e, 6b | “Fate or Necessity? An all-important distinction in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus.” | When Iokaste refers to Laios’ prophesied death as fate (moira), she characterizes herself and Laios as innocent victims of a senseless decree inflicted upon them by murkily understood divine agents. Knowing Aeschylus’ version of the story, however, in which Laios’ death at his son’s hand is the consequence of a decision to ignore divine instruction that the king and queen forego having children, Sophocles’ audience had reason to suspect that Iokaste is deflecting responsibility for her and her husband’s actions. So when, soon after Iokaste misleadingly attributes Laios’ death to moira, the audience hears Oedipus relate, not once but three times, the contents of a prophecy delivered to him by Delphic Apollo and bearing on his role in the same event just mentioned by Iokaste, it would have been keenly aware of a significant discrepancy, for now the father’s killing at the hands of his son is attributed not to “fate” but “necessity.” The audience will find that Apollo had three compelling reasons to engage Oidipous in Laios’ killing: the obligation to make good on his threat to Laios, the constraint imposed upon him by Oedipus’s failure to disambiguate the oracular communication in which he was engaged, and the impiety of Oidipous’s attitudes towards the god. It is arrogant and even offensive for him to expect Apollo to honor him. The result of Oidipous’s failure and impiety is that, to the requirement that he kill his father, intercourse with mother is added. The son’s repetition of his parents’ impiety necessitates a multiplication of consequences. The play thus cautions its Athenian audience to break its own cycle of impiety by humbly submitting to Delphi for instruction regarding its conduct relating to formerly allied cities now seeking protection of the Peloponnesian Alliance. |
| Wake, | Peter | St. Edward’s University | peteraw@stedwards.edu | 1g | “The wounds of the Spirit heal and leave no scars behind”: Hegel on Confession, Forgiveness, and Philosophy | The “Spirit” chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit develops the thesis that human rationality is inherently collective. Our rational reflections and endeavors are inescapably framed by the historically determined social world in which we are embedded, and so, in a way, to think is always to think with others, even when alone. This paper will address the significance of the fact that Hegel’s account of the dialectical unfolding of Spirit culminates in a scene of confession and forgiveness. More specifically, I will focus on how this scene is necessitated by both the achievements and limitations that Hegel finds in his own late 18th century/ early 19th century cultural world. I will then consider, in turn, how the phenomena of confession and forgiveness serve as the condition for developing a properly modern philosophical system. |
| Walker, | Kevin | University of Mary | kmattwalker@gmail.com | 7e | How to Not be a Tyrant: Lessons from Thomas Aquinas | Thomas Aquinas’ letter to King Hugh II of Cypress contains some typical bits of advice for a king, but also some extraordinary political philosophy that is valuable for any leader. Aquinas observed that power had a strong ability to bring out the king’s vices, and then blind him to the most obvious truths about what he truly is and why he holds such an office. His major goal, then, was to present political philosophy to the king and allow it to work like an act of charity in rescuing the him from his unique set of temptations, and understand the unique happiness reserved for truly good and just public authorities. |
| Wallace, | Jason | Samford University | wjwallac@samford.edu | 1g, 7e | Should Anything Hegel Ever Wrote be Taught as a Core Texts? | Hegel’s work is notoriously difficult. Yet, he remains one of the most influential thinkers of the 19th century both in terms of those he inspired and those who rejected his ideas. This paper seeks to explore how, if at all, Hegel can be made accessible in a core texts curriculum designed for a general undergraduate audience. |
| Walter, | Mark | Aurora University | mwalter@aurora.edu | 5f | “Actuality Overpowered by Appearance”: the Social Force of Beauty in Schiller and Beyond | In the Ninth Letter of Friedrich Schiller’s “On the Aesthetic Education of Man” we encounter a portrait of the ideal artist as well as a description of the ideal social function of art. Should the artist resist the blandishments of corrupt times, his or her beautiful forms are capable of pointing the way to a human future resting in truth, not error. Whatever conviction this claim might have aroused in the late 18th century, its veracity is questionable in a world in which the critical power of art would seem to divest itself from any necessary attachments to beauty. Yet beauty, truth, and the realization of human possibility remain linked in new theoretical contexts that recall and reconfigure Schiller’s original formulation. I examine two of these – Adorno’s attempts to come to terms with art beauty in his “Aesthetic Theory,” and Dave Hickey’s essay “Enter the Dragon: On the Vernacular of Beauty” – to ask what is exhausted and what remains unexplored in Schiller’s conception of the social force of beautiful art. |
