We’re enjoying a beautiful day in Iowa — sunny, dry air, and temperatures in the 60s. We arrived here half an hour late after having to switch planes in Detroit because the plane we were on initially wasn’t in shape for ice. I’m not sure which is more surprising: that we were delayed because of ice in the second half of May or that we managed to be only half an hour late after having to move all the people from one plane to another plane at another gate.
Sydney
Sydney and I leave early tomorrow morning for Iowa. We’ll be having breakfast with my parents in Cedar Rapids by 10:00 tomorrow morning. I’ll be staying for two weeks, to spend time with family and see my friend Heidi safely married (don’t worry, Heid; Mom’s got the dress safe and sound, ready to be worn). Sydney will spend a week with his in-laws before returning to Ithaca for a conference (and, presumably, to get in some gardening).
Erin
Since I have trouble looking up into the tops of trees to see birds when Sydney and I go out with our binoculars, we recently bought a CD of bird songs so that we could start memorizing the more common birds in our area. Since the CD has something like 360 species on it, I think we have a ways to go. But when we start playing the songs, Arwyn goes nuts. I think she’s realized by now that there aren’t actually birds in the house, but she still gets very affectionate, rubbing herself against our computers (where the sounds come from), walking ’round and ’round our work table, and looking longingly at us, hoping we’ll produce something she could chase. I think our local humane society would call this cat torture, but we’re hoping it’s something more along the lines of cat education.
Erin
Two of our Mennonite friends from our days at Yale paid us a most enjoyable visit over the weekend (though they now hail from Cambridge, England and have become three). On Sunday we went for a hike at one of the local parks, despite the rainy weather.
Cayley managed to do some sleeping on her first hike:
Two of the rewards for the upward trekking:
Erin and I went walking in Sapsucker Woods a couple of days ago. This is why green is my favourite colour (not that pictures come close to doing it justice):
And while we’re at it, I’ll be impressed if somebody identifies this handsome fellow for me:
Now that I’m done with my exams, I’m looking up to realize that much in the world around me has changed. I’ve certainly done my fair share of New York Times reading recently as I worked on the computer, but there are other kinds of news: among our acquaintances, friends, and family, there are four recently born babies and four upcoming weddings. Lots of life changes going on around us. Having done the wedding thing, we can nod in sympathy and be grateful we had it so easy. And, since we’re not expecting the gestation of anything other than our dissertation work, we can simply enjoy teasing and bouncing the babies of our friends when we get the chance.
Erin
Not surprising, given that I don’t think any one fails the qualifying exam in my department 🙂 But at least now I’ve officially been given the go-ahead for the dissertation and I have a Master’s Degree in English, for what it’s worth (not much, by the way). My advisors asked a lot of difficult questions about where I’m intending to take my project, whether I’ve thought about the implications of x, how I intend to handle problem y, but overall they seemed interested in what I had to say and desirous of asking difficult and nearly-impossible questions only for the purpose of furthering my thinking for the dissertation–no being difficult just to be mean.
I’ve now been released into sloth. Well, not really, but I’m going to emphasize fun reading, cooking, gardening, seeing friends and family, and being a good partner to Sydney more than my work for the next couple of weeks. I’ve made a good start. When I came home from the exam today Sydney greeted me with lunch and home-made black currant ice cream (yup, he’s good), which we ate in the hammock, and I enjoyed my first few minutes of sun-on-closed-eyelids in a good long while. Then we gardened hard, ate a lovely dinner as I read the first chapter of a novel, and now I’m baking a small batch of cookies. Plus, Ithaca in May is quite a pleasure in its own right. So glad to be able to get out in it now!
Erin
Sydney and I just spent the last three hours at the garden. To be more precise, we mixed a bread dough, put it in the breadmaker, and headed out to the garden, returning just in time to take it out and enjoy bread, cheese, and fruit smoothie for dinner.
We certainly worked up an appetite. There was much rock and compost hauling, path shoveling, and planting: 69 leeks plus cauliflower and cabbage. Although it was fairly warm there was quite a breeze, which kept us cool, if a bit dry, during our hard work. While I was holed up at home with my exam papers, Sydney put up the fence and did a lot of digging, so I walked into a lovely garden even at this early stage! Such a nice day to be out and about. To be honest, I don’t think I’m going to learn much between today and tomorrow, the day of my actual exam, so I’m very glad to have spent some time outside, with fingers and toes in dirt.
