Posts Tagged Aristotle

General Introduction
- Still in the decimals
- I haven’t the faintest idea
- What’s on the blog?
- Last man standing

Conservatism in The Office of Assertion
- Some background
- Conservative or old-fashioned?
- What should freshmen write about?
- Using Crider effectively
- What is interesting student writing?

Crider vs. Standard Freshman Comp.
- Discovery and persuasion
- The “O” word
- Rhetoric and dialectic
- Is there a middle ground?
- Truth as process and un-ignoring

Organization and Arrangement
- Immanent design
- How Crider helps us teach
- Assembly line writing
- Two models for draft meetings

Style
- Memorization and Delivery
- Clause Combination
- Style in other subjects
- How drafting saves time

Responsibility and Education
- How does The Office of Assertion work at Christian colleges?
- Vocational and liberal arts students
- The Office of Assertion and the Phaedrus
- Thanks, conservative youth ministers
- Tedious freshman relativism
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle. Rhetoric. Complete Works of Aristotle. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1984.

Austin, Michael (ed). Reading the World: Ideas That Matter. New York: Norton, 2010.

Crider, Scott. The Office of Assertion: An Art of Rhetoric for the Academic Essay. Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2005.

Plato. Gorgias. Complete Works. Ed. John Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997.

—. Phaedrus. Complete Works. Ed. John Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997.

—. The Republic. Complete Works. Ed. John Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997.

General Introduction
- What is a triptych, anyway?
- We stand outside of time
- What’s on the blog?

Euripides the Man
- What do we know?
- Making fun of Euripides
- Misogynist
- Troubled loner
- The “happy plays”

Hippolytus
- His unfortunate story
- Other sources for the myth
- Euripides’ first version
- Those amoral gods!
- Who’s really to blame here?

The Deus Ex Machina
- Petty yet ultimately vindictive behavior
- Aphrodite as metaphor
- Being kind to Aphrodite

Hippolytus’ Suffering
- For what does he suffer?
- Plato’s criticism of Euripides
- The realistic turn
- Absence of hamartia
- Hippolytus’ modern heirs
- Immoderate celibacy
- Misogyny

Medea
- Her long, troubled fate
- Never give a witch an inch
- Is she a proto-feminist or a monster?
- Medea’s original reception
- Rapidly changing characters
- Aegeus’s cameo
- How does it compare to Seneca’s version?

Euripides’ Influence
- Medea as godly woman
- Euripides and Paul’s advice
- The dark side of paganism
- Melville’s quarrel
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
Aristophanes. The Frogs and Other Plays. Trans. Shomit Dutta. New York: Penguin, 2007.

Aristotle. Trans. Joe Sachs. Newburyport, Mass.: Focus, 2005.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. New York: Norton, 2005.

Euripides. Alcestis and Other Plays. Trans. Philip Vellacott. New York: Penguin, 1974.

—. Medea and Other Plays. Trans. John Davie. New York: Penguin, 2003.

McIntyre, Alasdair. A Short History of Ethics: A History of Moral Philosophy from the Homeric Age to the Twentieth Century. South Bend, Ind.: U of Notre Dame P, 1998.

Melville, Herman. Pierre; or, the Ambiguities. New York: Penguin, 1996.

Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. New York: Penguin, 1998.

Murray, Gilbert. Euripides and His Age. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2011.

Ovid. Heroides. Trans. Harold Isbell. New York: Penguin, 1990.

Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. New York: Hackett, 1995.

—. Republic. Trans. Allan Bloom. New York: Basic, 1991.

Seneca. Six Tragedies. Trans. Emily Wilson. New York: Oxford UP, 2010.

Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. New York: Arden, 1997.

General Introduction
- Looking for the Yeti
- What’s on the blog?
- The review is coming tomorrow!
- Boethius Battlefield writes in
- An unenthusiastic obituary

A Primer on Greek Drama
- Civic festival
- Dionysian competition
- Millennia of theorizing
- Chorus and individuated characters
- The world’s most tedious arthouse film

A Primer on Sophocles
- Popularity and fame
- The Theban trilogy
- The lost plays of Sophocles
- The third person

Aristotle Reads Oedipus
- What makes tragedy good for the city?
- Freytag’s Triangle
- Breaking up the action
- How readings limit our readings
- Why Oedipus is like IKEA

David and Nathan and Oedipus and Tiresias
- Minimizing sin at the expense of the polis
- Why Oedipus is not a particularly evil king
- Who suffers with whom?
- On death and exile
- What is Oedipus condemned for?
- Tragic flaw or great mistake?

