St. John’s College | Academic Program | Santa Fe Preceptorials

Academic Program

Santa Fe Preceptorials
Fall 2011

Dostoevsky, Demons
Brubaker, Lauren
*Pol/Soc; Phil/Theo; Hist

“Dostoevsky conceived of Demons as a novel–pamphlet in which he would say everything about the plague of materialist ideology that he saw infecting his native land. What emerged was a prophetic and ferociously funny masterpiece of ideology and murder in pre-revolutionary Russia” (from translators) – thought by many to rival Brothers Karamazov as his greatest novel.

4:30 p.m. William Blake, Jerusalem
Carl, David

The culmination of Blake’s “prophetic” writing, Jerusalemis a long poem that is part epic, part mythology, part theology, part social commentary, and all madness. We’ll start with a few of Blake’s shorter works to get a sense of the settings and characters he created in order to populate his poetic world and then spend the bulk of our time grappling with the illusive challenges of mystic understanding and the power of the imagination as an alternative to rational scientific knowing. Please take a look at the poem before committing to 8 weeks of reading Blake: not for the faint of heart or literal of mind.

Byron, Don Juan, and Pushkin, Eugene Onegin
Chen, Christine
*Pol/Soc; Hist

The truism that poetry is often lost in translation might have originated with the first feeble attempts to translate Aleksandr Pushkin's great novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin from Russian to English. Nabokov resolutely refused to translate the novel's singular “Onegin stanza” verse form, declaring it a “mathematical impossibility,” and instead opted for a controversial prose translation of this most beloved and significant text. In this preceptorial we shall explore the many facets of both the poem and the poet, as well as early nineteenth-century European culture, beginning with the poem's inspiration, Byron's epic poem “Don Juan.” Close reading of the novel will be supplemented with short poems and a look at Tchaikovsky's operatic adaptation. And of course, we will finish by reading Nabokov's translation. Knowledge of Russian is helpful but not at all necessary.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
Duvoisin, Jacques
*Pol/Soc; Phil/Theo

Descartes, Discourse on the Method and Meditations
Heikkero, Topi
*Phil/Theo

We will be reading carefully Descartes’ two central philosophical works: Discourse on Method (1637) and Meditations on First Philosophy (1641). We will also read a selection of the “Objections and Replies” attached to the Meditations. In these works Descartes in many ways sets the stage for modern philosophy. The self-certainty of the thinking ego, the possibility of scientific knowledge, the primary substances of reality, science as mastery of nature, and purifying reason from what he claimed to be the dead weight of the tradition are some of the key themes in these works. We will begin by reading the first chapter of Discourse on Method.

Aristotle, Physics
Houser, Stephen
*Phil/Theo
We will read the entire work with occasional reference to the Greek.

4:30 p.m. Xenophon, Socratic Writings
Hunt, Frank

Another view of Socrates. We will read the Memorabilia (Recollections) and the Symposium. The translations published by Cornell University Press are recommended.

Homer, Iliad
Martin, Sherry
*Pol/Soc; Phil/Theo, Hist.

A close reading of Homer’s Iliad. Several meetings at the end will be devoted to reading David Malouf’s short novel, Ransom, which offers an imaginative expansion of Book XXIV.

Heidegger, Being and Time
McCombs, Richard
*Pol/Soc; Phil/Theo; Hist

Being and Time is arguably the greatest and most influential book of philosophy of the 20th century. It sets out to study being by studying human being, and turns out to be more philosophical anthropology than universal ontology.

Levinas, Totality and Infinity
McDonald, David
*Pol/Soc; Phil/Theo; Hist

This is a hard book, so be prepared for some very challenging reading. It is also a deep and provocative book. According to Levinas, the face-to-face is a “final and irreducible relation.” We will try to understand the meaning of this claim.

Plato, Alcibiades I and Laches
Pagano, Frank
*Pol/Soc; Phil/Theo; Hist

This preceptorial is a study of the intersection between Plato’s dialogues and Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War. Alcibiades, Nicias and Laches (and Socrates) are historical characters who appear in Plato’s dialogues that may be fiction. Hence, in this preceptorial we can compare historical description to the Platonic characterization. Perhaps we may be able to discern Plato’s analysis of a philosophy of history.

Selected Poems of E.E. Cummings
Rawn, Michael
*Pol/Soc; Phil/Theo

Cummings is usually considered (and, consequently, in the same breath neglected, since uncategorizable) as the most innovative poet of the twentieth century. His work with the material of language is remarkably diverse and prolific. He wrote hundreds of poems over 60 years, many of them great. One can say that the poems are first and foremost about themselves and not some all-encompassing ideology. Some are circles, others are diagonals, switchbacks, and verticals, as opposed to the standard horizontal format. Some are about love (not the love you know); some are about spring (not the season you know). Some have a curiously ancient Greek sense of syntax (think of Heraclitus).

