Annapolis Graduate Institute Preceptorials
Current Preceptorials
The following are preceptorials for the upcoming semester.
Classes meet on Tuesdays during odd-numbered weeks (1, 3, 5, 7, 9), and on Mondays and Thursdays during even-numbered weeks (2, 4, 6, 8, 10) from 7:30–9:30 p.m. ET / 5:30–7:30 p.m. MT beginning June 3.
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
Mr. Brendan Boyle
Description: Thucydides speaks of his work as a “possession for all time.” But why would the story of a conflict between two Greek city-states in an obscure corner of the Mediterranean be a possession for us now, two-thousand years removed? Why not think instead that the conflict is, from our standpoint, a relatively minor skirmish? Why not think that the difference between contemporary war-fighting and its ancient counterpart makes whatever happened between Athens and Sparta of mere antiquarian interest? Perhaps a close reading of the entire text will reveal answers to these and other, related questions. Any translation of the text is fine, though having access to — if not possession of — the so-called Landmark Thucydides (Strassler, ed.) will be helpful though not absolutely necessary.
Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1
Mr. Rahul Chaudhri
Description: In this preceptorial, we will study the entire first volume of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, and consider, along with Schopenhauer, how our fundamental metaphysical picture of the world may shape our views on life and art, on ethics and aesthetics. We will proceed at a slow and careful pace, focusing on an average of thirty pages each meeting.
Required Text: The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I, translated by Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman, and Christopher Janaway, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chaucer, Canterbury Tales
Ms. Erika Martinez
Description: Chaucer’s 14th century masterpiece of late Middle English, The Canterbury Tales, wastes not a moment, plunging its reader into the luscious thrills of spring and the provocative descriptions of The General Prologue’s pilgrims, according to their stations, occupations, and vocations. The chivalry-loving Knight arrives with his coat of mail stained and besmothered; the Wife has been married in church five times and may be looking to marry again; the estate-managing Reeve always places himself at the back of the line of pilgrims, with his rusty blade dangling for all to see. Chaucer’s pilgrims offer interpretations of love, marriage, roosters, Christianity, oaths and more as they embark on a contest to tell the tale of greatest seriousness and pleasure. The prize: supper paid for by the pilgrims who accompany the winner to and from Canterbury. We will read the Tales in its entirety (as we know it), never flinching from the delight, humor, and terror we will find.
Pedagogy and Education
Mr. Llyd Wells
Description: The Graduate Institute was founded for teachers and still attracts a large number of them. But we are all teachers of some sort and this preceptorial will help us think about that practice and that vocation. Unlike most preceptorials, we will read a range of different authors, ancient and modern alike, all of whom have written penetrating – and, I think, quite opposed – accounts of what is involved in shaping other minds, if that is even the right formulation to use. (If it isn’t, what is?) Authors to be read include, but are not limited to, Plato, Aristotle, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Dewey, Arendt.
Classes meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays 3:00 – 5:00 pm on the Annapolis campus beginning June 10.
Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury; Absalom, Absalom!
Mr. Matthew Caswell
Description: In lieu of a description, Mr. Caswell warmly welcomes anyone with questions about the preceptorial to write to him directly.
Aristotle, Organon: Language, Logic, & First Philosophy
Mr. John Tomarchio
Description: ORGANON is the title given by editors to the collection of Aristotle’s logical works. His Categories and Topics deal with naming and defining; his De interpretatione with judgment; and his Prior and Posterior Analytics with reasoning. However, Aristotle’s treatments are not just the technical Logic of the logician, but rather the inquiry of a philosopher who approaches it as a sort of first philosophy of human reason. I think this approach well conveyed by the introduction Aquinas gave to the Organon, which
also gives some sense of what we might take up in the preceptorial: “What is peculiar to the intellective part of man is its ability to reflect upon itself. For the intellect knows itself. Accordingly, reason is able to reason about its own act. Now an art is needed to direct the act of reasoning, that by it a man when performing the act of reasoning may proceed in an orderly and easy manner and without error. This art is Logic, the science of reason. And it concerns reason not only because it is according to reason (for that is common to all arts),
but because it is concerned with the very act itself of reasoning. Therefore it seems to be the art of the arts, because it directs us in the act of reasoning, from which all arts proceed.”
Past Preceptorials
The following are preceptorials from previous semesters.
Classes meet on Wednesday from 8:00 – 10:00 pm ET / 6:00 – 8:00 pm MT beginning January 22.
Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle
Mr. Mark Rollins (Santa Fe)
Description: Having tried out the study of medicine, then study for the ministry, and rejecting both, Charles Darwin, like many young men of 22 years, was uncertain which direction he should direct his life. With some rudimentary training in biology and geology, he boarded, toward the end of 1831, the H.M.S. Beagle as a naturalist and gentleman
companion for the captain. The voyage of five years became the life-defining experience for Darwin, and was ultimately to change fundamentally the way we look at nature. The book reveals a young man with an active imagination, curiosity, perspicacity, and an openness to what nature can teach, on a modern Odyssey. While we do not yet find a full theory, we do see Darwin slowly assembling the main observational premises of what was to become his theory of evolution; and, along the way, we find many insights about human societies and cultures, as well as geological discoveries. And he proves to be a very capable writer – this work is often taken as a model of Victorian non-fiction writing. You will enjoy reading the work, and seeing how an original and imaginative scientific mind evolves.
Plato, Protagoras and Cratylus
Mr. Russell Winslow (Santa Fe)
Description: In this preceptorial, we will interpret works of Plato that raise the question of the art of persuasion and language (among other things). To this end, we will formulate our interpretation by analyzing not only the arguments of Socrates, but also the dramatic, literary, and historical body into which Plato always situates those arguments.
Recommended Editions: I will use Focus Publishing’s translation of both texts by Joe Sachs. If you use another translation, it must have Stephanus pagination. Socrates and the Sophists. Plato's Protagoras, Euthydemus, Hippias Major, & Cratylus. Translated by Joe Sachs.
First Assignment: Before our first meeting, please read the entire Protagoras once, even if only in a cursory way. For our first discussion, we will focus on Stephanus pages 309a-314c.
Melville, Moby Dick
Mr. Llyd Wells (Santa Fe)
Description: Always and everywhere troubled hearts have sought peace of mind beside still or running waters. Some might take themselves to the banks of a nearby pond and ask it to deliver up life’s secrets. But others’ troubles seem scaled to greater dimensions. These afflicted individuals long to be flung far from the familiar. They would know the horrors of the deep, thinking it ". . . well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in.” But what of that most terrifying inmate? Can a covenant be made with the Leviathan? The monsters of Ishmael’s deep form “endless processions of the whale and, mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.” He is the living symbol of evil that thwarts men in their pursuit of good. He is Moby Dick.
Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel
Ms. Judy Seeger (Annapolis)
Description: Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel is a challenging book that manages to be both hilarious and deeply serious. Close study of it will occupy the majority of our meetings, but we will begin with readings from both Erasmus and Luther, readings that also bring together the theological and the social in a tumultuous admixture: In Praise of Folly, an "Open Letter to Pope Leo X," and the "The Freedom of a Christian."
Kafka, Selected Novels & Short Fiction
Ms. Erica Beall (Annapolis)
Description: “Some books seem like a key to unfamiliar rooms in one’s own castle." So says Franz Kafka, whose work explores society and the soul by defamiliarizing the familiar, demanding seriousness in the face of the ridiculous, and drawing on the grotesque to prompt reflection on the poignant difficulty of being human. Thomas Mann said of his work that it was "dreamlike in conception and form," but "full of a desperately reasoned morality, struggling with all of its might toward justice." His is not a gentle approach to literature, but the elegance of Kafka's prose and the depth of his insights have nonetheless left their indelible mark on the modern literary tradition. We will read one of his major novels, The Trial, along with several of his shorter works, including The Metamorphosis, The Burrow, and In the Penal Colony.
Required Text: We will begin with The Metamorphosis, and I ask that you use Susan Bernofsky's translation (ISBN:9780393347098).
Classes meet on Thursday from 7:30 to 9:30 pm on the Annapolis campus beginning January 9.
Aeschylus, The Four Non-Seminar Plays (Suppliant Maidens; Persians; Seven Against Thebes; & Prometheus Bound)
Mr. Bill Braithwaite
Description: These are The Suppliant Maidens (50 daughters flee Egypt to Greece to avoid forced marriages with their 50 Egyptian cousins); The Persians (a look from the defeated Persians’ point of view at the Athenian victory in the naval battle at Salamis); Seven Against Thebes (Eteocles rules Thebes, Polyneices and allies attack, Antigone and Ismene mourn the death of their brothers); and Prometheus Bound (a cosmic-scale drama about Prometheus’ gift of fire to man, and what it means that he stole it from the gods).