I’m A-Freud of That Play!
- How does Freud fare as a reader of Sophocles?
- Skipping centuries of critics
- De-mythologizing (but not what you think)
- Human desires
- Stunted development
- The connection to dreams

Antigone
- Who’s the tragic hero here?
- Public and private virtues
- To whom your obligation?
- Why Creon is not a monster
- Antigone as feminist icon
- Sophocles and civil disobedience

The Takeaway
- What does Sophocles do well?
- Why should Christians read him?
- The rebirth of tragedy
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aristotle. Trans. Gerald Else. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1967.

Dante. Inferno. Trans. Mark Musa. New York: Penguin, 2002.

Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Basic, 2010.

King, Martin Luther, Jr. A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches. Ed. James M. Washington. New York: Harper, 1990.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? South Bend, Ind.: U of Notre Dame P, 1989.

Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. New York: Penguin, 1998.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.

Plato. The Republic. Trans. Allan Bloom. New York: Basic, 1991.

Sophocles. The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 2000.

There’s a game Christian intellectuals sometimes play regarding ancient philosophers. “If he had lived 400 years later,” the question goes, “would Plato (or Aristotle, or Euripides, or Cicero, or Confucius, or whoever) have been a Christian?” Good existentialist that I am, I suspect that people hold their religious beliefs for reasons that have more to do with deep-seated spiritual need than with being logically convinced–and thus that questions like this one are fundamentally unanswerable. A better question: “What does Plato (or whoever) say that echoes strangely and unexpectedly with the Gospel?” One need not agree with C.S. Lewis’s assertion that Christ fulfills all religions to think that Mencius or Homer found some fragment of truth that the death and resurrection of Christ put into a larger context.

It’s a bigoted way to read the great works of the past, and I understand that. But I still can’t escape it, which is why Thomas Aquinas kept coming to mind this morning as I read Horace’s distinctively non-Catholic Satires. I don’t know Thomas’s work well, but I doubt seriously that he spent much time reading Horace, whose poems are dirty, crude, and scatological–and yet deeply concerned with virtue. (In this they also prefigure the novels of John Updike, which depict human sexuality in nauseous detail but which are ultimately concerned with what goodness looks like in the modern world.) But Thomas meets Horace in their common intellectual ancestor, Aristotle, who is both the most important secular influence on Thomas and the foundation of Horace’s system of virtue.

Aristotle’s ethical system is most famous for its articulation of the so-called “Golden Mean,” which he develops in the Nicomachean Ethics and implicitly uses in most of his other works. “Excellence,” says Aristotle,

is a state concerned with choice, lying in a mean relative to us, this being determined by reason and in the way in which the man of practical wisdom would determine it. Now it is a mean between two vices, that which depends on excess and that which depends on defect; and again it is a mean because the vices respectively fall short of or exceed what is right in both passions and actions, while excellence both finds and chooses that which is intermediate. (1106b-1107a)

For example, we can look at various reactions to fear. A soldier who is afraid to die is scheduled to go into battle. The virtue associated with this scenario, of course, is bravery. The soldier with not enough bravery turns tail and runs, an action that most of us would condemn. But Aristotle also condemns the soldier with a surfeit of bravery, the soldier who lacks the instinct for self-preservation. The proper response to fear is to acknowledge it but to do what has to be done. This is the virtue of bravery, as distinguished from the vices of cowardice and foolhardiness.

Incidentally, we should be careful not to give Aristotle too much credit for the Golden Mean; countless other thinkers from the East and the West alike came up with versions of it. But Aristotle’s is the foundational formulation of the principle–at least for Westerners.

