Note:
Your Teachers
This Quarter
Your primary teachers this quarter will
be Socrates, Plato, Schopenhauer, Martin Buber, and all the other authors
you'll be reading, so in effect you are going to have six or eight of
the absolute best teachers in the world.
I'll be one of your teachers too, but I
see my job to be largely one of helping you to understand what these
primary teachers are saying, and then helping you to make sense of that
for yourselves.
When reading these authors, your job will
be twofold, and the two parts will need to be done in this order:
1. To understand what each
author is saying as best you can.
With some authors this will not be so difficult
and with others it will be more difficult. The study questions are intended
to help you focus on a few of the more salient points in each author,
and your classroom discussions with each other will help do the same.
Mini-lectures that I'll post to the class forum should help a bit too.
So this first task is simply to understand
what the author is saying. It is the necessary first step because without
it you can't really do a good job of the second task.
2.
The second step is then to figure
out what you personally think about what that author is saying.
This is the step where you make some personal
assessments about what you have read. Classroom discussions should help
with this task too.
As a rule, making judgments about something
or someone is a whole lot easier the less you know about that thing or
person. We see this in politics, religion and personal relationships all
the time: If you know only a little, the forming of judgments can be quick
and facile. Perhaps this is what Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
meant when he said
A little learning is a
dangerous thing;
Drink deep or taste not the Pierian Spring.
As a rule, the more one knows about a thing,
person, situation or idea, the more complex the judgments about them will
tend to be. This will most likely hold true of what you read this quarter
too. "Plato is kool." "Tolstoy needs prozac." "Schopenhauer
is a pessimist." and such simplistic judgments won't fly quite as
easily after you understand what these authors are saying at something
more than the most superficial level.
I think you're going to enjoy understanding
what these authors have to say, and that you'll also enjoy struggling
to come to your own judgments about what they say. In the process you'll
be forming (or clarifying, or uncovering) your own beliefs about the world.
So let's get on with the adventure.
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