We will spend four meetings on each play. Knowledge of Greek is not required.
Recommended text: Aeschylus II (2d ed) in the Grene and Lattimore Complete Greek Tragedies series (University of Chicago Press, 1991).
Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
Mr. Jay Smith
Description: Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) was one of the founders and first practitioners of Sociology. In his The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life he argues for the practice of sociology, and exhibits its methods of exploration and explanation. He charts how he comes to his definition of religion as "a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden - beliefs and practices which unite into one simple moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them." In so doing he demonstrates a novel mode of social scientific inquiry, one which was to have a rich and
complicated afterlife.
Recommended Text: The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life with a red cover, with ISBN 0-19-954012-8, and ordered from Thriftbooks.
Heidegger, Being and Time
Mr. Lee Goldsmith
Description: Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time has a strong claim to being the greatest work of philosophy of the 20th century. Many excellent minds have been drawn to the book and drawn from it various lessons related to the Enlightenment, Existentialism, politics, and the foundations of science, just to name a few. But at its heart this book is one attempt--thoroughgoing, to be sure--in a life full of attempts to discover what Heidegger calls the meaning of being. That meaning, he observes at the outset, is both the most transparent when we use the verb ’to be’ and yet the most perplexing when we try to explain what we mean by it. Heidegger hoped to lead us out of these perplexities by focusing the investigation on this simple fact: that we ourselves feel compelled to ask what being means. Thus he blazes a trail from a novel analysis of our own existence back to the meaning of being, a trail which it will be our task to follow probingly.
Required Text: I would like the students all to use the revised edition of Joan Stambaugh's translation published by SUNY Press in their Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy (ISBN: 1438432763).
Austen, Emma, Persuasion, and Mansfield Park
Mr. Chris Nelson
Description: Jane Austen may be the finest writer of prose in the English language, and we might have chosen to read any three of her books, all of which take place in a happy world and end happily in marriage. These three are her last three novels and have among her protagonists her youngest and oldest heroines. We see these unsettled young women find their way to becoming settled just before they embark on their married lives (that we know will be happy ones), but we only see her young women from inside and out in the turbulent period in between. Each of the novels have a wonderful way of being comic, not so much in the person of her heroines but in the character and behavior of those surrounding them. One might say that the novels are delicious in this latter respect and provoke much private laughter while reading them.
Ancient Greek Translation
Mr. Robert Goldberg
Description: We will translate and study a Platonic dialogue, as yet undetermined. Currently under consideration are the Lysis and the Euthyphro. This preceptorial is open to anyone who has done the first semester or second semester of GI Greek or who has learned classical Greek elsewhere.
Classes meet on Wednesday from 8–10 p.m. ET / 6–8 p.m. MT beginning August 28.
Camus, Novels and Philosophical Essays
Ms. Erica Beall
Description: French philosopher Albert Camus’ work revolves around the following hypothesis: the human condition is, fundamentally, absurd. Camus developed the concept of “l’absurde” in rigorous philosophical essays, and explored its social, psychological, and ethical implications in his novels - among the most elegant produced in the 20th century. Camus claimed that the absurd could not be grasped through his essays or literature alone; thus, in this preceptorial we will explore the philosophy of the absurd in a selection of Camus’ major works that includes both modes of exploration: the novels The Plague and The Fall, and the essays “The Myth of Sisyphus” and “The Rebel.”
Shakespeare, The Histories: Richard II, Henry IV Pt. 1, & Henry IV Pt. 2
Ms. Sarah Stickney
Description: We will read the first three of the plays known collectively as The Henriad, a series of histories in which Shakespeare chronicles the forced deposal of Richard II and the rise of Henry IV and his son, Henry V. These plays are wonderfully rich, transcending the particular historical events on which they are based. They treat a broad range of subjects including friendship, government, romance, class, what it means to desire and pursue power, received wisdom vs. practical know-how, and more. Shakespeare presents a layered and ambiguous portrait of human life and leaves his readers/viewers to come to their own conclusions about whether the categories of right and wrong are applicable. This will be a close-reading preceptorial in which we will focus on one act (roughly) per meeting, and pay special attention to Shakespeare’s language and poetry, while enjoying the politics, intrigue, scandal, and high spirits of these plays.
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice
Mr. Mark Rollins
Description: John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice has frequently been cited as the most influential work in moral and political philosophy of the twentieth century, at least in the English-language tradition, and it remains central to contemporary philosophical discussions of political, social, and ethical issues. Virtually every author of political philosophy since the work’s publication over fifty years ago has felt a need to address Rawls’ defense of a Kantian/contractarian theory of distributive justice – “justice as fairness” – against narrowly utilitarian doctrines on the one hand, and strictly libertarian views on the other. We will read substantial excerpts from that book, closing the preceptorial with a briefer examination of some of Rawls’ restatements and elaborations of the theory toward the end of his life (in 2002).
Xenophon, Education of Cyrus, Memoirs of Socrates, & Anabasis
Ms. Stephanie Nelson
Description: Among Classical Greek authors Xenophon is unique in his range of genres, extending from Socratic philosophy, to his own, fraught, military expedition in Persia, to an account of the Great Persian King, Cyrus – rather like a Plato, Herodotus and Thucydides rolled into one. In addition, in terms of practice, he himself gained a reputation for being a great military leader, while, as a writer, the Education of Cyrus is often thought to have given rise to the ancient novel.
This preceptorial will explore how and where these different modes of thinking intersect: do we learn in the same way from Socrates, from a mythologized Cyrus, and from Xenophon’s own experiences at war? Do we learn the same lessons about what it means to be an excellent human being, or about what it means to be a human being at all? Do the very different challenges faced by Socrates, Xenophon, and Cyrus demand completely different kinds of excellence or is there one essential quality to being human that Xenophon brings out? What finally do philosophy, history, and myth have in common, so that Xenophon felt he could write them all?
Spinoza, Ethics
Mr. John Cornell
Description: Spinoza was perhaps the most audacious thinker in a century of audacious thinkers, and probably the most relevant today. He engaged in a systematic critique of biblical religion, issuing a permanent challenge to “the teachers of sadness and superstition.” In the Ethics, he presented his positive vision, a demonstration of the truth about God, nature, and the embodied soul. This truth was to secure the good life for all rational individuals.
Nietzsche, having formulated the doctrine of will-to-power, discovered in Spinoza his true predecessor. Goethe thought that Spinoza’s teaching about loving God without return was the most sublime teaching in philosophy. Lacan followed Spinoza as the realist who first based ethics on an analysis of desire. One could add to the list of Spinoza’s beneficiaries: Eliot, Melville, Schopenhauer, Borges, Deleuze…
Caveat: The first two of the Ethics‘ five parts will test a student’s fortitude. There the philosopher lays out, with geometric rigor, his first principles concerning substance and attribute, intellect and will – principles intended to revolutionize all former metaphysics and epistemology. The payoff lies in the practical insights that follow. The subsequent parts of the Ethics are a stunningly original study of the emotions, showing how they originate and commonly hold the soul in bondage, and finally how humanity is liberated.
Recommended text: Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, Proved in Geometrical Order, Matthew Kisner, transl. and ed. (Cambridge U. P.)
First Assignment: In Part One “On God,” Definitions, Axioms, Propositions 1-8, including scholia 1 and 2
Classes meet on Thursday from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. on the Annapolis campus beginning August 22.
Plato, Minos and Hipparchus
Mr. Bill Braithwaite
Description: The Minos begins, “What is law?” Hipparchus begins, “What is gain” (or “profit”)? Together, these two short dialogues (12-13 pages each) address the deepest philosophical roots of the American regime as a commercial republic, the vision in its Founding documents. We will inquire what Plato suggests about the conditions and limits of a profit-seeking people’s capacity for self-government.
Text: Any standard translations; but the bi-lingual Loeb editions will make easier our occasional references to the original Greek (knowledge of Greek is not, however, a pre-requisite).
Three German Dramas
Ms. Gisela Berns
Description: We will study three very different but equally great plays from the late 18th and early 19th century, each of which, in addition to its formal excellences, poses powerful questions about freedom and Enlightenment.
Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, a moving play about the problem of tolerance in a divided world, set in Jerusalem during the time of the Crusades, but perhaps even truer today.
Schiller’s Don Carlos, a great dramatic poem about the struggle of Enlightenment, fighting for freedom in the dark world of 16th century Spain.