I am not sure of the degree to which Horace was aware of Aristotle’s philosophy, but it’s clear that, even if he didn’t know the text itself, the content had filtered down through the centuries. The Golden Mean is an unspoken force behind many of the satires, but it’s especially clear in the first poem of Book I. Here Horace addresses the working man, the man who slaves away at a job he can’t stand but who dreams of doing something more stimulating. The problem, of course, is that this description applies to nearly everyone who works, a universality that intrigues Horace:

How is it, Maecenas, that no one is content with his own lot–
whether he has got it by an act of choice or taken it up
by chance–but instead envies people in other occupations?
“It’s well for the merchant!” says the soldier, feeling the weight of his years
and physically broken down by long weary service.
The merchant, however, when his ship is pitching in southern gale,
cries “Soldiering’s better than this!” (1.1.1-7)

This is a remarkable opening for at least two reasons. First, we in the modern world are apt to think of occupational ennui as the invention of the Industrial Revolution; many of us sit amid the throb and hum of our various machines and dream of simpler times. To see that laborers in Horace’s day–unbound to cubicles, fluorescent lights, and TS reports–were as unsatisfied with their jobs as we are with ours is to be struck by the absolute universality of Horace’s anthropological observation. Second, Horace (who seems to be utterly content in his own occupation) clearly has great sympathy for the dissatisfied workers whom he describes; he fully understands why they’d want to leave their chosen or fated fields.

But he doesn’t excuse them. Instead, he notes slyly that, were they given the opportunity to change occupations, “they’d refuse, even though they could have their heart’s desire (1.1.19). Why this absurdity? he asks, exasperated and amused. The workers, he says, “maintain that their only object / in enduring hardship is to make their pile, so when they are old / they can then retire with an easy mind” (1.1.30-32). This is not, let us admit, a ridiculous answer, nor is it without its analogues in the natural world:

In the same way
the tiny ant with immense industry . . .
hauls whatever he can with his mouth and adds it to the heap
he is building, thus making conscious and careful provision for the future. (1.1.32-35)

But the example of the ant, says Horace, condemns the workaholic and the striver rather than justifying them. After all, even the ant works only for a season and “Then, as the year wheels round into dismal Aquarius, the ant / never sets foot out of doors but, very sensibly, lives / on what he has amassed” (1.1.36-38). Not so the unhappy worker, whose labor never ends and who pushes himself to the limit out of greed and envy. Why work to build a pile on which to retire, Horace asks, when half a pile would be plenty?

To make his point, he turns to another image from the natural world. Sensible people, when they are thirsty, get a glass of water. But the striver has bigger plans; he says,

“I’d sooner draw it from a big river than from this
piddling stream, although the amount would be just the same.”
That’s how people who like more than their fair share
get swept away, bank and all, by the raging Aufidus,
while the man who wants only what he needs doesn’t draw water
clouded with mud, nor does he lose his life in the torrent. (1.1.55-60)

Horace is not arguing that we should live the life of the carefree hobo, you’ll notice–the satires are not the Roman version of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, and that his metaphor for money is water suggests that slacking off is an equally bad idea. The point is to get the money one needs and then to enjoy it; after all, in Horace’s view, that’s what money is for.

There are two ways to go wrong once you’ve got money: You can either toss it around like a Rockefeller with a brain tumor, or you can hold onto it so tightly that Caesar’s face is burned into your palm. Further, recoil from either tends to lead to its opposite:

When I urge you not to be a miser
I’m not saying you should be a rake and a wastrel. There is
a stage between the frigid midget and the massive vassal.
Things have a certain proportion. In short, there are definite limits;
if you step beyond them on this side or that you can’t be right. (1.1.103-107)

Reading Horace, I realized something that made the connection between Aristotle and Aquinas crystal clear.  The Golden Mean is not merely a guide to ethical behavior, and the Nicomachean Ethics is not properly classed among the humanities. Rather, Aristotle is acting in his capacity as a scientist, describing a natural phenomenon that human beings ignore at their peril. After all, one does not avoid stepping off a ledge because it’s ethically wrong to do so; one avoids stepping off a ledge because gravity is a natural force.

Thus, proper behavior is written into the fabric of the world itself, a phenomenon Catholic theologians call natural law. I’m not sure I believe them, incidentally–the Fall seems to have sufficiently mucked things up to make going against “nature” the more ethical decision sometimes–but I see now where the idea comes from, and it was the ribald ethical poet of Rome who showed me. I’m not sure what Aquinas would think.

General Introduction
- New segment: Michial Farmer’s world of women’s fashion
- Thanks for not writing in
- Why Nathan is the left-leaner amongst us
- What’s on the blog?

