2013 Actc Proceedings

THE GREAT SEARCH: RETHINKING THE LIBERAL ARTS AND SCIENCES Selected Proceedings from the Nineteenth Annual Conference of the Association for Core Texts and Courses Quebec, Canada April 25–28, 2013 Edited by Ann Charney Colmo Acknowledgments (Mora) Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. Print. (Schudt) Excerpt(s) from THE ILIAD by Homer, translated by Robert Fagles, translation copyright © 1990 by Robert Fagles. Used by permission of Viking Books, an im- print of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. (Moore) Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. G.R. Hibbard. Oxford, UK, copyright © Oxford University Press, 2008. (Reed and Sullivan) “The Rake’s Progress” By Igor Stravinsky © 1951 by Hawkes & Son Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Used With Permission. (Cohen de Lara) Plato, Republic. Trans. T. Griffith. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Reproduced with permission of The Licensor through PLSclear. (Constas) Plato. “Phaedo.” Five Dialogues. Trans. G.M.A. Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981; used with permission from Hackett. (Kauth) From Larry D. Benson. The Riverside Chaucer. © 1987, a part of Cengage, Inc. Reproduced by permission. Contents Introduction Ann Charney Colmo vii Awareness Augustine’s View of Tragedy Allison Hepola 3 Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and the Politics of Republics Jerome C. Foss 9 Brave New World and the Plurality of Human Goods Robert Anderson 15 Rethinking Paul in Historical Context: Teaching Undergraduates Paul’s Letter to the Galatians James McBride 19 Comprehension Saintsbury and the Heart of Criticism Nicholas Margaritis 27 iv Contents Rethinking the Liberal Arts in the Company of Miguel de Cervantes’ Sancho Panza Victoria Mora 33 Who’s on First? Order in the Appeal to Achilles Karl Schudt 45 Lao Tzu, Wittgenstein and a Pragmatic Reading of the Tao Te Ching Albert Piacente 51 Reading Nonsequentially: Teaching Great Books in Conversation with One Another Richard Bodek 57 Freedom Reading Hamlet with Virgil Andrew Moore 65 Schiller: Beauty after Beauty Mark Walter 71 Glaucon’s and Satan’s Proposals Kenneth Post 79 An Introduction to the Quran through a Close Reading of Sūra 12 (Yūsuf) Gregory McBrayer 85 The Virtuous House Chad Wilkes 93 Wholeness Dante, Aerial Bodies, and Personal Identity: How Poetry Enriches Philosophy Silas Langley 101 Contents v Rethinking the Liberal Arts: A Chinese Perspective Haipeng Guo and Wendy Chan 107 Hogarth and Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress: Negotiating Individual Freedom in the Liberal Arts Kathy Reed and Rebecca Sullivan 113 Can a Liberal Arts Education Really Make Us Better? Richard Kamber 119 Communal Living and Independent Thinking: A Reading of Plato’s Republic Emma Cohen de Lara 131 Truth Plato’s Phaedo and the Limits of Naturalism Christopher Constas 139 Dreams: Poetry, Theology, History, and Science in Chaucer Jean-Marie Kauth 145 Knowing and Being Ravi Ravindra 153 Teaching Robertson Davies’s Fifth Business through Oscar Wilde’s “The Decay of Lying” Paul Hawkins 161 Introduction The theme for the nineteenth annual conference of the ACTC in Gatineau, Quebec in 2013 is “Rethinking the Liberal Arts through Core Texts: Science, Poetry, Philoso- phy and History.” “Rethinking” implies a diagnosis of our situation and a command. If we have stopped thinking, if we are asleep, we will lose what is best in the liberal arts and sciences. Therefore, rethinking will be a wakening, an acuity of hearing where we have become deaf, a new openness to the liberal arts and sciences. Why do we sleep? For one thing, we become immersed in our disciplines and can no longer see beyond them, or take what is outside them seriously. We no longer understand the disciplinary power of the liberal arts themselves. We also focus on the Western tradition and are satisfied that all answers have been given, or at least that all questions have been raised. Finally, we take for granted modern natural (i.e., material) science as the source of the truth, or—following science to its logical con- clusion—we take truth not only as not a given, but as not a possible aspiration. All is construct. These causes are interconnected: we cannot pass judgment on one without pass- ing judgment on the others. This volume contains papers that cause us to rethink our prejudices, to wake up to the possibilities that we took to our slumber with us. They ask questions. They help us to begin to understand that there are problems in the commonplace answers that we have been resting on for so long. We are asked about science. Is it really so objective? What are the consequences of seeing in science the truth about all things? Does scientific technology make us more, or less, free? We are