Academic Program
Annapolis Preceptorial
PRECEPTORIAL LIST 2010-2011
| Augustine, City of God (selections) | (Mr. Michael Brogan) | |
| Aristotle, Ethics | (Mr. Chester Burke) | |
| Kant, Metaphysics of Morals | (Mr. Matthew Caswell) | |
| Written 12 years after his Groundwork, the Metaphysics of Morals is Kant’s complete Articulation of the system of morality. The work Includes Kant’s political theory (the ‘Doctrine of Right’), as well as an account of character (the ‘Doctrine of Virtue’). |
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| The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra: | (Mr. Michael Comenetz) | |
| any polynomial of degree n has n roots. Hard mathematics, though strictly elementary. No text; as in Meno 82-85, students will think up what is needed in response to questions—not an easy thing to do. |
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| Thermodynamics. |
(Mr. Radoslav Datchev) | |
| The main text will be Maxwell, Theory of Heat, but including also papers, or parts of papers, by Carnot, Clausius, Helmholtz, Mayer, Kelvin, and Planck | ||
| Herodotus, Histories | (Mr. Nathan Dugan) | |
| Shakespeare’s sonnets | (Ms. Nina Haigney) | |
| Hegel, Lectures on Fine Art, with emphasis on visual art | (Mr. Peter Kalkavage) | |
| Descartes, Rules for the Direction of the Mind and Optics (selections) |
(Mr. Brendon Lasell) | |
| We will look primarily at the Rules, turning to the Optics, which Descartes calls an essay in his method, to think more concretely about how his rules should be applied. |
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| Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1889), and Matter and Memory: Essay on the Relation Between Body and Mind (1896). |
(Mr. John Lenkowski) | |
| The first investigates inner experience as something completely non-quantifiable and non-spatial, whose leading concept is what Bergson calls “duration.” The second investigates the mind-body problem from the vantage point of just this “duration.” |
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| Shakespeare, Hamlet; Henry IV, Part I; As You Like It | (Mr. Matthew Linck) | |
| Dostoevsky, Demons | (Mr. Nick Maistrellis) | |
| Ariosto, Orlando Furioso | (Mr. Gabriel Pihas) | |
| “What Copernicus and Machiavelli are for modern astronomy and modern politics, Ariosto is for modern literature. His poem focuses on madness and bestial elements in the human soul, underneath the Renaissance veneer of courtliness and humanistic education. He explicitly claims to overturn the civilized ideals of Homer and Vergil and aim at realism and a new role for the imagination. His major work, the Orlando Furioso, like Don Quixote, is a funny, self-conscious epic that suggests much of the modern novel. Hegel thought Ariosto was simply essential to understanding modern literature. The Orlando Furioso was the inspiration for Shakespeare’s As You Like It and the direct source for Cervantes’ “Novela of Impertinent Curiosity”, both of which we will discuss alongside Ariosto.” |
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| Chaucer, Canterbury Tales | (Ms. Amanda Printz) | |
| Plato, Sophist and Statesman | (Mr. Greg Recco) | |
| Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Bear It Away and selected stories, including The Barber, You Can’t Be Any Poorer Than Dead, The River, A Good Man Is Hard To Find, The Artificial Nigger, The Lame Shall Enter First. |
(Mr. George Russell) | |
| Musonius Rufus and Epictetus | (Mr. Erik Sageng) | |
| We will read the whole of The Discourses, The Handbook, and The Fragments of Epictetus (selections from whi+ch were read in Sophomore Seminar); we’ll read the smaller collection of surviving texts attributed to Musonius Rufus, Epictetus’s teacher; and with what time remains, we’ll read selections from Diogenes Laertius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers on Zeno of Citium and the other first Stoics. |
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| Heidegger, Being and Time | (Mr. Eric Salem) | |
| Erasmus (The Praise of Folly and The Paraclesis), Luther (The Freedom of Christian), and Rabelais (Gargantua and Pantagruel) | (Ms. Judy Seeger) | |
| Homer, Odyssey | (Ms. Fawn Trigg) | |
| Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Part One) and On Certainty |
(Mr. John Verdi) | |
| Pre-Socratic Philosophers (with Greek component) | (Mr. Marcel Widzisz) |