Aesop Ipsa Loquitur
- Is the country mouse a rube?
- Other Greek notions about the polis
- Plato’s suburban pharmacy
- The importance of human contact

Contrasting the Hebrew Perspective
- Cities and corruption
- Solomon’s urban fervor
- That curséd wilderness
- Garden as Hebraic ideal
- Gilgamesh civilizes the wild man
- Moses goes out beyond the boundary of imagination

The New Testament and the Early Church
- Christ the vagrant
- Equal-opportunity parables
- Augustine and Rome
- The heretical countryside

The Middle Ages and The Renaissance
- Churches and urban centers
- The origins of pagan
- Snookering-slash-correcting the rubes
- Langland gets sympathetic
- A new kind of pastoral
- London as hell

The Romantics
- Hegel and the city
- The Romantics fight back
- The country laborer and the university Marxist
- The rise of industrialization

America!
- The errand to the wilderness
- Puritan commerce
- The early decay of Boston
- Continual westward expansion
- Sister Carrie’s ambiguous ending
- The urban pushback and the abandonment of small towns
- Make the noise stop, please

The Cynical Midcentury
- The suburbs take over the shire
- The American dream gets transplanted
- American re-creation
- The stultifying suburbs
- Farmer on On the Road
- The vanishing rural
- All God’s children are terrible

The Takeaway
- Automobile culture
- But let’s not romanticize
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aesop. Fables. Trans. Laura Gibbs. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.

Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio. Ed. Charles E. Modlin and Ray Lewis White. New York: Norton, 1995.

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. W.D. Ross. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1984. 1729-1867.

Augustine. City of God. Trans. Henry Bettenson. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Blake, William. Poetry and Designs. Ed. John E. Grant and Mary Lynn Johnson. New York: Norton, 2007.

Bunker, Nick. Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World: A New History. New York: Knopf, 2010.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Ed. V.A. Kolve and Glending Olson. New York: Norton, 2005.

Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

The Epic of Gilgamesh. Trans. Andrew George. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Vintage, 1991.

Felix. Life of Saint Guthlac. Trans. Bertram Colgrave. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 1999.

Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Penguin, 1999.

Langland, William. Piers Plowman. Ed. Elizabeth Ann Robertson and Stephen H.A. Shepherd. New York: Norton, 2006.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. New York: Norton, 2004.

O’Connor, Flannery. The Complete Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971.

—. Wise Blood. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.

Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. Christopher Rowe. New York: Penguin, 2005.

Roth, Henry. Call It Sleep. New York: Picador, 2005.

Sidney, Philip. The Major Works. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. New York: Mariner, 2005.

Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Norton, 1998.

Updike, John. Rabbit, Run. New York: Knopf, 1996.

Wordsworth, William. Selected Poems. Ed. Stephen Gill. New York: Penguin, 2005.

Our theme music this week is Ted Leo’s “The Sons of Cain,” from 2007’s Living with the Living. Does it remind anyone else of Hey Dude for some reason?

General Introduction
- A month of Christian
Humanists
- What’s on the blog?
- Nathan axe crazy
- Like us on Facebook!

Cain, the Sons of Cain, and the Lex Talionis
- Cain takes his revenge
- Cain fears his revenge
- The Mark of Cain
- The mercy of the Law
- The days of Lamech
- Orestes and the Furies
- The city of refuge

Achilles’ Revenge
- Revenge within revenge
- Humiliation atop revenge
- Plato’s Christian Bookstore
- Euripides and Seneca get ugly

Jesus Throws It All Off Balance
- But first, Paul quotes Leviticus
- Purification ritual or apocalyptic cruelty?
- Interpreting Matthew 5
- Pacifism? Law? Ignoring insults?
- What do the Anabaptists say?

Christians Breaking the Rules
- Grendel stands with the sons of Cain
- Mrs. Grendel takes revenge
- Beowulf as divine avenger and magistrate
- Stiletto heels for a proper vendetta
- Seeking revenge with Arthur’s knights
- Good revenge and bad revenge
- Explaining Monty Python

The English Renaissance
- The Seneca revival
- Shakespeare’s balancing act
- Why your high-school English teacher was wrong
- Claudius’s bedroom prayer
- F.O.B.