asked about beauty. Is it really so subjective? What is its role—not only in our academic work but also in our lives? Perhaps beauty frees us from constraints that the human condition puts upon us. Beauty can appear in nature, in speech, and when we look for it, in the doings of our own lives. In what ways can we awaken to the insights of the liberal arts and sciences? We can begin within our own disciplines by juxtaposing ideas within a disci- pline, only to be surprised that even here important questions arise. Two core texts in literature can surprise us if they are read simultaneously. Two core texts in the viii The Great Search: Rethinking the Liberal Arts and Sciences sciences can confront profoundly different assumptions in each—or great obstacles to any unified theory of the sciences. It goes without saying that philosophy texts are going to argue with each other. Joining in on any of these arguments has a revivify- ing effect. Transdisciplinary texts and discussions also give us new viewpoints. Philosophy and history texts both shine a light on each other, and raise serious questions about the historicity of philosophy. Can we ever understand the thoughts of a different historical epoch? Or does human nature transcend history? The most important result of going beyond our disciplines is to widen our own horizons and to help us stand outside a place where we might have been rooted. Poetry, in the wide sense that includes the epic, literature, and drama, may open our eyes to politics or the cosmos—espe- cially when read together with political philosophy or religious texts—or to science; it may take us out of the confines of our own time. One of the most interesting ways to approach core texts is to go beyond the text. Film, art, opera are in their own way core texts, or can be used to interpret and to raise core discussions of the texts we are accustomed to reading. Stay tuned for the media of the electronic age. Nor should the role of the critic be ignored. Literary criticism can provide a means to bridge disciplines—science, poetry, philosophy, history. For example, the critic can point out that the term “nature” has widely different meanings across disciplines, and even within disciplines. Thus, access to criticism can be “an extension of the whole thrust of the core text movement—to guide students toward the best” (Hawkins, infra). In this volume, a number of papers show the importance of opening ourselves up to other cultures. The West has not superseded these cultures, but has for varying reasons slighted them, and thus cut itself off from the insights that other cultures offer. For example, our customary opposition between self and society closes us off from the wholeness that is to be found only in our relationships, from family to cosmos. Transcultural studies are both a pathway to and a goal of knowledge. We can learn about our Western core texts from the texts of other cultures, as well as learning about other cultures from Western texts. Further, if other cultures provide an alternative way of life, we should be aware of these alternatives. We need to know if these are exclusive alternatives, or if there is a way to reconcile these alternatives with ours. In addition, learning alongside those from other cultures includes learning what we share with these cultures and what these cultures can offer us. We see that human beings everywhere share the desire for a life of reason. We have an awakened access not only to human nature but also to nature itself. All of these ways of rethinking are, of course, devoted to a higher goal, to pur- suing and answering the principal questions: what is the human good, what is the relation between the human good and the cosmos, how shall I live my life? We thirst for answers to these questions, and we believe our students do, too. This is why we join with them in the study of the liberal arts and sciences; we are their guides only because we are a little farther down the path. The papers in this volume have been selected for their “awakening” qualities. They present new insights, and are meant to provoke discussion. In fact, we will con- Introduction ix sider them most successful if they generate controversy, or at least lively discussion, and do help readers rethink the liberal arts and sciences, their own relation to them, the guidance of their students, and the principal questions. Acknowledgments My sincere thanks are offered to J. Scott Lee for inviting me to be the editor of these 2013 selected papers. I would like also to express the awe that we all feel about his great and unflagging work to make the ACTC so successful in promoting the liberal arts and sciences. The work of preparing a book of selected papers from the Association for Core Texts and Courses must necessarily be a work of many hands.

Load more