| Warner, | Stuart | Roosevelt University | swarner@roosevelt.edu | 1b | “Stuck in the Middle with You”: Montesquieu on Brutus, Cassius, and Cato Taking Their Own Lives | |
| Watkins, | Alfredo | Duke University | alfredo.watkins@duke.edu | 6c | Education as Quest: Liberal Arts in the Heroic Life | In Book I of Plato’s Laws, we are told education is “the first of the finest things accruing to the best persons.” (644a) If this is true, every student in the classroom should be zealous to digest large swathes of text, fervently motivated to glean insights from lectures, and dutifully prepared for dialectical engagement with their peers. After all, if education really is “the finest of goods possessed by the best,” who wouldn’t be eager to possess that (and as quickly as possible)? Every instructor knows reality sometimes fails to match this ideal. What’s going wrong? Why don’t students get it? A natural impulse is to lay the blame at their feet. However, a prominent commentator once wrote that successful writing requires “humility: the knowledge that you must earn your reader’s interest, and that it is not for you to declare your success.” The same holds for teaching, where one approach is to take for granted students should be engaged and indulge in disappointment when they aren’t. In this paper I take Plato’s line, run with it, and turn it into a solution. I will explain that key to creating autodidacticians – self-motivated learners – is to show how liberal education is critical to “the best lives.” As I argue, typical students, especially young ones, long for an “heroic” element to build into their personal story. This is due to facts about normal, healthy human psychology well-known to educators since Aristotle. I pinpoint academic motivational deficiency in a failure to inflame what Plato designates the “spirit,” which is naturally responsive when presented with “heroic” models of character. I then display Plato, Nietzsche, and Saint Jerome as three competing models of how liberal education can be conceived as part of the thrilling quest to become “the best kind of person.” |
| Watkins, | Shannon | The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal | swatkins@jamesgmartin.center | 2f | The Public Need for Meaningful General Education | The country’s health and longevity are intertwined with the quality of the college graduates it produces. And much of that quality depends on general education, which consists of about 30 percent of students’ studies. Higher education remains the path chosen by a substantial number of young people, many of whom will populate the most influential sectors of society in government, business, journalism, and academia. The time they spend in college will not only mold their competence to perform difficult professional tasks but will inform how they approach complex moral and political issues. A well-designed general education, centered around the great works of the Western canon, is an opportune way to instill in students a sense of civic duty, an appreciation for American values, and to help them realize that they have a part in safeguarding the country’s ideals and institutions. It is, in these ways and others, very much a public good. Higher education is funded in part because it is at least implicitly understood that the preservation of the country’s principles, attitudes, and practices depends on what its citizens and leaders know. University boards, alumni, and legislators have a responsibility to ensure that the general education curricula of their institutions offer a “unified general education” that transmits students’ “common cultural heritage,” as stated by President Truman’s higher education commission nearly 80 years ago. In a time of fragmented knowledge, political polarization, and cultural decay, the commission’s call for a “core of unity” in general education resonates more clearly and loudly today than ever before. |
| Weiner, | Lauren | Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization | lweiner6@gmail.com | 3f | “Dostoevsky’s Devils and Ours” | “It had to be done,” said the healthcare CEO’s killer. What demons possessed the wealthy young man who awaits trial in New York? The murder was horrifying; it was weird; and it was, unfortunately, familiar. The urge to kill to correct an evil condition of the world was something that Fyodor Dostoevsky knew from the inside. As a young man, he joined a secret society that planned violence to bring an end to serfdom. After the Petrashevsky Circle was discovered, he was jailed and sentenced to death. A last-minute reprieve saved his life. He became the master chronicler of a paradox: the “do-gooder” who does something profoundly and irretrievably bad, for the sake of his cause. The ideas and ideologies change with the generations but the maladies of the soul do not. The problems raised in Devils (1871) are more than relevant as we struggle to understand what has become of our own “best and brightest.” This novel of Western European radicalism is part satire, part adventure story, and part theological meditation. My paper will explore this work on its own terms, to savor its peculiar brilliance, while also making a case for its indispensability for the 21st century reader. |