A New Kind of Revenge Tale
- Spoiler alert
- How Dimmesdale ruins Chillingworth’s revenge
- Who’s the protagonist?
- Updike’s twisting of the already twisted
- Captain Ahab’s quixotic revenge quest

Pop Cultural Manifestations
- Why do Christians get more uneasy about revenge in some genres?
- Dream time
- Justice vs. Achillean rage
- The racial component
- How explicit is it?
- The Biz Never Sleeps
- Where’s the critique?
- A tale of two Eastwoods

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aeschylus. The Oresteia: Agamemnon; The Libation Bearers; The Euminides. Ed. W.B. Stanford. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 1984.

Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Malcolm Heath. New York: Penguin, 1997.

Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. Trans. Seamus Heaney. New York: Norton, 2001.

Euripides. Heracles and Other Plays. Trans. John Davie. New York: Penguin, 2002.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2010.

Homer. The Iliad. Trans. E.V. Rieu. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Kyd, Thomas. The Spanish Tragedy. New York: Book Jungle, 2007.

Malory, Sir Thomas. Le Morte d’Arthur. New York: Norton, 2003.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. New York: Norton, 2001.

Plato. The Republic. Trans. Desmond Lee. New York: Penguin, 2007.

Seneca. Six Tragedies. Trans. Emily Wilson. New York: Oxford UP, 2010.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. London: Arden, 2006.

Updike, John. A Month of Sundays. New York: Ballantine, 1996.

—. Roger’s Version. New York: Ballantine, 1996.

—. S. New York: Knopf, 1988.

Music this week is “Isn’t That What Friends Are For?” from Bruce Cockburn’s 1999 album Breakfast in New Orleans, Dinner in Timbuktu.

General Introduction
- What’s on the blog?
- All hail Craig Farmer (no relation)
- Old Man Gilmour tells us all to get off his lawn

Friendship in the Ancient World
- Aristotle’s friendship between equals
- Can friendship exist without sexual contact?
- Cicero’s common pursuit of good things

David and Jonathan
- David Grubbs’ personal connection
- Why were David and Jonathan friends at all?
- (LACUNA)
- The “homosexual” reading of David and Jonathan
- (Please pardon our oscillating fan during this segment)
- Exploding the dichotomy of sexual identification
- In which we cast David and Jonathan in a Judd Apatow movie

Christ and His Friends
- Nathan gets technical
- Jesus shakes things up
- A new kind of philia and agape

The Friendship of the Inklings
- Michial admits that he ripped this episode off
- Who were the Inklings?
- The friendship of common interests
- When friendship gets brutal

Michial Extemporizes About Existentialism
- Seeking a jingle for this segment
- The glory of the isolated individual
- Why is hell other people?
- How religion solves the problem
- Buber’s I and Thou, and Marcel’s testimony
- Let’s get linguistic

Literary Friendships
- Jeremy Irons speaks some sense!
- Achilles and Patroclus
- Watson makes Holmes more human
- Tolkien’s interracial friendships
- American literature and friendship
- Ishmael drops Queequeg
- Huck and Jim vs. Marlowe and Lennox

Ephemeral Friendships
- MICHAEL W. SMITH LIED TO US?
- Grubbs invokes Old English (as usual)
- Do you have real friends in high school?
- The we and the that
- (Sorry—I can’t make this edit sound natural. Blame Skype!)

Friends and the Internet
- Michial’s 221 Facebook friends
- No offense if you like The Matrix
- Mutual pursuit of intellectual excellence
- The illusion of mutuality
- Getting rid of Aristotle
- David endorses South Park blanketedly

A Specifically Christian Friendship
- Let’s talk ecclesiology
- Radical inclusivity
- “In Christ There Is No East or West”
- “What a Friend We Have in Jesus”
- “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood”

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. W.D. Ross. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1984. 1729-1867.

Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Touchstone, 1970.

Chandler, Raymond. The Long Goodbye. New York: Vintage, 1988.

Cicero. Laelius, on Friendship and the Dream of Scipio. Trans. J.G.F. Powell. Oxford: Aris and Phillips, 1991.

Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2010.

Homer. The Iliad. Trans. E.V. Rieu. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Lewis, C.S. The Four Loves. New York: Houghton Mifflin-Harcourt, 1991.

Marcel, Gabriel. The Philosophy of Existentialism. Trans. Manya Harari. Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel, 1956.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. New York: Norton, 2001.

Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Complete Works. Ed. John M. Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997. 506-536.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel Barnes. New York: Washington Square, 1956.