Goethe’s Faust, the story of man endlessly striving for knowledge, but at the cost of guilt involving the lives of others.
Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, Selected Writings
Mr. Steven Crockett
Description: The American civil war was, like the Peloponnesian, a clear window into human nature, its best and its worst, in times of great difficulty and great consequence. In the decades leading up to the American war, and during it, Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass emerged as men of great character, intelligence and accomplishment. Both born in poverty, with little access to education, they largely brought themselves up into their excellences. Partly because they were on opposite sides of the color line, their ambitions took different shapes, and they contended with slavery, and each other, in different ways. Their writings show us much about freedom and human excellence.
Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception
Mr. Jay Smith
Description: Merleau-Ponty’s “Phenomenology of Perception”, one of the most original and transformative works of 20th century phenomenology, begins with the experience of one’s own lived body as essential to any understanding of the nature of perception. The experience of one’s own body is not the experience of the body as one object among other objects nor as an object of thought for a separable and constituting consciousness. Drawing upon insights from psychological and neurological studies, as well as from classical and contemporary philosophical reflections on perception, all to help to deepen and better articulate our lived experience of embodiment, Merleau-Ponty explores the ever changing and ambiguous nature of perception. This exploration and articulation helped to establish embodiment at the heart of existential and phenomenological philosophy. Students in the preceptorial will need a copy of the Routledge edition of the Landes translation, which is an important improvement over its predecessors.
Introduction to Ancient Greek
Mr. Robert Goldberg
Description: Here is your opportunity to learn all the basics of the Greek language in a single semester and to translate passages from the pre-Socratics, Aesop, Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle, Menander, and others. In addition, you will learn a lot not only of Greek grammar but of English grammar as well, and you will come to understand the importance of reading the Greeks in their original language and in very accurate translations. Learning Greek will make reading the texts we study at St. John’s an eye-opening experience. The text we use is by Mollin & Williamson, Tutors who wrote it with a view to the needs of St. John’s students in particular.
In the second semester, should you elect to continue, we will translate some work of philosophy, most likely by Plato. As of now, I’m considering doing Plato’s Lysis, the dialogue on friendship. Students who have already done either semester of the Greek preceptorial, or have learned Greek elsewhere, are welcome to take the second semester only.
Text: Introduction to Ancient Greek, 4th Ed., Mollin & Williamson
Classes meet on Tuesdays during odd-numbered weeks (1, 3, 5, 7, 9), and on Mondays and Thursdays during even-numbered weeks (2, 4, 6, 8, 10) from 7:30 – 9:30 p.m. ET / 5:30 – 7:30 p.m. MT beginning May 27.
Descartes, The Passions of the Soul
Mr. Halley Barnet
Description: Are we our minds or our bodies? By the same move that Descartes wrested soul and body asunder, he also made possible the explanation of soul's activity, its thoughts and feelings, in terms of the body. While we get glimpses of what this might mean in Descartes' more philosophical and metaphysical works, only in The Passions of the Soul - the last treatise Descartes published before he died - can we see the full implications of this corporeal psychology for our cognitive and moral selves. In this preceptorial, we will work to understand the Cartesian Self from the perspective of body - both inanimate and animate. Other short, related works may be read alongside The Passions of the Soul.
Hobbes, Leviathan
Mr. Greg Freeman
Description: This is an opportunity to read the entirety of a text that we begin to work on in the Politics and Society tutorial. Hobbes's book is foundational for modernity; only a close reading can do justice to its many aspects.
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
Mr. Ken Wolfe
Description: Hans Castorp, “an ordinary young man,” travels to the Swiss Alps for a brief visit at a tuberculosis sanatorium peopled by compelling and unsettling characters. He stays for seven years – years of unimagined experiences and dogged questions: What is life? What is death? What is love? Friendship? Music? And perhaps most importantly, What is Time? “I have dreamed a poem of mankind,” says Hans. What is the “Magic Mountain?” We will explore the characters and their questions through a close reading of Thomas Mann’s masterwork.
Translation by John E. Woods (Vintage Books)
First Assignment: pp. 3-54 ("Arrival"–"Teasing/Viaticum/Interrupted Merriment")
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
Ms. Erika Martinez
Description: Description: The first characters we encounter in The Portrait of a Lady take the form of shadows. Three men taking afternoon tea cast their shadows upon a “perfect” English lawn. We soon meet Miss Isabel Archer and are introduced to her imaginative powers: “Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out of the window. She was not accustomed indeed to keep it behind bolts.”
But these early shadows later become a darkening of the world. Made independent by wealth, she makes the wrong choice from among her suitors. As a married woman, Isabel Archer–now Mrs. Osmond–meditates upon more abstract shadows that emanate not from her own mind but which are a part of her husband’s “very presence.” Characterized as the “intellectual” among her sisters, she has married the man for whom, “The real offence, as she ultimately perceived, was her having a mind of her own at all.” What does art have to do with all of this? We will read James’s novel as slowly as the summer permits, occasionally wandering about with Isabel through Roman art and ruins, turning at times to the problem of understanding why this novel is a portrait.
Any edition is fine.
First Assignment: Volume One, Chapters 1-5.
Pedagogy and Education
Mr. Brendan Boyle
Description: The Graduate Institute was founded for teachers and still attracts a large number of them. But we are all teachers of some sort and this preceptorial will help us think about that practice and that vocation. Unlike most preceptorials, we will read a range of different authors, ancient and modern alike, all of whom have written penetrating – and, I think, quite opposed – accounts of what is involved in shaping other minds, if that is even the right formulation to use. (If it isn’t, what is?) Authors to be read include, but are not limited to, Plato, Aristotle, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Dewey, Arendt
Classes meet daily Monday through Friday 2– 4 p.m. on the Annapolis campus beginning July 22.
Cervantes, Don Quixote
Mr. Nicholas Bellinson
Description: In this preceptorial we will risk our own sanity by reading and trying to grasp the whole voluminous history of Don Quixote of la Mancha, who "lost his mind... [with] too much reading.” Quixote's adventures with Sancho Panza and Rocinante, and his representation of chivalric ideals, will make us question the relationship between imagination and reality, irony and sincerity, humor and suffering. Why, indeed, has Cervantes' novel seemed to so many readers and writers both the wellspring and the trial of "modernity"?
Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society
Mr. Dan Harrell
Description: The Technological Society was originally published in France in 1954 (under the title La Technique ou l’enjeu du siècle). But the book received little attention until an English translation appeared in 1964, and it has remained in print ever since. Even though the author, Jacques Ellul, was a professor of law and history, and characterized the book as a work in sociology, it has since impressed readers as perhaps the most encompassing and radical philosophical reflection on technology imaginable. Scott Buchanan, for one, compared it to something Plato might have envisioned: “If he had been faced with the panoply of artificial technical operations, processes and products among which we live, he surely would have been led to construct something like the technical phenomenon that we find in Jacques Ellul’s La Technique.” The irony of such a comparison is how unprecedented Ellul himself considered his subject, as well as how urgent: We are conditioned by something new: technological civilization. I make no reference to a past period of history in which men were allegedly free, happy, and independent. The determinisms of the past no longer concern us; they are finished and done with. If I do refer to the past, it is only to emphasize that present determinants did not exist in the past, and men did not have to grapple with them then. The men of classical antiquity could not have found a solution to our present determinisms, and it is useless to look into the works of Plato or Aristotle for an answer to the problem of freedom. But is Ellul right about this? This is the question I hope we can address in the preceptorial through a reading of this remarkable book.
Classes meet on Thursday from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. on the Annapolis campus beginning January 11.
Aristotle, Politics
Ms. Deborah Axelrod
Description: In the beginning of the Politics, Aristotle says that we are political animals and he indicates that the city is the completion of our humanity, like the blossoming rose on the bush. We will wonder how he arrives at this claim and also investigate how it – and Aristotle’s beginnings more generally – shapes his accounts of constitutions, good and bad citizens, education, and revolution.
Proust, Swann’s Way
Ms. Sarah Benson
Description: In the first part of this 1913 novel, the narrator recounts memories of his childhood and contemplates the experiences that summon these memories. In the second part the narrator enters imaginatively into a love affair of Monsieur Swann, one of the grown-ups who figures in the first part. While told from the point of view of an “I,” the novel explores whether there is a self that coheres in time, or language, or material body. These mysteries of the “I” are present from the opening lines:
“For a long time, I went to bed early. Sometimes, as soon as my candle was extinguished, my eyes would close so quickly that I had no time to say to myself “I’m falling asleep.” And, a half hour later, the thought that it was time to try to get to sleep would wake me up; I would want to put down the volume that I thought I still had in my hands and to put out my light; I had not stopped, while sleeping, to reflect on what I had just been reading, but these reflections had taken a rather strange turn; it would seem to me that I was myself the thing the work was talking about: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V.”
