Modern academia exhibits a strange incongruity. The physics professor who assigns Aristotle to her students is a laughingstock, but the metaphysics professor who assigns Aristotle is typical. The ancient philosopher is equally comprehensible in either context. Historically, he exerted at least as much—if not more—influence in the empirical sciences as in philosophy. And in both cases, modern scholars roundly reject his views. Does this make any sense?

I dissent:

The heart of the issue is whether or not these writings represent the best exposition of their position, and whether or not these ideas are worth studying.

For instance, “[r]eading Aristotle and Aquinas at the expense of Wittgenstein and Quine conveys the notion that, despite centuries of development, you really can’t improve on the originals.”  Are Wittgenstein and Quine a development of Aristotle and Aquinas?  This is an assumption sorely in need of proof.  In many respects these thinkers are in conflict with each other.  Does coming centuries after someone you reference and in some respects disagree with necessitate salutary development?  One can believe that we can and do progress in knowledge in philosophy and science and also reject the extreme version of this view: that whatever comes after is always somehow better.

Speaking of “great books” and education, see this selection from an interview with Charles Taylor, philosopher:

At the time of Max Weber – maybe we nostalgically magnify that – and even slightly later, you found that philosophy students in Germany, were given an incredibly broad course in Greek philosophy and the history of philosophy, and Kant and German idealism; but they also read Weber, Durkheim, Troeltsch, and Dilthey. So they had a broad understanding of how the questions then being debated had got to that stage.

That was one of the things that struck me when I managed to see the tail end of it – because I think it’s dying out, even in Germany. When I visited Habermas, he was handing on that kind of education to his students, even though he didn’t necessarily agree with a lot of the stuff that he was conveying to them. That’s what got me riled up when I went to Oxford – they were so narrow, those people: they weren’t even reading one tenth of the tradition that had got them to where they were.

…

You make many powerful assertions about modern identity drawn not only from philosophy but from the history of religion, and literature and art and so on. It is difficult for someone who does not have that breadth of knowledge to assess your claims adequately.

Yes. So great (laughs) – so people might go and read something! It connects up with what I was saying about my ideal picture of the German university circa 1920: that we really should have that kind of breadth in our education system for the history of humanities, social science, and so on. So I’m not displeased by that kind of reaction. If people really want to know if an idea is right, then they’ll go and read something, and it will make them capable of forming their own view about how we got to where we are.

Cross posted from the Castoff Review.

There is a small and mostly unnoticed renaissance of sorts occurring in this country, arising out of a renewed interest in the study of fundamental ideas and the serious books which explicate them. Check out this WSJ article by Emily Esfahani-Smith describing students from 12 to 17 who willingly spend their summers reading the greatest of books:

The mere existence of these programs suggests an important trend in student learning habits. The academic radicalism of recent decades is receding, and students are ready to be serious again. Flaky courses…no longer interest them. Instead, students from book camp and Princeton are interested in “sitting down with Plato, St. Augustine, and James Madison, to think through the perennial issues of politics and citizenship,” says Robert George, a professor and director of Princeton’s James Madison Program…

Students want to learn this stuff…

…too many colleges are not meeting that demand.

Amen to that. There is as much or more going on at the K-12 level in this respect than there is at our nation’s institutions of higher learning. Besides the Great Books Summer Program described in the article, for instance, check out Great Hearts Academies in Arizona: a classical, liberal arts education within an innovative charter school model.

The participants in this modest renaissance stand in good company. Read Thomas Jefferson’s suggestions to his nephew (who I believe was 16 at the time) on what the young student should read during his high school years, and weep:

For the present, I advise you to begin a course of antient history, reading every thing in the original and not in translations. First read Goldsmith’s history of Greece. This will give you a digested view of that field. Then take up antient history in the detail, reading the following books, in the following order: Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophontis Hellenica, Xenophontis Anabasis, Arrian, Quintus Curtius, Diodorus Siculus, Justin. This shall form the first stage of your historical reading, and is all I need mention to you now. The next, will be of Roman history (Livy, Sullust, Caesar, Cicero’s epistles, Suetonius, Tacitus, Gibbon). From that, we will come down to modern history. In Greek and Latin poetry, you have read or will read at school, Virgil, Terence, Horace, Anacreon, Theocritus, Homer, Euripides, Sophocles. Read also Milton’s Paradise Lost, Shakspeare, Ossian, Pope’s and Swift’s works, in order to form your style in your own language. In morality, read Epictetus, Xenophontis Memorabilia, Plato’s Socratic dialogues, Cicero’s philosophies, Antoninus, and Seneca.

Anyone want to take a wild guess how many of the books listed above the people who write the Western Civilization textbooks have read seriously (nevermind “in the original and not in translations”)?

As Tom Dillon, president of my alma mater, pointed out in an op-ed earlier this year shortly before his untimely death:

A frequent objection to liberal education is: How can it prepare our students for life in the “real world”? What good are a bunch of dusty old tomes in a highly competitive global marketplace?

Such questions remind me of a visit I once took to Monticello, where I encountered on Thomas Jefferson’s bookshelves authors such as Virgil, Plato, Cicero, Locke, and Ptolemy. If these thinkers shaped the minds of our country’s founders, then surely they have something to offer the minds of those who will shape our country’s future.

It is worth noting that most of the books mentioned above have, shall we say, been “in print” for a good long while, so maybe it was a case of generational hubris to think, rightly or wrongly, that they were going to simply disappear. Of course, much of what they have been replaced with is thrown out on an annual basis, never to be seen again.

Cross posted from the Castoff Review.