—. No Exit. Trans. Stuart Gilbert. No Exit and Three Other Plays. New York: Vintage, 1989. 1-46.

Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2011.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. New York: Harper Collins, 2002.

Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Norton, 1998.

I wrote a few months ago about the problems with the over-specialization that plagues the Academy. This morning I’m reading Aristotle’s Parts of Animals, which begins thusly:

Every study and investigation, the humblest and the noblest alike, seems to admit of two kinds of proficiency; one of which may be properly called educated knowledge of the subject, while the other is a kind of acquaintance with it. For an educated man should be able to form a fair judgement as to the goodness or badness of an exposition. To be educated is in fact to be able to do this; and the man of general education we take to be such. It will, however, of course, be understood that we only ascribe universal education to one who in his own individual person is thus able to judge nearly all branches of knowledge, and not one who has a like ability merely in some special subject. For it is possible for a man to have this competence in some one branch of knowledge.

It’s a sign of how far we’ve fallen that the polymath is now considered a “jack of all trades and master of none.” Now to go educate myself…

Our outro music this week comes from Michael Knott’s 1994 record Rocket and a Bomb. The song’s called “Jan the Weatherman.” Hey, “Jan” rhymes with “Dan,” and our special guest this week is tornado chaser Dr. Dan Dawson. He’s kind of a weatherman, anyway.

General Introduction
- Where’s David Grubbs?
- Welcome to our special guest
- What’s on the blog?

Our History with Science
- Dan Dawson dreams of tornadoes
- Michial’s near-failures
- Easy science at Milligan College

Ancient Science
- The four elements
- Aristotle and the geocentric universe
- Methodological contributions
- Rapidly changing science
- A gratuitous shot at 2012

Arab Investigators and Medieval Science
- Why Nathan doesn’t call it science
- Elaborate biology
- Effect on Medieval drama

The Rise of Modern Science
- Reverence for mathematics
- Science as a self-correcting system
- How philosophical is your average scientist?
- “Whatever works”
- No sense of history

Tornadoes
- The Wizard of Oz
- A history lesson
- Electric tornadoes
- How tornadoes work
- But can we fix it?

Mad Scientists and the American Renaissance
- Emerson, Poe, and the War on Science
- Romanticism and the Enlightenment
- Hawthorne and the dangers of scientific perfection
- Melville and the unspeakable
- The death of the imagination

Dan Defends Science
- The move toward the holistic
- A sense of mystery
- The end of history
- The myth of progress

A New Kind of Science
- The ecological movement
- Merging the Romantic and the scientific
- Interdisciplinary interaction

Scientific Threats to Christianity
- Hegel, Nietzsche, Dawkins
- Integration by example, not argument
- Learning from the nü atheists
- Are confessing Christians a lunatic fringe?

The Limits of Science
- Physics and metaphysics
- The limits of theology
- The geocentric universe and evolution
- Non-overlapping magisteria
- The natural shift
- Why we’re frustrated with militant atheism and militant creationism

What We Need to Know
- Science is your ally
- The what questions and the why questions

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle. On the Heavens. Trans. J.L. Stocks. Complete Works of Aristotle. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1984. 447-511.

—. Sense and Sensibilia. Trans. J.I. Beare. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1984. 693-713.

Bacon, Francis. The Major Works. Ed. Brian Vickers. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.

Baum, L. Frank. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. New York: Signet, 2006.

Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. New York: Mariner, 2008.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Each and All.” Collected Poems and Translations. New York: Library of America, 1994. 9-10.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “The Birth-Mark.” Tales and Sketches. New York: Library of America, 1982. 764-780.

—. “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” Tales and Sketches. New York: Library of America, 1982. 975-1005.

Melville, Herman. “The Lightning-Rod.” Pierre, Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales, The Confidence-Man, Tales, Billy Budd. New York: Library of America, 1985.

—. Moby-Dick. New York: Norton, 1967.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “Sonnet—To Science.” Poetry and Tales. New York: Library of America, 1984. 38.

Sagan, Carl. Contact. New York: Pocket, 1997.

Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.

That’s the end of Season 2, folks. We’ve had a great time doing the show, and we’re glad you listen. We explain our summer plans in the show itself. Keep listening, and keep reading!

