Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Thursday, June 11, 2015

Teaching, Aristotle

In "Patriarchal Conventions and Convictions in Greece and Rome" today we are taking up Aristotle, the Rhetoric with some Topics and Poetics thrown in for good measure. Aristotelian reasonableness as mask for a paranoid defensiveness in which character is reduced to expertise, everyday speech is suffused with syllogisms, emotions convey logical propositional content, art is reactionary medicine, and figures are not so much subversions of literality as shorthand for it. Hectic life has intervened to make what would normally be an enjoyable subject a bit of a slog. How these summer intensives crawl, how they claw! Conversations in the Moot will have to wait for the weekend to resume, I fear. And the long ghost-arm of mid-term grading already beckons with its bony heavy chain-laden hand.

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