Visit Plato's Academy

 

A visit to the site of Plato's Academy (NY Times)

Guide to finding the Academy in Athens

A review of Mary Beard's new book

Jutta sends along this review of Mary Beard's new book, Confronting the Classics. It sounds like a fun read - the sort of thing that would provoke undead minds to find out more about those whose cultural value has, for the past 70 years or so been marked more in the breach than the observance.

A Minoan fresco from Knossos, Greece, known as the 'Ladies in Blue,' which dates from 1500 B.C. but was extensively restored in the early 1900s. The Bridgeman Art Gallery

If her intent - and Beard is a highly regarded classicist at Cambridge -  is to stimulate interest, hoping that a virus of curiosity might prod schools and media mavens to give the Classics a tad more centrality, or at least visibility, then of course more power to her. She does seem to be aiming beyond the heads of those already enchanted by, or receiving a salary for expertise related to, the "ancient" Greeks and Romans -- no mean feat, and a generous thing for a scholar to do.

What might not be quite so strongly emphasized in Beard's book -- I can't tell from the review, but will be curious to discover -- is an argument we don't hear so much any more: That the Classics are always current, always central to our languages, our words, syntax, rhetorical susceptibilities, logical powers, scientific interests. The classics are the wellspring of our underlying vernacular: we can not say "logic" without invoking, as from Olympus, the richly shared semantic burden of the λόγος of Heraclitus, Plato, and Aristotle. The fact that some folks might have neither read nor even heard of these Greek authors carries no weight -- when one says "logic," one summons a symposium living on in the λόγος -- a lively 2500-year conversation going on within the philology of that word to this day.

The classics won't be irrelevant or otherwise superfluous so long as we insist on attempting to apply reason to our world. It would be like trying to walk without feet - or better, without the gravity that keeps us grounded as well as able to stand, move, and look around us. As much as we might consider Socrates rather out of date, at some moment, in the αγορά of daily interaction, the smile of his awe at our all-knowing modernity could cease to flatter. In that moment, we might learn to see ourselves with a bit more classical candor, and share a bit of his good humor.

Liberal education is a conversation . . .

Mark Kingwell, a teacher in Toronto, on returning to a humanistic basis for education:

We philosophers don’t value Plato because he has been around so long; he has been around so long because he’s valuable. . . .

Sitting together in groups, with a shared text before us, still works as well as it did two millennia ago. And many innovations, such as flashy PowerPoint slides or “clickers” that rate instant comprehension, are just gadgets. Gadgets can be fun, but they are no substitute for reading, writing and discussion. . . 

Liberal education is a conversation, not a data transfer that might be accomplished as well online. That conversation starts in a room, with other people. It can even be a large room, if the professor is engaging and enthusiastic.

Montaigne's beams and the cultivation of freedom

A friend posted these links:.

The first is a catalog of the inscriptions that Montaigne placed on the beams of his famous library.

The second is an editorial on why narrow models of education are a betrayal of pedagogy.

Fish and Horace on Classical Education

In today's times, Stanley Fish, former Milton scholar and current New York Times blogger, offers "A Classical Education, Back to the Future," in which he discusses three books that appear to share the common aim of persuading the nation of the need to return to a classical model of education.

As we begin to read Horace's Epistle to the Pisos, it might be worth looking at how the Roman poet speaks to us of the uses and abuses of art, of poetry, of making in a very broad sense (poiesis), and then ask whether, after spending some time with him, we think Horace would applaud the classical model that Fish presents.

Academic dead end?

"English has become less and less coherent as a discipline and, worse, has come near exhaustion as a scholarly pursuit. "

Professor William M. Chace laments a sea-change in the nature and fate of the Humanities in US higher ed.

Mirabile dictu

Latin is back, according to the NYT:

The resurgence of a language once rejected as outdated and irrelevant is reflected across the country as Latin is embraced by a new generation of students like Xavier who seek to increase SAT scores or stand out from their friends, or simply harbor a fascination for the ancient language after reading Harry Potter’s Latin-based chanting spells.

The number of students in the United States taking the National Latin Exam has risen steadily to more than 134,000 students in each of the past two years, from 124,000 in 2003 and 101,000 in 1998, with large increases in remote parts of the country like New Mexico, Alaska and Vermont.