OK, I’ve now done everything except post your final grades officially to the Hunter system. That actually may take me another few days, so feel free to write to me in the meantime if you’d like your grade before then.
Take care everyone. Thanks for a very pleasant semester, and enjoy your winter break.
OK, the exams are starting to coming in. Remember that the deadline is 11:59pm on Thursday, December 20th, 2007.
It should take me a day or two at least to work through the exams and submit the grades. As soon as I’ve submitted the grades, I’ll post a notice here. In the meantime, you can distract yourself by thinking about food.
My pronunciation of Classical Greek words in class is pretty sloppy, as some of you might have noticed. I tend to follow casual North American conventions on such matters, rather than trying to actually get it right. What “getting it right” amounts to in these matters is actually a bit controversial - it’s not as if we can just listen to recordings of ancient speakers and then try to imitate them. We do our best - or rather, linguistics do, working from various clues. To hear some reconstructions of the way Classical Greek might have sounded, click here.
In class yesterday, I was discussing Polus’s incoherent little comment at 473c, which reads in part as follows:
Suppose that he’s caught, put on the rack, castrated, and has his eyes burned out. Suppose that he’s subjected to a host of other abuses of all sorts, and then made to witness his wife and children undergo the same.
I claimed that Plato illustrates the incoherence of Polus’s position by having him describe an impossible scenario: witnessing something after your eyes have been burned out.
A student asked, quite reasonably, if this was really incoherent. After all, you might “witness” something by hearing it. Looking at the Greek and double-checking my dictionary confirms that I was right: the word in Greek is literally “looking at,” and the examples in my Classical Greek dictionary suggest that the meaning is specifically visual.
So, Polus really is that confused.
Just to make it official, your first assignment will be due Tuesday, September 25th.
Well now, this looks like it should be fun, and of possible interest to some of you. We’ll be reading the Stoics, though not much on their views of justice. Sorabji is wonderful, and puts on a good show:
Professor Richard Sorabji
Cyprus Global Distinguished Professor
Inaugural Lecture“What Zeno of Cyprus Started: Why Stoic Thinking
on Justice is Important”to celebrate the establishment of the Cyprus Chair in the History
and Theory of Justice at New York Universityin the presence of
His Excellency Mr. Tassos Papadopoulos,
President of the Republic of CyprusMonday, September 24, 2007
6:00 p.m.
Eisner and Lubin Auditorium
Kimmel Center for University Life
60 Washington Square South
New York City
If you’re taking Classical Greek Philosophy with Chris Young at Hunter College this fall, you’ve come to the right place.
The syllabus and other course materials will always be on the right-hand corner of this page, in case you lose your own copies.
Please watch this page, for updates and course material. In this meantime, here is a compilation of quiz questions I’ve asked in recent semesters. It should give you a good sense of the sorts of questions I ask.