I recommend this edition, available in the bookstore:
Marcel Proust. Swann's Way. Translated by Lydia Davis. Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition. ISBN: 9780142437964
Dante, Divine Comedy
Mr. Cordell Yee
Description: We’ll read the Comedy in its entirety, six to eight cantos per class. If time permits, we will also read selections from other of Dante’s works, for example, La Vita Nuova and De Monarchia.
Text: Any of the translations of the Divine Comedy available at the college bookstore. Any supplementary readings will be supplied by the tutor.
Melody: The Music of the West
Mr. Steven Crockett
Description: For over a thousand years, the music of the West has been unfolding the riches that have lain in the simplest but most accessible and personal form of music: melody. And the unfolding has brought with it new things to think about, and new forms of relations among human beings. Each week in the preceptorial we will consider closely some great work of the Western musical tradition, beginning with medieval liturgical chant, moving through Perotin, Palestrina, Bach, and others, and ending perhaps with Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments, or a more recent work of 20th and 21st century music. And each week we will read and discuss some brief written work, ancient or modern, of reflection on music – how it is made, of what and by whom, what gives it shape and wholeness, and what it is for. Because having names for things, and images of them, helps us engage more fully with them, we will also learn each week a modest portion of the tradition’s still developing vocabulary and imagery for music.
Ancient Greek Translation
Mr. Robert Goldberg
Description: We will translate and study a Platonic dialogue, as yet undetermined but possibly the Lysis—the dialogue on friendship. This preceptorial is open to anyone who has done the first semester or second semester of GI Greek or who has learned classical Greek elsewhere.
Classes meet on Thursday from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. on the Annapolis campus beginning January 11.
Aristotle, Politics
Ms. Deborah Axelrod
Description: In the beginning of the Politics, Aristotle says that we are political animals and he indicates that the city is the completion of our humanity, like the blossoming rose on the bush. We will wonder how he arrives at this claim and also investigate how it – and Aristotle’s beginnings more generally – shapes his accounts of constitutions, good and bad citizens, education, and revolution.
Proust, Swann’s Way
Ms. Sarah Benson
Description: In the first part of this 1913 novel, the narrator recounts memories of his childhood and contemplates the experiences that summon these memories. In the second part the narrator enters imaginatively into a love affair of Monsieur Swann, one of the grown-ups who figures in the first part. While told from the point of view of an “I,” the novel explores whether there is a self that coheres in time, or language, or material body. These mysteries of the “I” are present from the opening lines:
“For a long time, I went to bed early. Sometimes, as soon as my candle was extinguished, my eyes would close so quickly that I had no time to say to myself “I’m falling asleep.” And, a half hour later, the thought that it was time to try to get to sleep would wake me up; I would want to put down the volume that I thought I still had in my hands and to put out my light; I had not stopped, while sleeping, to reflect on what I had just been reading, but these reflections had taken a rather strange turn; it would seem to me that I was myself the thing the work was talking about: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V.”
I recommend this edition, available in the bookstore:
Marcel Proust. Swann's Way. Translated by Lydia Davis. Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition. ISBN: 9780142437964
Dante, Divine Comedy
Mr. Cordell Yee
Description: We’ll read the Comedy in its entirety, six to eight cantos per class. If time permits, we will also read selections from other of Dante’s works, for example, La Vita Nuova and De Monarchia.
Text: Any of the translations of the Divine Comedy available at the college bookstore. Any supplementary readings will be supplied by the tutor.
Melody: The Music of the West
Mr. Steven Crockett
Description: For over a thousand years, the music of the West has been unfolding the riches that have lain in the simplest but most accessible and personal form of music: melody. And the unfolding has brought with it new things to think about, and new forms of relations among human beings. Each week in the preceptorial we will consider closely some great work of the Western musical tradition, beginning with medieval liturgical chant, moving through Perotin, Palestrina, Bach, and others, and ending perhaps with Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments, or a more recent work of 20th and 21st century music. And each week we will read and discuss some brief written work, ancient or modern, of reflection on music – how it is made, of what and by whom, what gives it shape and wholeness, and what it is for. Because having names for things, and images of them, helps us engage more fully with them, we will also learn each week a modest portion of the tradition’s still developing vocabulary and imagery for music.
Ancient Greek Translation
Mr. Robert Goldberg
Description: We will translate and study a Platonic dialogue, as yet undetermined but possibly the Lysis—the dialogue on friendship. This preceptorial is open to anyone who has done the first semester or second semester of GI Greek or who has learned classical Greek elsewhere.
Classes meet on Wednesday from 8– 10 p.m. ET / 6–8 p.m. MT beginning August 30.
Plato, Philebus and Theaetetus
Ms. Erica Beall
Description: This preceptorial will undertake a close reading of two Platonic dialogues. Philebus investigates the claim that “pleasure is the good.” Theaetetus takes up the question: “what is knowledge?” Both dialogues are richly dramatized, and their respective lines of inquiry confront us with ontological and epistemological matters that are surprising, perplexing, and perhaps even troubling.
Clarisse Lispector, Agua Viva (1973) and Related Texts
Mr. Robert Druecker
Description: Clarisse Lispector (1920-77) was a Brazilian author whose emotional power, formal linguistic innovations, and philosophical depth put her in the company of Kafka and Joyce. The main text would be this short novel, no, long prose poem, or, perhaps, rather sequence of prose poems. It is in the form of a plotless interior monologue, in which the narrator aims to catch, to write—at each instant—the alive instant of existing, which is what joy turns out to be par excellence, for her. Along the way she—and we together with her—makes discoveries about the nature of life, time, and creation.
Rousseau, Confessions
Ms. Natalie Elliot
Description: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions and Reveries of a Solitary Walker are texts concerned with the meaning of our inner lives, and with the many ways our inner selves must reckon with the world. We will read both works with care to explore Rousseau’s psychological, linguistic, philosophical, and political insights into the formation of the self. We’ll also consider the modes of reflection that he adopts—from poetic autobiography, to walking and floating, to philosophic irony—and consider how these ways of orienting the psyche help us come to know ourselves.
Recommended Texts and Translations:
Students may read from any English translation based on the Pléiade standard edition or the Garnier edition, or they may read from the original French. For each text, I have listed one reliable, affordable translation option below.
Confessions: Oxford University Press, translated by Angela Scholar, ISBN: 978-0199540037
Reveries: Oxford University Press, translated by Russell Goulbourne, ISBN: 978-0199563272
First week’s assignment:
Week 1: Confessions Opening, and Part I, Book 1
Ibn al-‘Arabi, The Ringstones of Wisdom
Mr. Michael Wolfe
Description: The Ringstones of Wisdom is the best-known work by the 13th-century mystic who has been called the most influential Muslim of the latter half of Islamic history. In this book, Ibn al-‘Arabi explores the question of how we come to know God. His answer to this question is: “Whoever knows oneself knows one’s Lord.” Ibn al-‘Arabi sees this knowledge as reciprocal: God can be a mirror in which we see ourselves, and we can be mirrors in which God sees Himself (or Herself, as Ibn al-‘Arabi makes clear that God is both male and female). To cite another metaphor Ibn al-‘Arabi often repeats: “The water takes on the color of the cup.” That is, we can take on the colors of God, and God can take on the colors of us. This book can be both bewildering and inviting. Readers often feel disoriented yet find themselves readily drawn into the “ocean without shore” that Ibn al-‘Arabi urges us to plunge into. No prior knowledge of Islam is required.
First Assignment: Author’s Introduction and Chapter 1 (pp. 1 – 17)
Required Text:
Ringstones of Wisdom (Fusus al-hikam) (Great Books of the Islamic World), translated by Caner K. Dagli.
Publisher: Kazi Publications (August 1, 2004)
ISBN-10: 1567447244
ISBN-13: 978-1567447248
Classes meet on Thursday from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. on the Annapolis campus beginning August 24.
Chaucer, Canterbury Tales
Ms. Deborah Axelrod
Description: Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales bring together an odd assortment of people, each of whom tells a story meant to be both entertaining and educational. What can the stories, and the people who tell them, teach us? How does story-telling compare with other kinds of writing that also raise questions that are important to us as humans – what is good, what is just, what is love, what is true and how do we judge? Can story-telling help us examine ourselves in ways that other writing doesn’t. Any edition with line-numbers will suffice.
