three chunks of Aristotle’s Metaphysics

That’s what I’ll be reviewing this morning, since I’m sitting in on a Freshman Seminar tonight on these excerpts. The seminars run from 8-10 PM on Monday and Thursday nights.

Otherwise, the classes taken by all students are 4 years of mathematics (Euclid all the way up through Einstein), 4 years of language (roughly 2 of Greek and 2 of French for everyone), and the fourth and final class is laboratory though it’s replaced by music in Sophomore year.

I’m not sure how the lab program works these days, but we did the history of atomic theory when I was a Freshman, and it was a fantastic experience.

I loved the whole program, and would probably choose it 100 times if I had 100 rebirths at my disposal. Perhaps the most valuable skill you pick up from the St. John’s curriculum is that you end up not the least bit intimidated by any subject matter, since you’re always having to come to grips with materials that are initially over your head. It’s hard to get jived by someone blowing smoke in an article if you already had to figure out Einstein, Lobachevski, and Hegel on your own. To this day I refuse to read secondary sources on any author until the very last minute, after struggling abundantly with the primary sources first.

If by some chance you’re still in high school and reading this, I can say you’re making a mistake if you go anywhere else for your undergraduate studies.

What was the hardest part of the whole four years? That depends on the student. I thought it was Maxwell, personally.

Most fun? Studying Ptolemaic astronomy! And Dante was my favorite author. Heidegger was not read at the time; that was my extracurricular hobby. But I saw yesterday that they’ve added a few days on Introduction to Metaphysics.

And I did find the library’s copy of the dual-language Vom Wesen des Grundes yesterday. I loathe it when people write notes in library books, but I seem to have done it myself in that book: quite a few marginal notes and underlines are undeniably in my own hand. But I’ll forgive myself this time, because I really loved that book. The one-page 1949 preface to it (it was originally published in 1929) is one of the most interesting things Heidegger ever wrote, but it’s perpetually ignored. That’s where he says that there are two kinds of “not,” the “not” of nothingness and the “not” between being and beings (the ontological difference), which he says are the same but not identical. He also wonders aloud why no one has done anything with that topic in 20 years. I floated a theory about that in Tool-Being, but haven’t seen others talk about it.

And yes, I found that they had indeed taken my suggestion and moved Jakob Klein’s personal copy of the first edition of Vom Wesen des Grundes and moved it to the Rare Book Room. It’s nice to have materials available in the stacks, and perhaps Klein’s will required his books to go on the shelf. But I couldn’t stand the thought of someone taking that book to the coffee shop and spilling orange juice on it. It’s too valuable an item even as a first edition, let alone the personal copy of Klein (one of Heidegger’s more interesting students).

This reminds me of my weirdest used bookstore experience, in Iowa City in 1996. I was passing a recently opened used bookstore, and hesitated before going in; at the time I was writing my Ph.D. and low on funds. Finally I decided to enter, but made a mental vow to myself: “I won’t buy anything unless it’s absolutely exceptional and impossible to find elsewhere.”

I went straight to the Philosophy section, and behold– I found a first edition copy of Heidegger’s habilitation thesis on Scotus! I’m not joking.

Even weirder, I opened the front cover apprehensively to see what he price might be, and saw these words written in pencil: “First Edition, Heidegger’s Habilitation Thesis, $25”

How any used bookstore owner could both know what he had on his hands and only charge $25 for it– that was something I couldn’t understand.

I thought of just buying it and silently running before the owner realized his error, but in the end my curiosity prevailed, and I struck up a conversation with him about how he had obtained the volume. He was actually quite enthusiastic about having a customer come in who appreciated the opportunity.

It turned out that this book came from the estate of the recently deceased University of Iowa philosopher Moltke Gram, who had had Heidegger as a doctoral committee member many decades earlier.