| West, | David | Ashland University | dwest6@ashland.edu | 1c | The Importance of Being Socrates in Cicero’s De Oratore | How could the figure of Socrates, the anti-rhetorical philosopher of Plato’s Gorgias, be of any importance in Cicero’s first dialogue on rhetoric and oratory? The scholarly consensus has concentrated on Socrates’s status in the dialogue as the originator of the centuries-old quarrel between rhetoric and philosophy. Readers generally come away with the impression that Cicero viewed Socrates as fundamentally hostile to the practice of oratory. They do so with good reason, since both major speakers in the dialogue, Antonius and Crassus, point to Socrates’s incompetence as an orator and his hostility to the art of rhetoric and the practice of public speaking. However, this impression fails to take account of three passages in which Socrates is represented positively. First, in the stage setting of Book 1, the interlocutors relax on Crassus’s estate under a plane tree, and one of the characters fondly compares their situation to that of Socrates and Phaedrus in Plato’s dialogue. Secondly, Crassus fondly recalls Socrates’s summoning others to study philosophy so that they would both desire to be and become good men. Third, the evident hero of the dialogue, Crassus, is compared by Cicero to Socrates in the preface of Book 3 in a variety of ways. In this paper, I will argue that the implication of these passages is that what distinguishes Cicero’s ideal orator, represented in the dialogue by Crassus, and the heart of what makes him excellent is precisely his Socratic traits: personal moral excellence, concern to know what justice is, and the courage to stand up for it. Moreover, these passages shed light on the larger question, so central to the dialogue, of why Cicero is so concerned in the work with promoting the idea that the orator should study philosophy. The positive references to Socrates in De Oratore thus suggest that the orator should study philosophy so that he will be a good man, with some knowledge of justice, who uses his rhetorical skills to pursue it. |
| Wu, | Shih Yu “Franklyn” | Dharma Realm Buddhist University | franklyn.wu@drbu.edu | 6f | The Paradox of the Island | “Be an island unto yourself!” Many interpret this advice from the Buddha in his last days as one about self-reliance. This paper alternatively thinks of the island as a refuge on a nautical journey, akin to shelters for Buddhist mendicants while they live an itinerant lifestyle. The practice of “leaving the householder’s life” aims to undermine the home as the strongest and most intimate support for a sense of an independently existing and last self and strengthen the understanding that all phenomena arise and vanish depending on a host of other conditions. Receiving alms from the community is an intentional practice highlighting the necessity of material nutriments and community engagements for what we consider as the self to continue. In this light, “be an island unto yourself” is an acknowledgement of the necessity of the public as much as a teaching about self-reliance. |
| Young, | Matthew | Elon University | myoung52@elon.edu | 6c | “To study men and things”: Education Beyond the Great Books. | Proponents of liberal education have often claimed that a liberal education grounded in core texts or Great Books is particularly well suited for producing men and women of great character and leadership capacity. In this paper, I engage with Booker T. Washington’s autobiography “Up from Slavery,” in which Washington describes his own education at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute. Washington’s education paired liberal education with manual labor, no doubt shaping his future leadership of the Tuskegee Institute and other schools. Yet Washington – himself an unquestionably great man – suggests that neither books nor labor lay at the heart of his education. Instead, “that which made the greatest and most lasting impression on me … was a great man … the late General Samuel C. Armstrong.” Indeed, Washington concludes: “One might have removed from Hampton all the buildings, class-rooms, teachers, and industries, and given the men and women there the opportunity of coming into daily contact with General Armstrong, and that alone would have been a liberal education. The older I grow, the more I am convinced that there is no education which one can get from books and costly apparatus that is equal to that which can be gotten from contact with great men and women.” I offer a friendly response to Washington’s argument, evaluating his claim that exposure to great persons lies at the heart of liberal education. Drawing on virtue ethics, I argue that those who wish to educate for greatness much consciously include exposure to great individuals or exemplars of greatness. This is, however, not entirely at odds with Great Books education. Instead, teachers can and ought to expose their students to human greatness by placing autobiographies such as Washington’s at the heart of the liberal arts curriculum. |
| Zelnick, | Stephen | Temple Univesity, retired | stephen.zelnick@gmail.com | Plenary speaker | Thoughts on Liberal Education and the Founding of ACTC |