Galileo, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems—Ptolemaic and Copernican
Ms. Sarah Benson
Description: Galileo considers the case for a moving earth in a way that was and is accessible to the lay reader—the book was written in Italian (not Latin) and as a dialogue rather than a mathematical treatise. We will spend a couple of days first with The Sidereal Messenger, Galileo’s 1610 report on the findings of his first telescopic observations. And we will make use of the campus planetarium to review the apparent motions of the planets and stars and of the observatory, conditions permitting, to look at the Moon, phases of Venus, and Jupiter’s moons.
Suggested editions:
Galileo. Sidereus Nuncius, or The Sidereal Messenger. Trans. Albert van Helden. (University of Chicago Press, 2016). ISBN: 978-0226320090
Galileo. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems—Ptolemaic and Copernican. Trans. Stillman Drake. (University of California Press, 1962). ISBN: 978-0520004504
Plato, The Republic
Mr. Steven Crockett
Description: In Plato’s The Republic, Socrates recounts a night-long conversation in which he, Plato’s brothers, a sophist, and an old man and his son try to see what justice is, both in a city and in the soul. The talk is long – about kinds of cities, kinds of souls, ways of learning and thinking – and in that talk the stakes are high: to do well in a “thousand-year journey”.
Three Moments in Modern Poetry: Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), Marianne Moore, Jorie Graham
Mr. Cordell Yee
Description: Readings in three of the most innovative and challenging poets of the last century.
Required Texts:
- H.D., Sea Garden (pdf to be supplied by tutor)
- H.D., Notes on Thought and Vision
- H.D., The Walls Do Not Fall (in her Trilogy)
- Marianne Moore, New Collected Poems (ed. Heather Cass White) [Note: please avoid Moore’s Complete Poems, first published in 1967.]
- Jorie Graham, The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994
- Other readings will be distributed as needed.
Introduction to Ancient Greek
Mr. Robert Goldberg
Description: Here is your opportunity to learn all the basics of the Greek language in a single semester and to translate passages from the pre-Socratics, Aesop, Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle, Menander, and others. In addition, you will learn a lot not only of Greek grammar but of English grammar as well, and you will come to understand the importance of reading the Greeks in their original language and in very accurate translations.
Learning Greek will make reading the books we study at St. John’s an eye-opening experience. The text we use is by Mollin & Williamson, tutors who wrote it with a view to the needs of St. John’s students in particular.
In the second semester, should you elect to continue, we will translate some work of philosophy, most likely by Plato. As of now, I’m considering doing Plato’s Lysis, the dialogue on friendship. Students who have already done either semester of the Greek preceptorial, or have learned Greek elsewhere, are welcome to take the second semester only.
Text: Introduction to Ancient Greek, 4th Ed., Mollin & Williamson
EMMANUEL LEVINAS, NINE TALMUDIC READINGS
Tutor: Ms. Deborah Axelrod
Description: Emmanuel Levinas (1906 - 1995) wrote Nine Talmudic Readings in order to explore a philosophy, an ethics, an understanding of what it is to be human that is, in his view, blocked by modern western ways of thinking and speaking. His mode is to show that stories philosophize and that language reveals truth when it uses irony, imagery and paradox, for example.
THOMAS MANN, THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN
Tutor: Mr. Matthew Caswell
HERODOTUS, HISTORIES
Tutor: Ms. Sarah Benson
Description: Herodotus’s Histories center on an analysis of the Graeco-Persian wars of the early 5th century BC, a generation before his time. An ἱστορία in its range of classical uses is not only a methodical attempt to account for the causes of human affairs but more broadly an investigation, a story, or a mythological narrative. Herodotus’s work is all these things. He reports what he has heard, or seen on his travels, of the cultural habits and natural histories of the lands that came under the control of the Persian empire. We will read the complete work, parts of which are read in the History seminar.
MICHEL FOUCAULT, ARCHAEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE and BIRTH OF THE CLINIC
Tutor: Ms. Erica Beall
Description: What does it mean for an idea to have a history? How do new concepts emerge, and how do they give rise to new ways of thinking and speaking? What, in short, does it mean for knowledge, in its many cultural, social, and academic forms, to exist? These are some of the questions at the heart of Foucault’s The Archeology of Knowledge. He develops a theory of language, and a philosophy of history to ground his radically new method for investigating the origin and historical development of the concepts, cultural themes, and intellectual patterns that shape our understanding of the world. If time allows, we will also read parts of Madness and Civilization, in which he applies this new archaeological method to the concept of madness, tracing its cultural and intellectual evolution in Western society from the late Middle Ages to the modern world.
PEDAGOGY AND EDUCATION
Tutor: Ms. Marsaura Shukla
Description: In this preceptorial, we will read a wide range of texts on education and pedagogy. Authors will include: Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Dewey, Washington, Du Bois, Woolf, Oakeshott, Arendt, Weil, Hook, and Brann. As a class, we will both discuss and practice different approaches to education and pedagogy.
JAMES BALDWIN, GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN and NOTES OF A NATIVE SON
Tutor: Ms. Leah Lasell
Description: We will be reading two works by James Baldwin, the novel, Go Tell it on the Mountain, and a collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son.
CHEKHOV’S FICTIONS
Tutor: Ms. Natalie Elliot
Description: Works of fiction, and especially short stories, give us a chance to consider life closely, and to do so from multiple vantage points. Good stories do not offer easy morals or ideological solutions to the conflicts they present. Many of the best stories treat human conflicts as irresolvable on one level, something to be beheld and transformed rather than straightforwardly overcome. In this seminar, we’ll read and discuss a selection of works by Anton Chekhov, a writer universally regarded as a master of fiction. We’ll examine how he renders characters, language, and dramatic conflicts—and explore how his art transforms our perspectives on life.
“THE PAINTER OF MODERN LIFE”
Tutor: Ms. Sarah Benson
Description: Starting from the essay of this title by French poet Charles Baudelaire, we will explore what paintings are and what paintings do. Our period will be the mid-19th to early 20th centuries and our texts will be both paintings themselves and contemporary works of art criticism and theory. If schedules permit, we will visit the National Gallery in Washington.
DAVID HUME & ADAM SMITH
Tutor: Mr. Cordell Yee
Description: Readings in the moral and politico-economic thought of two leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment.
DEMONS, DOSTOEVSKY
Tutor: Ms. Pamela Kraus
Description: Demons, first published in 1871-2, is Dostoevsky’s penetrating and psychologically acute presentation of the ideologies that spread in Russia during the 19th century—the political and moral nihilism that they spawned and the conspiracies and assassinations that followed.
GREEK TRAGEDIES
Tutor: Ms. Susan Paalman
Description: We will read and discuss several plays from Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides that are not currently included in the literature seminar. Students are encouraged to use the recommended translations of the plays to aid in reading through sections of the plays together in class.
ANCIENT GREEK TRANSLATION
Tutor: Mr. John Tomarchio
Description: The second semester course in Ancient Greek language. The text that will be translated is TBD. Participation in this class requires successful completion of a fall semester “Introduction to Ancient Greek” course, or permission of the tutor.
NIETZSCHE, WILL TO POWER
Tutor: Mr. David Carl
THE POETRY OF T.S. ELIOT & EZRA POUND
Tutor: Ms. Erica Beall
MELVILLE, MOBY DICK
Tutor: Ms. Julie Reahard
WAYS OF THINKING ABOUT THE MEANING OF HISTORY—SIX APPROACHES
Tutor: Mr. Robert Druecker
Description: We will address questions like: What is involved in coming to understand a historical phenomenon, such as a historical individual, event, institution, society, political community, way of thinking and feeling? What comprises that understanding? How is it related to scientific understanding, to philosophic understanding, to understanding a work of are, and to everyday conversational understanding? Our guides will be six thinkers whose works have been—R. G. Collingwood and Leo Strauss, G. W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche, Wilhelm Dilthey, and H.G. Gadamer—on the GI Reading List
ZORA NEALE HURSTON, THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD and ETHNOGRAPHIC WORKS
Tutor: Ms. Sarah Benson
Description: We will read Hurston’s 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God with some of her short fiction and her ethnographic work on African-American folklore.
ALGORITHMS and COMPUTATION
Tutor: Mr. Cordell Yee
Description: Study of some of the fundamentals of computing—e.g., logic, binary arithmetic, algorithms, the relationship of computation to thought—through a selection of readings and through the assembly and programming of a mechanical computer: No previous experience with computer programming is necessary or even desirable.
