not a bad final day

That was a pretty good final day of classes, I think. Both groups still have a test a week from today, but that was the last lecture. It was all review, and it was satisfying. One of the things I think I do pull off well as a teacher is summarizing large amounts of material in digestible form in compact time-frames, and of course review days are ideal for that technique.

It was all of Plotinus in 75 minutes, and later all of the pre-Socratics in 35 minutes. We’d done all of that stuff before over the course of many weeks, but it’s nice to be able to hit the highlights quickly as a memory refresher, especially since students invariably come up with stuff that you’ve never thought of before, no matter how many times you’ve done it.

This reminds me of an exercise I would like to try… Have every philosopher write a 2-page history of philosophy, just to get some idea of what they think has been most important in the 2,600 years of our discipline in the West. The histories would probably vary wildly. I was much struck by Levi’s point some months ago that his experience doing psychoanalytic work drove home the lesson that people are much more different from each other than we normally realize. I suspect the same would be glaringly true of forced quick histories of philosophy. You might be shocked to find that some of your colleagues think that “real” philosophy began only with Kant or even with Frege. In some histories, figures you yourself regard as minor would stroll across the stage as giants. I met someone who thinks Gadamer is actually a better philosopher than Heidegger, for instance, and that claim takes my breath away. There would be numerous such surprises in store, most likely, and our own views would likely astonish others.