General Introduction
- So long, Season 2
- Listener feedback
- What’s on the blog?
- Our summer plans and our love for decimal places

Beginning Apophatically
- Literary criticism vs. critical theory
- The Academy and the newspaper
- The professor and the amateur
- The unconscious and the conscious
- Literary criticism vs. book reviews
- Why age is more than a number
- The bleeding edge of criticism

Auden Makes the Rules
- Historical context
- Overcome evil with good
- Subjectivity
- How to tell if a critic is any good
- Development of taste
- The pleasures of the text

Old Stuff
- The extreme POETIX! of  Chuck “Ham-Bone” Aristotle
- Dorothy Sayers’s internalization of Aristotle
- The gaping hole of the Anglo-Saxon period
- Boethius and his epic, tragic harlots
- Philip Sidney to the rescue!
- Milton’s dismissal of fiction
- The Calvinist aesthetic defense of Scripture

The Aesthetes and Decadents
- The critic as artist and the artist as critic
- Creation vs. criticism
- Rules for independent critics
- Why Wilde would like Lester Bangs
- Complicating, not explaining
- What does “art for art’s sake” actually mean?

A New Kind of Criticism
- Connection to the Southern Agrarians
- Reaction to the Old Historicism
- Text as self-contained and unified
- Why the New Critics overreacted
- New Criticism as all-consuming blob

Mythological Criticism
- Deeper into Tolkien
- The Mythography Project
- Finding patterns in mythology
- Frye’s embrace of archetype
- The Gospel’s role in myth criticism

Heroic Criticism and American Studies
- The Heroic Critic as true believer
- Defining the newly emergent America
- Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination
- The difference in seriousness
- Intellectual decline
- [] you, you bourgeoisie pig!
- Defining Americanism(s)

Jiving Criticism and Art
- Why poets can’t write well about poetry
- Historical moments
- The need for critical distance
- A fist-fight breaks out!!
- Artists who do great criticism
- Is this a difference in eras?
- The problem with self-accounts
- Michial prepares for hate mail from creative-writing students
- Does scholarship create better writing?

Getting Personal
- To what extent is our academic output literary criticism?
- Auden makes David self-aware
- Nathan’s Hegelian synthesis
- Michial tries to complicate, not simplify

Post-Theory Criticism
- The Emmanuel Laboratory
- Nathan as the singular Voice of Criticism
- David fights to stay in the middle
- The non-academic return to Auden’s world

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Malcolm Heath. New York: Penguin, 1997.

Auden, W.H. The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays. New York: Vintage, 1990.

Bangs, Lester. Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. Ed. Greil Marcus. New York: Vintage, 1988.

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. San Francisco: Hill and Wang, 1975.

Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy. Trans. Victor Watts. New York: Penguin, 1999.

Brooks, Cleanth. The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. New York: Mariner, 1956.

Calvin, John. The Institutes of the Christian Religion. Trans. Ford Lewis Battles. Ed. John T. McNeill. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960. Two volumes.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. San Francisco: New World Library, 2008.

Chesterton, G.K. Charles Dickens: A Critical Study. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2009.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985.

Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London: Methuen, 1976. 47-59.

Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Anchor, 1992.

Frazier, James. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

Frye, Northrop. Biblical and Classical Myths: The Mythological Framework of Western Culture. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2004.

Jung, Carl. Jung on Mythology. Ed. Robert A. Segal. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998.

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.

Mather, Cotton. Magnalia Christi Americana. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2006. Two volumes.

Milton, John. Paradise Regained. The Major Works. Ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. 619-669.

Parrington, Vernon Louis. Main Currents in American Thought. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1987. Three volumes.

Patterson, Lee. Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987.

Ransom, John Crowe. The New Criticism. New York: Greenwood, 1979.

Sayers, Dorothy L. The Mind of the Maker. New York: Continuum, 2004.

Sidney, Sir Philip. “The Defence of Poesy.” The Major Works. Ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. 212-251.

Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007.

Tolkien, J.R.R. “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1983. 5-48.

Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination. New York: New York Review of Books, 2008.

Updike, John. Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism. New York: Vintage, 1984.

Weston, Jessie. From Ritual to Romance. New York: Waking Lion, 2008.

Wilde, Oscar. “The Critic as Artist.” The Major Works. Ed. Isobel Murray. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. 241-297.

Wordsworth, William. The Prelude. New York: Penguin, 1996.