MORALITY & LAW
Tutors: Co-led by Mr. Lee Goldsmith and Ms. Gabriela Kahrl from the University of Maryland Carey School of Law
Description: We take for granted that it is better to be ruled by law than by man. But what difference exactly does law make? It is easy to say that legal rulings are more fair and less arbitrary than the edicts of an unrestrained magistrate. Yet it is more difficult to say how a legal system accomplishes that. In this preceptorial we’ll explore the difference law makes by probing many of the philosophical questions legal concepts raise, including the various connections among law, morality, and politics. Central to this study will be an investigation into the nature of justice from both legal and moral perspectives. Readings will include Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Bentham, Hamilton, and Anscombe, as well as Supreme Court cases.
ARISTOTLE’S ETHICS
Tutor: Ms. Susan Paalman
Description: We will read Aristotle’s seminal work on happiness and human action, with a view to understanding better what the good life is and how we might achieve it. We will read the book in translation, but will also pay some attention to Aristotle’s vocabulary. We may turn briefly to one or more of Aristotle's other works to help deepen our understanding of his thought.
INTRODUCTION TO ANCIENT GREEK
Tutor: Mr. John Tomarchio
EMILY DICKINSON and WALLACE STEVENS, SELECTED POEMS
Tutor: Mr. David Carl
Description: Writing between 1850 and 1955, Emily Dickinson (1830–86) and Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) are two of the most unique, influential, and original voices in American poetry. Their work spans what might be called the “golden age” of American literature, a period that encompasses everything from the Transcendentalists and the Harlem Renaissance to the Modernist writings of William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, H. D., Djuna Barnes, Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, and T. S. Eliot. Our goal will be two-fold: on the one hand to get a broad sense of the work of these two poets over the course of their writing careers (from the 1850s to the 1880s and from the 1920s to the 1950s respectively), while at the same time to read slowly and carefully a curated selection of some of their greatest poems. To that end we will focus on a few poems (and in Stevens’ case, a few prose works) by each poet, moving chronologically and alternating weeks (starting with Stevens), turning to these two great voices in American poetry so that they can teach us how to read poetry while at the same time we consider the question of why such reading matters.
ARENDT,THE HUMAN CONDITION
Tutor: Ms. Erica Beall
Description: Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition is as broad in its scope and as deep in its concerns as its title suggests. Drawing on ancient and modern philosophy, from metaphysics to political theory, Arendt offers an elegant and systematic critique of the cultural and political situation in which modernity finds itself. She sheds light on the many problems of action, inquiry, and experience that we face as the inheritors of this modern world—in short, the problems of our human condition.
SHAKESPEARE’S LATE ROMANCES—THE TEMPEST, PERICLES, THE WINTER’S TALE, CYMBELINE
Tutor: Ms. Natalie Elliot
Description: In many of his final plays, Shakespeare alters the conventions of comedy and tragedy to create forms of dramatic art that better capture human transformation. We will conduct a close reading of four plays that are known as the late romances, The Tempest, Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, and Cymbeline, and reflect on the transformations—in characters, and in literary forms—that they present.
KIERKEGAARD, SICKNESS UNTO DEATH and THE CONCEPT OF ANXIETY
Tutor: Mr. Robert Druecker
Description: Our two texts would lead us to re-examine whatever we may think about the two human feelings, or emotions, called “anxiety” and “despair.” We’d be invited to consider seriously the possibility that their source may lie much closer to the core of who we are than we’d thought and that none of us can avoid at least a brush with them. We’d be testing the proposition that deeper than psychological states or moods, both anxiety and despair are called forth in each of us in the face of our most fundamental human task, namely, constituting our self. We’d consider the question: In the deepest or most encompassing sense, What do I mean by “my self”? Do I assume, or constitute, my self at a certain moment? What does it mean to be true to my self? Our work together would be to use our imaginations and memories, in order to make the various existential attitudes on offer concrete and real for ourselves, in the way a short-story writer might. Finally we will ask, do the above perspectives lead us to any fresh ways of looking at the Bible or at our theological positions?
Session 1, May 30–June 17
Galileo Galilei, Two New Sciences
Tutor: Ms. Leah Lasell
Description: In the Two New Sciences, Galileo unearths some of the problems and contradictions in an Aristotelian account of nature, while proposing two new sciences of nature grounded in experiment and made rigorous through geometry. Galileo writes the Two New Sciences in dialogue form; three friends over the course of a handful of days propose theories about the nature of bodies, examine them in conversation and through experiments, gladly take up philosophical digressions, and argue vigorously but in good spirits with one another. In the last two days, they examine a treatise on motion, applying geometry to the study of moving bodies. The class will have a laboratory component and there will be opportunities for mathematical demonstrations.
Text Edition: Stillman Drake’s translation is recommended.
Writings of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln
Tutor: Mr. David Townsend
Description: We will read essays, speeches, notes, and letters of two American Presidents who rank among humanity’s best political philosophers. From works many know by heart—The Declaration of Independence and The Gettysburg Address—to the practical wisdom of their common working papers, we shall examine two exemplars of leaders standing by words.
Text edition: Texts are the Library of America’s. Jefferson ISBN 0-940450-16-X and Lincoln ISBN 0-940450-43-7 and ISBN 0-940450-63-1
Session 2, July 25–August 12
Proust, Swann’s Way
Tutor: Mr. Rahul Chaudhri
Description: In this preceptorial, we’ll read the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time at a slow and careful pace, working on around forty pages each seminar.
The translation by Moncrieff is preferred.
Arendt, The Human Condition
Tutor: Mr. Daniel Harrell
Description: In this preceptorial we will read the whole of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, one of her best-known works. See more information about the book, along with its table of contents.
Low-Residency
Plutarch’s Lives
Tutor: Mr. Gregory Freeman
Description: A selection from the Lives that will allow for close reading.
Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit
Tutor: Mr. Brendan Boyle
Description: Hegel gave this description of the book: “This volume is the exposition of the coming to be of knowledge. The phenomenology of spirit is supposed to take the place of psychological explanations and also those of abstract discussions about the grounding of knowledge. It examines the preparation for science from a standpoint through which it constitutes a new, interesting philosophy and a ‘first science’ for philosophy. It comprehends within itself the various shapes of spirit as stations on the way through which spirit becomes pure knowledge, that is, absolute spirit.” The preceptorial will try to figure out what all this means.
Required Text: Hegel, GWF. The Phenomenology of Spirit, Terry Pinkard translator and editor. Cambridge, 2018.
Proust, Swann’s Way
Tutor: Ms. Natalie Elliot
Description: Proust’s novel, Swann’s Way, the first of a series of seven novels that form In Search of Lost Time, gives us occasion to reflect on language, memory, time, and identity. We’ll read Proust’s sensory revery with care to acquaint ourselves with the way the novelist renders life.
Text Edition: I will work from the Penguin Classics, revised edition, translated by Lydia Davis. ISBN 0142437964. Students may choose other translations.
First Assignment: Part I, Combray, Section 1, p. 1–48.
On the Ends of the Art of Rhetoric, A Critique, A Treatise, and An Apology
Tutor: Mr. John Tomarchio
Description: Plato’s Gorgias, Aristotle’s Ars Rhetorica, and Cicero’s De Oratore
Dante, Essential Philosophical Texts: Vita Nova, Convivio (The Banquet), On Monarchy
Tutor: Mr. John Cornell
Description: One of the down sides of having written the greatest epic poem since Antiquity is that people don’t pay much attention to your earlier work. Dante’s Divine Comedy has generally overshadowed his other writings, whether they made his reputation during his lifetime, were only privately circulated, or were published after his death: Vita Nova, Convivio (The Banquet), and On Monarchy. We shall study these works for their boldly original ways of thinking about ethics, a post-clerical political order, and the psychology of love. At the very least, this study might revolutionize one’s subsequent readings the Comedy.
Required Texts: Dante, Vita Nova, Andrew Frisardi, trans. (Northwestern U.P., 2012); Dante, Convivio: A Dual-Language Critical Edition, Frisardi, trans. (Cambridge U.P., 2022); Dante, On Monarchy, TBA
First Assignment: Vita Nova, sec. 1–10, (in Frisardi ed.:) pp. 3–25
Pedagogy & Education
Tutor: Mr. Llyd Wells
Description: In this preceptorial, we will read a wide range of texts on education and pedagogy. Authors will include: Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Dewey, Washington, Du Bois, Woolf, Oakeshott, Arendt, Weil, Hook and Brann. As a class we will both discuss and practice different approaches to education and pedagogy.
Required Texts: Pedagogy Manual (found in the Bookstore); Augustine, The Teacher; Kant, On Education; Dewey, Experience and Education.
