Beowulf is over, and so my semester of experimental literature survey wraps up with it. ?I was dog-tired when I taught today, impending events having robbed me of some sleep, and I felt like the lesson suffered somewhat, but Beowulf?is a strong enough poem in its own right that, despite my own fatigue, the material [...]
Strangely enough, even though I had just as much amateur linguistics lore, Tolkien tidbits, and other distractions in my notes today, our class on Beowulf turned out more focused than did our class on Anglo-Saxon elegies just before spring break.? We covered more of the poetry, got in some discussions of big cultural questions, and [...]
I met with the last of my portfolio-revision groups on Thursday afternoon, and now that I’ve actually slept and had a chance to reflect on this fall’s classes, I’m pleased with my efforts.? I hope I never get so stupid as to claim credit for another human being’s curiosity, but I also hope I never [...]
We finished the Consolation of Philosophy with a bang today, and Dr. Freer came in on a very animated class to boot.? I started both classes with a fairly detached discussion of what chance is for Boethius, and we extended his definition into modern terms by saying that in Boethian terms, we call chance or [...]
We had a really great class in both sections today.? We began by tackling Boethius’s famous distinction between fate and providence, and the class followed along pretty well as we worked out the categories.? Boethius calls Fate the temporal unfolding of the eternal idea for history, which he names Providence.? So the relationship is not [...]
This was the perfect time for book three of Consolation to come along.? We all know that, five days and change from now, when the federal election commission declares the votes tallied and one of two men president-elect, the nastiness that characterizes a presidential campaign is going magically to disappear, and one of the two [...]
It’s fun, really, if one throws one’s self into it.? Money has no value at all when hoarded, and it has no staying power when spent.? Political and military power are illusions: they rely on chains of command that become weaker as one uses power more visibly.? Fame is ultimately insignificant: it lasts but a [...]
It’s interesting how different classes take the same questions in entirely different directions.? In today’s comp classes we discussed book one of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, and along with the text I wrapped up the session with a fairly straightforward question, namely what human nature is.
For Boethius, human nature has to do with the telos [...]
I led discussion in our Old English seminar and held my own with the big ax-swinging Anglo-Saxonists.? That’s always a nice feeling.? Now the next few weeks are going to be low-maintenance for me in there–each student has one discussion to lead, and mine is over, so now all I have to do between now [...]
Am I fishing for funky Google searches?? Yes.
We spent the bulk of today’s class talking about the fourth scene of J.B., in which paparazzi-style reporters scheme to capture a picture of Sarah, J.B.’s wife, just at the moment when she hears that her children have died.? We noted that the language in the scene is [...]
We wrapped up our textual discussion today, always a bummer.? I had forgotten that book five of Consolation was such a short one, but fortunately today also happens to be my class’s turn to do evaluations, so all worked out.
Moving from the problem of evil to the problem of divine knowledge and human freedom, Boethius [...]
Such was our topic today as we finished book four of Consolation.? Boethius asserts ultimately that, because evil is a movement away from goodness/being/God and towards nothing, the result of all evil will be nothing, and thus there is no problem of evil.? My students were dubious, but they’re still working out how to articulate [...]
I’ll admit that I didn’t do my best teaching today.? For whatever reason, I had trouble getting the discussion going in meaningful directions in either class, and although my students were saying good things, I didn’t do a very good job moving those comments into conversation with one another.? I don’t know whether I was [...]
I could tell that my 8:00 class is a pious group today; almost half of them missed class, no doubt for All Saints’ Day services.? And of the ones that did show up, half of them had their heads bowed in prayer for most of the class.? Or at least they had their eyes closed.
11:00 [...]
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 [...]
Just finished The Consolation of Philosophy yesterday. The final three chapters deal with those lovely questions of divine foreknowledge, determinism, and human agency. Boethius, an unapologetic Platonist, unsurprisingly advances the Platonist argument that the same action that seems undetermined to “human” reason can be known exhaustively to a divine mind.
Such an argument normally [...]
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