Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Spring 2014
Department 1
Philosophy
Abstract
While serving as a Visiting Fellow at Lancaster University, I was asked to lead an informal seminar on Classical Philosophy. It was to be a reading group of postgraduate students and staff, focusing on two foundational texts of Western civilization: Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. I happily accepted. The resulting two-hour, weekly sessions over Michaelmas Term were lively times of philosophical effervescence, full of probative questions, interesting interpretations, diverse evaluations, vigorous debates, and shared insights. Postmodernists engaged in the holy act of Interpreting the Text, we nonetheless strained to grasp the “true meaning” of the texts, to extend our range of charitable understanding across twenty-four centuries of linguistic and cultural difference, and then to examine that meaning in light of our contemporary context and personal perspectives. However successful that collective exercise may have been, it was certainly provocative. [excerpt]
Copyright Note
This is the publisher's version of the work. This publication appears in Gettysburg College's institutional repository by permission of the copyright owner for personal use, not for redistribution.
Recommended Citation
DeNicola, Daniel R. "Reflections on Reading Plato and Aristotle at Lancaster." Lancaster Journal of Philosophy 2.1 (Spring 2014), 9-16.
Required Publisher's Statement
Original version is available from the publisher at: http://ljop.weebly.com/volume-two-issue-one.html