First Assignment: Meno 80D–86C
On-Campus
Melville, Moby Dick
Tutor: Mr. Louis Petrich
Description: Moby-Dick is Melville’s masterpiece. At its very heart is Captain Ahab, who challenges God and His creation in a world-wide hunt to find and kill the great white whale, and Ishmael, an outcast who wants to know the meaning of the actions aboard that whaling vessel, the Pequod. Melville’s book taxes the imagination as the Bible does, and it rewards the effort with the vigor of a quest. The words of this epic American poem (for it is a poem, though written in prose) summon good and evil across time and space in a single burning vision. Participants should find, in the experience of reading it thus, a severe kind of happiness.
Text edition: Norton Critical Edition, 2017, ISBN-13: 978-0393285000.
First assignment: Etymology, Extracts, and Chapters 1–9.
Xenophon, The Education of Cyrus and The Anabasis of Cyrus
Tutor: Mr. Jeffrey Black
Description: Do you want to learn how to rule the world? In The Education of Cyrus, or Cyropaedia, Socrates’ student Xenophon tells the story of the education and rise to power of the Persian emperor Cyrus the Great. He claims, in doing so, to address the question of how political rule can be made permanent; he also composes the first exemplar of the literary genre later known as ‘mirrors of princes’—a genre whose most famous exemplar is Machiavelli’s Prince. In The Anabasis of Cyrus, by contrast, Xenophon tells the story of how he and ten thousand Greek mercenaries were stranded deep in the Persian empire, having just supported Cyrus the Younger in his unsuccessful attempt to seize the Persian throne from Artaxerxes II—and of how the practical application of Socratic philosophy helped him to lead the Greeks through hostile territory, to the Black Sea, and to safety.
Recommended Texts: Xenophon, The Education of Cyrus. Translated and annotated by Wayne Ambler. (Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 2001). ISBN-10: 0801487501, ISBN-13: 978-0801487507
Xenophon, The Anabasis of Cyrus. Translated and annotated by Wayne Ambler. With an Introduction by Eric Buzzetti. (Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 2008). ISBN-10: 0801489997; ISBN-13: 978-0801489990.
First Assignment: The Education of Cyrus, Book I.
American Historical Documents on Slavery in America, 1776–1865
Tutor: Mr. Steven Crockett
Description: Between the time of the American revolution and the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the national laws—despite the revolution’s declaration that “all men are created equal”—permitted slavery to exist in many places in the nation, and even to expand. And though the bloody civil war brought to an end the Constitution’s support of slavery, we are still contending with slavery’s lingering effects. In the hope that knowing more about that past will, human nature being what it is, help us contend with the present, and know better how to judge both the past and ourselves, the reading list will consist largely of writings by thought-taking people who participated in one way or another in the events of those years, among those people Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Sojourner Truth, John C. Calhoun, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Brown, Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Nat Turner, de Tocqueville, and Karl Marx. (Imagine a history of the Peloponnesian war in which the speeches are always what the speaker, and never Thucydides, thought was called for by the situation.) These people perhaps can help us understand what questions we should be asking, and how they might be answered.
First assignment: Aristotle, Politics, Book 1, Chapters 1–7 (from the beginning to 1256a1) and 12–13 (from 1259a6 to the end of Book 1); Exodus, Chapters 1–12 and 19–23.9. Galen, On the Passions and Errors of the Soul, from sections IV and V. (Copies will be provided by the tutor.)
Ancient Greek Translation
Tutor: Mr. Robert Goldberg
Description: The second semester course in Ancient Greek language. The text that will be translated is TBD. Participation in this class requires successful completion of a fall semester “Introduction to Ancient Greek” course, or permission of the tutor.
Low-Residency
Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Tutor: Mr. David Starr
Description: The Brothers Karamazov by F. M. Dostoevsky (often said to be his greatest novel) is about three sons of a disreputable and dissipated 19th century Russian businessman. All—a soldier, an intellectual, and a monk—have inherited personal, economic, social and spiritual issues from their common father and respective mothers. The youngest son, whom Dostoevsky calls his “hero,” believes he has found spiritual resources for all. Has he? Let’s see for ourselves.
Edition: Translation by either Constance Garnett or R. Pevear & L. Volokhonsky (various editions)
First Assignment: Book 1
Darwin, Descent of Man
Tutor: Mr. Alan Zeitlin
Description: After reminding ourselves of the conclusions Darwin reached in On the Origin of Species, we’ll read The Descent of Man, his exploration of the origins and nature of human beings—a project that will require considerable effort given the book’s length and richness.
Recommended text: The Penguin edition (paperback) ISBN 978-0-140-43631-0
First assignment: Come to class having read the final chapter of On the Origin of Species (“Recapitulation and Conclusion”) and the introduction and first chapter of The Descent of Man (pages 17–43 in the Penguin edition).
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
Tutor: Ms. Erica Beall
Description: Both the aphoristic style and the philosophical content of this work resist the idea of a system or a theory; nonetheless, Wittgenstein’s investigations are coherent, incisive, and methodical in their own way. Wittgenstein spreads his thoughts out in many different directions, all of which are exciting and worthy of our attention. In this preceptorial, we will work slowly through the text, making an effort to articulate the threads that unite this rich web of ideas about the nature of thought, language, logic, and human community.
Edition: The preferred translation (and the only one widely available) is by G.E.M. Anscomb.
First assignment: Aphorisms 1–19
Herodotus, Histories
Tutor: Ms. Anita Kronsberg
Description: Herodotus provides his own introduction: “I, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, am here setting forth my history, that time may not draw the color from what man has brought into being, nor those great and wonderful deeds, manifested by both Greeks and barbarians, fail of their report, and, together with all this, the reason why they fought each other.” (David Grene translation)
The History, at least at the outset, is strange to many modern readers. Herodotus travelled a great deal in his effort to discover the causes of the fighting. He reveals and evaluates many of his sources but also seems to value custom and myth as much as first-hand accounts. The book is filled with the color, greatness, and wonder he refers to at the beginning. Part of the joy and the challenge of reading it is to try to comprehend the kind of account Herodotus offers us and see it, as far as possible, as he conceived it.
Edition: There are quite a few translations available and you can read samples of many online. In recent years the two most often read are probably the Grene and the Purvis (in the Landmark edition). Make sure that whatever translation you choose has section numbers in addition book numbers. This makes following the discussion in class much easier.
Even if you choose a different translation you may want to have the Landmark edition, which many libraries have, on hand for its maps. (Anchor Books, edited by Robert Strassler)
First assignment: Book I, sections 1–106
Tolstoy, War and Peace
Tutor: Mr. Rahul Chaudhri
Text: The Pevear and Volokhonsky translation strongly preferred.
John of the Cross
Tutor: Mr. Robert Druecker
Description:
I abandoned and forgot myself
Laying my face on my beloved;
All things ceased; I went out from myself,
Leaving my cares forgotten among the lilies.
John of the Cross attempted to forge a new style of spiritual life. Our aim will be to try to gain some understanding of the experiences (where that word still fits) and of the inner states of soul to which phrases like “forgot myself,” “All things ceased,” and “I went out from myself” are pointing, through exploring the path to them. Our focus will not be on St. John’s theology.
For most of our meetings, we shall read selections from his four major works—The Ascent of Mount Carmel, The Dark Night of the Soul, The Spiritual Canticle, and The Living Flame of Love. We shall study the successive stages of the path, through the following “dark nights”—the “active night of sense,” the “passive night of sense,” “active night of the spirit,” and the “passive night of the spirit”— culminating in the soul’s joining with divine love and becoming ablaze with that love.
St. John considered the followers along this way as being of three types—those who are beginning, those who have progressed, and those who have become perfected at its end and have entered union with the divine. The late Bernadette Roberts travelled to the end of San Juan’s path and described her progress through the late stages of the journey. She articulated her experience of the unitive life in six phases. In the last few sessions, we shall study the last three of these phases, as described in her book The Path to No-Self: Life at the Center.
Required texts: John of the Cross, Selected Writings, ed. K. Kavanaugh, in The Classics of Western Spirituality series (New York: Paulist Press, 1987) [available used for $15 and up] AND Bernadette Roberts, The Path to No-Self: Life at the Center, (any edition).
Pedagogy and Education
Tutor: Mr. Nicholas Bellinson
Description: In this preceptorial we will read a wide range of texts on education and pedagogy. Authors will include: Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Locke, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Dewey, Washington, Du Bois, Woolf, Oakeshott, Arendt, Weil, Postman, and MacIntyre. As part of the work of the preceptorial, students will practice co-leading the discussion, either with the tutor or with another student, and receive feedback on this.