Ideas take a back seat to gesture, sensation (movement), and tone. And yet, the nonreferential use of general pronouns and demonstratives in many of the poems, the treatment of abstract pointers and references as if they were proper nouns referring only to themselves and their function in the particular poem, is a recurrent always new task for Cummings. The usual quantifiers some, any, all, every, no one, anyone, which, whom, each – and words that are abstract place holders become not quite individuals in their own right, more than quite individuals in their own right, quite sounds in their own right and, ultimately, nothing quite in its own right to be nothing.

Individuality, perhaps the overarching concern of Cummings, is sometimes multiplicity, sometimes the otherness of a lover, and sometimes the something (nothing) that was just there, is right here, and will be just around the next corner. Individuality is explored as aesthetics: gesture and movement.

4:30 p.m. Quantum Phenomena
Rollins, Mark
This preceptorial will complement and extend the study of quantum mechanics which we begin in the senior laboratory. The core of the preceptorial will consist of testing and developing five or six laboratory practica, utilizing newly acquired laboratory equipment, which delve into the phenomena of quantum superposition, quantum entanglement, tunneling, and related phenomena which are too weird for classical physical explanations. The lab work will be supplemented by primary readings developing the matrix/operator-mechanics approach to quantum physics – which is somewhat more general than the wave-mechanics approach of senior lab – as well as more contemporary theoretical and philosophical readings concerning the specific phenomena observed in our lab.

4:30 p.m. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Schneider, Gregory

One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez’s history of the town of Macondo and the Buendía family, has since come to epitomize magical realism and helped to launch what became known as the Latin American Boom in literature of the late twentieth century. In this history, Marquez employs unconventional and enigmatic narration but manages to chronicle five generations of descendants of José Arcadio Buendía and his wife Ursula. Sometime in the past, somewhere in South America, the couple founds the village of Macondo. "At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point” (p. 1). We will attempt to point our way through this unorthodox, enchanting tale, and, if time allows, also take a peak at some of Marquez’s other short works.

Freud’s Case Studies
Singleton, Mark
*Pol/Soc; Phil/Theo; Hist

In this preceptorial, we will read some of the case histories upon which Freud built his theories of psychoanalysis, including “Little Hans”, “Anna O.”, “The Wolf Man”, “The Rat Man” and “The Psychotic Dr. Schreber”.

G. Eliot, Daniel Deronda
Smith, Jay
*Pol/Soc; Hist
Daniel Deronda is the last work of George Eliot and is a mature expression of her idealism. She is concerned with personal morality, dedication to tradition and roots, and the exploration of spiritual identity.

Thucydides; The Peloponnesian War
Thompson, Caleb
*Pol/Soc; Phil/Theo; Hist

We will read the entirety of Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War, including those portions that are not read in the undergraduate and graduate classes. These sections include further details of the career of Alcibiades and the internal conflict in Athens. Time permitting, we may also read Books I and II of Xenophon’s Hellenica which complete the story, left unfinished by Thucydides, of Athens’ political turmoil and military collapse. Some knowledge of Greek will be useful but is not required.

F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
Van Luchene, Stephen
*Pol/Soc; Hist

At present, political discourse is caught up in sound bite professions of belief. By contrast, in this text Hayek builds a philosophical foundation for conservative politics. The preceptorial will center on the question of the individual and the common good, though many other important issues are sure to arise, including hard money, the role of the free market, and the proper purview of a central government. In addition to Hayek, readings will include selections from Tocqueville, the founding fathers, Marx, and perhaps one or two present-day voices.

Readings in the Origins of Algebra
Wales, Jack
Not available to GIs.

Algebra (that is, the kind of stuff you did on the algebra test) seems to be a kind of generalized arithmetic, but that observation may obscure more than it reveals. Euclid already had some pretty refined arithmetical results, but it took on the order of two millennia to pull off the generalization that was algebra. What were the barriers? What is algebra? We’ll seek answers to these and related questions by reading excerpts from a variety of writings that seem to be involved in that “generalization.” A few of our texts will be in books such as Euclid and Ptolemy that you already have in your library, but all, including those just mentioned, will be available as handouts. The first assignment will be by Euclid; I will send the specific assignment to participants soon after the preceptorial class lists are announced.

Dante’s Divine Comedy
Wolfe, Michael
*Pol/Soc; Phil/Theo; Hist

The soul, which is created quick to love,
responds to everything that pleases, just
as soon as beauty wakens it to act.
— Purgatorio Canto 18, 19-21

This preceptorial will provide an opportunity to slow down and read The Divine Comedy at a more leisurely pace. Among other advantages, this will provide us with the time to savor the sound of Dante’s poetry in its original language. Students will be encouraged to use a bilingual edition of The Divine Comedy and to listen to an audio recording of the poem in Italian.

*For Graduate Institute students in Philosophy and Theology or Politics and Society or History segments as indicated.