Erin
Warning: this post is rather long. But I think it’s rather interesting myself.
I think I’ve figured out my academic parentage a good ways back (doing this provided me with some lovely procrastination). There are a couple of links that I’m not entirely sure about yet, but here is how I think it goes:
1. Sydney Penner – I trust that you’ve heard of him.
2. Scott MacDonald – Cornell’s resident scholar of medieval philosophy; particularly interested in Augustine and Aquinas.
3. Norman J. Kretzmann (1928-1998 ) – He joined Cornell’s department in 1966 and became a prominent representative for medieval philosophy. A good bit of the current interest among analytic philosophers in medieval philosophy can probably be credited to him.
4. Albert L. Hammond (1892-1970) – According to an obituary in the proceedings of the APA, he was an exemplary teacher. When he retired the philosophy graduate students at his university, Johns Hopkins, changed the name of their club to ‘The Hammond Society’. But ‘he did no committee work’ — clearly I need to learn something about his strategy. He also has a collection of essays on horce racing, bridge, sex, ethics, epistemology, and ontology entitled Proprieties and Vagaries. I need to get my hands on that.
5. Arthur O. Lovejoy (1873-1962) – Yes, the guy who wrote The Great Chain of Being and a father of what is known as the study of the ‘history of ideas’ (he was a founder of both the History of Ideas Club at Johns Hopkins and the Journal of the History of Ideas). Apparently, the president of Harvard vetoed hiring him on grounds that he was a known troublemaker.
6. Josiah Royce (1855-1916) – Here we definitely get to strange metaphysics: Royce is the most prominent American advocate of absolute idealism. In a rather different vein, Boolean algebra may also go back to him (it was one of his students who first axiomatized it). Royce had numerous prominent students other than Lovejoy, e.g., T. S. Eliot, George Santayana, C. I. Lewis, and George Herbert Mead. Perhaps trying to get one’s head around strange metaphysics makes for good stimulation.
7. George Sylvester Morris (1840-1889) – Perhaps best known as a mentor of his more famous student, John Dewey. Morris taught at the University of Michigan and Johns Hopkins. In the words of one reviewer, ‘Morris’s philosophy is a dynamic variety of theistic idealism compounded mainly of Fichte and Hegel, but nevertheless rooted in Aristotle and modified by the rigors of pioneer living’. Or, according to Dewey in a review in The Philosophical Review of a biography of Morris: `he acieved, by means of a combination of Greek and German thought, a triumphant reconciliation of traditional religion with rational intelligence, of the older New England individualism with devoted loyalty to the purpose and meaning of objective institutions, of moral faith with the pronouncements of science’. I’m not sure exactly what all that amounts to, but it sounds interesting and impressive.
8. Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg (1802-1872) – Morris may have gotten his ‘combination of Green and German thought’ from Trendelenburg, who led an Aristotelian revival, albeit of an idealist Aristotle. Trendelenburg was a key figure in the resurgence of interest in the history of philosophy in Germany. after the grand system-making of the early nineteenth-century. He said some interesting things: ‘One must have a philosophical system, just as one must have a house, and this house each must build for himself’. He generally seems to have thought that the things he studied were rather important: ‘The ancient languages and the mathematics are the way to the heights of humanity and into the innermost nature of things’. He spent two hours each week every semester publicly expounding Aristotle to a voluntary class.
9. Karl Leonhard Reinhold (1757-1823) – Best-known as an advocate and popularizer of Kantian philosophy. He was very good at this. For example, in the spring semester of 1794, 600 students were enrolled in his three lecture courses on Kantian philosophy at the University of Jena. How many students were enrolled altogether at the university? 860. Reportedly, even Kant himself was charmed by the Reinhold’s presentation of his views. Reinhold eventually changed his mind, though, about the merits of Kant’s philosophy. And thus began a series of espousals and subsequent rejections of various philosophical views, apparently ending with something that anticipates the so-called ‘linguistic turn’ in twentieth-century philosophy.
10. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) – Yeah, the Königsberg chap. You might have heard of him. But I bet you haven’t heard this quotation before: ‘So, in starting a conversation, we must begin with what is near and present, and then gradually go on to more remote subjects, if they can be of interest. When we go from the street into a group gathered for conversation, the bad weather is a good and common expedient. For if we enter the room and begin talking about the news from Turkey that has been in the papers, we do violence to others’ imagination, since they cannot see how we got to this subject. For in any communication of thought the mind requires a certain order, and in conversation the introductory ideas and the beginning are as important as in a sermon’.
11. Martin Knutzen (1713-1751) – Never heard of him before? Neither had I. But Kant spoke of him with great appreciation.
12. Christian Wolff (1679-1754) – If there is such a thing as a prominent German philosopher between Leibniz and Kant, Wolff would be it. He didn’t just do philosophy — he wrote rationalist works on pretty much all academic subjects of the time. He was also instrumental in changing the language of German philosophy to, well, German.
13. Ehrenfried Walter von Tschirnhaus (1651-1708 ) – Typically, Wolff is called a student of Leibniz. There is some reason for that, since he was much influenced by Leibniz, corresponded with him, and had him read his thesis. Besides, that’s a way to get another famous name into the genealogy. But let’s go with Wolff’s actual thesis advisor — Leibniz is famous enough without undue credit. And von Tschirnhaus is also an interesting chap. Besides philosophy, he studied mathematics, particularly curves and algebraic equations. Isn’t it cool to have a curve named after you? The von Tschirnhaus cubic is the curve y^2 = x^3 + 3x^2. There is also something called the Tschirnhaus transformation. In more down to earth matters, he invented European porcelain.
14. Arnold Geulincx (1624-1669) – He was a Flemish philosopher who started out a Roman Catholic and ended up a Calvinist. He didn’t think that the mind and body can influence each other, so he argued for something called ‘occasionalism’, i.e., the view that the mind’s intention to move the body is an occasion for God to move the body that way.
15. Erycius Puteanus (1574-1646) – The names are getting increasingly interesting, aren’t they? Puteanus was a Belgian humanist and philologist. For a time, he dreamed of re-establishing a classical cult of eloquence in Belgium. But he discovered that his efforts to that end were useless, so he wrote books instead.
16. Justus Lipsius (1547-1606) – Lipsius’s claim to fame is his being the father of Neostoicism and the principal figure in the revival of Stoicism in the Renaissance. Montaigne called him ‘the most learned man’.
And that’s as far back as I can take it. Alas, it doesn’t take me back to Francisco Suarez or even to a fellow scholastic, but to a humanist contemporary of his. I suppose, though, that if it has to start with a humanist, Lipsius is more philosophically interesting than many. And there was undoubtedly some Suarezian influence along the way, since a couple of the people in this line might well have used Suarezian textbooks in their own education.
It’s beginning in earnest.
In my five semesters of teaching thus far I’ve taught roughly 75 kids of my own, plus shared TA responsibility for roughly 100 more. Within the past week I’ve seen and talked to something like half-a-dozen of them, all from different classes. One, funnily enough, is a philosophy major now and was in a class where Sydney was the TA. I told her to get used to having Penners grade her papers 🙂
Although I like seeing them, and I enjoy watching them move from sophomore to senior, there are downsides. I have seen three of my students at the gym, so I guess my vanity is taking something of a blow. I saw three today on my way back from the gym, when I was still red in the face and had wet hair.
Vanity takes something of a blow just by living and working in Ithaca: you’re quite likely to see your students when hiking, visiting the grocery store, swimming, etc. I already see them in church. And I hear that if you go out on weekends it’s even worse. Besides, I’ve realized I may lead too comfy of a life, and students might help to keep me a bit more presentable. (No, this isn’t where I reveal scandalous nighttime activity.) I wore jeans yesterday for the first time in a long while and they were horrendously uncomfortable. I couldn’t figure out why, until I realized that there was absolutely nothing wrong with the pants: I had just spent the past several weeks in long skirts and yoga pants, so I’d reached a level of comfort that jeans just couldn’t match. I really will be in trouble when I leave Ithaca, won’t I?
Erin
Alan Schmierer