Rousseau, Discourses
Tutor: Mr. Jeffrey Smith
Description: Considered together, Rousseau’s Discourses offer arguably the most powerful critique of the Enlightenment ever conceived. The Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (the First Discourse) calls into question assumptions about the value of culture and forces its readers to take stock of the damage done to virtue, freedom, and justice by the so-called progress of the human mind. The Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality (the Second Discourse) argues that civil society itself is at odds with the “natural goodness of man,” in context of explaining both how the human species developed and why its historical development eventually served to degrade human beings and to make them wicked. Rousseau’s critique of modernity furnishes him with the resources not only to refute prior accounts of the state of nature, but also to raise fundamental questions about Christianity’s teaching regarding original sin and the fall of man.
Text: Students should obtain and use a copy of the Victor Gourevitch translation of the Discourses.
The assignment for the first class of the Rousseau preceptorial will be to read the Title Page and Advertisement, the Preface, and the first nine paragraphs of Part I of Rousseau’s Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (i. e., the First Discourse). In the Gourevitch translation that I have recommended, which provides numbered paragraphs, the assignment covers paragraphs 1–15, the last paragraph ending with the words “… to be precisely the opposite of what they are.”
Shakespeare, Hamlet and The Tempest
Tutor: Mr. Louis Petrich
Description: Many would say Hamlet is the great tragedy. Many would also say The Tempest is as great a comedy. Participants will see and hear for themselves. Two weeks will be spent on Hamlet, and one week on The Tempest. That proportion is determined by length, not by quality of contents. Both plays contain fratricidal politics, frank sexual and marital relations, and strong motives of revenge versus mercy and forgiveness. Much attention is paid in each play to the arts of theatre as means of investigating truth and conscience, and as instigations of action. The Tempest is Shakespeare’s last solo effort, so it is not surprising that he would come to terms in that play with all the darkness and light that previously fought for primacy in his many created worlds, most vividly so in the rotten state of Hamlet’s Denmark.
Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid
Tutor: Mr. David Townsend
Texts: Virgil. Loeb Classics. 2 volumes.
Editions with line numbers tracking the Latin are best.
- Tr. Robert Fitzgerald. Vintage. ISBN: 9780679729525
- Tr. Allen Mandelbaum. Bantam. ISBN: 9780553210415
- Tr. Frederick Ahl.. Oxford. ISBN: 9780199231959
“Sunt lacrimae rerum—there are tears here and mortal things touch the heart”
—Aeneid I.462
Description: Virgil’s account of the wanderings of Aeneas and his band of refugees charged with founding a new city of unparalleled destiny is perhaps the greatest of all classical epics. It’s itinerary of love and loss, of humanity and brutality, of duty and fame moves readers to a renewed sense of the dimensions and capacity of the human heart. We shall understand better why Dante chose Virgil to lead him through Hell into Purgatory. We will also read Virgil’s other two major works—the ten short bucolic poems of Eclogues and Georgics a 2188 line poem on farming, cultivation, sustainability, and our relationship to nature.
Homer, Odyssey
Tutor: Mr. David Townsend
Description: A foundational great, great book exploring poetically and symbolically the deathless ideas of home and love. Can we separate truth from shadow as we follow this man of many wiles? We shall explore the relations of men and women, parents and children, and time and the eternal in encounters with Circe, Athena, Calypso, Aphrodite, Cyclops, Nausica, and a panoply of beasts, men, and gods. How shall we restore our home should we ever find it occupied?
Black American Poets
Tutor: Ms. Joan Silver
Description: Our reading will range from folk poetry to poems by Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, Rita Dove, and Ruth Forman to name a few. Although the list of poets is necessarily long, we will read only a few poems in each preceptorial meeting, to allow ourselves time to pay close attention to the poetry as poetry. Our primary text will be the anthology, The Black Poets, edited by Dudley Randall, supplemented by other poems we bring to the class.
Introduction to Ancient Greek
Tutor: Mr. Robert Goldberg
Description: An introduction to Ancient Greek language using the Mollin and Williamson textbook, An Introduction to Ancient Greek.
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Tutor: Mr. Louis Petrich
Description: Thus Spoke Zarathustra is Nietzsche’s most popular book and the one that he considered his best. It is the work of a lonely man at the height of his powers of expression, with nothing to restrain him but posterity, to which he looked for appreciation. It is a work that combines the sublime and ridiculous, the prophetic and psychological, the philosophic and poetic. It is a book of laughter and gravity. In the end, it is an attempt to provide a transition from Christianity to a new, life-affirming human posture, one that avoids nihilism and pity, and overcomes the lassitude of the “last man” who blinks at the news—delivered by Zarathustra come down from the mountain—that God is dead, and man has killed him.
Digital Computation
Tutor: Ms. Sarah Benson
Description: “Computer science touches on a variety of deep issues,” writes Richard Feynman in his Lectures on Computation. “It has illuminated the nature of language, which we thought we understood: early attempts at machine translation failed because the old-fashioned notions about grammar failed to capture all the essentials of language. It naturally encourages us to ask questions about the limits of computability, about what we can and cannot know about the world around us. Computer science people spend a lot of time talking about whether or not man is merely a machine, whether his brain is just a powerful computer that might one day be copied.” We will explore these and other deep issues of computing by considering its elements. Building and programming a simple mechanical computer will be accompanied by readings in Feynman, Leibniz, Lovelace, Boole, Turing, Peirce, and others. No prior knowledge of computing or programming is needed.
Required Materials:
- Richard P. Feynman. 1996. Feynman Lectures on Computation. Edited by Tony Hey and Robin W. Allen. Westview Press; paperback edition 2000.
- Manual of readings. (Compiled and printed by St. John’s College, more information to follow.)
- Digi-Comp computer kit. (Supplied on first day of class or by mail; paid for by the college.)
The Old Testament: Numbers, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Samuel I and II, Kings I and II, Esther
Tutor: Mr. Louis Petrich
Description: These books follow the history of the Hebrews as they leave Mt. Sinai under Moses, wander the wilderness for forty years, battle their way into the promised land, rule themselves by judges, later by kings, and after 700 years find themselves captive to the Persians and threatened by holocaust.
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
Tutor: Mr. Mark Sinnett
Description: In Central Europe, in the years between the World Wars, social scientists were at a loss to account for the political and cultural collapse of their societies. “The only sources of insight,” in the experience of Eric Voegelin, “were the artists: painters, composers and especially novelists and poets.” Among the great names of the period—Thomas Mann, Karl Kraus, Heimito von Doderer, Alfred Schnitzler, Herman Broch—none stands higher than Musil, whose great, unfinished, novel depicts the descent of Austro-Hungarian society into the social and psychological pathology known as “ideology.”
Spinoza’s Ethics
Tutor: Mr. Michael Dink
Description: The full title of Spinoza’s book gives some idea of its scope and ambition: Ethics: Demonstrated in Geometric Order and Divided into Five Parts, which treat I. Of God; II. Of the Nature and Origin of the Mind; III. Of the Origin and Nature of the Affects; IV. Of Human Bondage, or the Power of the Affects; V. Of the Power of the Intellect, or on Human Freedom. Spinoza uses traditional language about God, substance and attribute to radically transform traditional Aristotelian and scholastic metaphysics so as to provide a framework for a new Cartesian science of matter in motion which is meant to be more satisfactory than that which Descartes himself had appeared to provide. He also claims to fully integrate within that account an explanation of the human good and how to attain it. Although Spinoza’s identification of God and Nature and his denial of free will to humans led to the condemnation of his philosophy by most orthodox Christians and Jews, he himself identified the intellectual love of God as the highest form of human freedom and happiness.
T. S. Eliot: “The Waste Land” and “Four Quartets”
Tutor: Ms. Pamela Kraus
Description: “The Waste Land” is generally agreed to be one of the most important poems of the 20th century. In the years after its publication, T. S. Eliot continued to dwell on the perils of modern life: about how, in its midst, to live the best life, the life closest to perfect. Almost twenty years after “The Waste Land,” he gave us the poem he regarded as his best work, his culminating work, “Four Quartets.” The preceptorial will study both poems.
Ancient Greek Translation: Plato’s Republic, Book 1
Tutor: Mr. Robert Goldberg
Description: We will translate (and study) Book 1 of the Republic. GI students who have previously completed Introduction to Ancient Greek are welcome to enroll in this preceptorial. Students who have taken spring Greek Translation in the past may enroll in this course for credit provided they did not translate the same text in their previous class.