We jumped a thousand years into the future today, landing squarely in the sixth century AD.? A class that lives, so to speak, in ancient Greece can make those sorts of jumps.
We found at the end of our jump a man who did not so much contemplate Plato’s thought experiment about morality and consequences but lived it. Boethius foud himself exiled, awaiting execution, because he uncovered a conspiracy to blackmail the Roman Senate.? The political enemies he made in that endeavor brought false charges against him, and he found himself in the shoes of Socrates and of Jesus, about to die for being good.
Steeping in tragic poetry to alleviate the suffering, Boethius finds himself entertaining Philosophy embodied.? The Consolation of Philosophy is a record of the conversation that ensued.
I think both classes got into the appropriation of Plato today.? Both groups seemed interested in seeing how a Christian-era intellectual uses Republic both to narrate his own career and to craft a new perspective from which to see his own situation.
Along with light doses of Boethius (about a third of a normal Plato reading assignment), the classes have been doing some philosophical freewriting, and my hope is that their final papers, brief philosophies of liberty, will turn out compelling for it.
