St. John’s (Annapolis) lecture title for February 2014

Finally, I decided on “Dante’s Ontology: What the Florentine Poet Can Teach Contemporary Philosophers.”

It’s not going to be about Dante’s own explicit views on ontology, which as far as I recall simply parrot the views of Thomas Aquinas. What I’m thinking of instead are some tacit ontological categories that can be dug up from The Divine Comedy.

The first reasonably good piece of intellectual work I did in my life was, in fact, my Sophomore Essay at St. John’s back in March 1988. It was on this same theme. Recently I reread that essay, and though my writing style as a 19-year-old writing style made me cringe a bit, a number of the ideas were not just salvageable, but interesting pointers as to where I’m standing today. Next year’s return to Annapolis seemed like a good excuse to bring that series of thoughts full circle, a quarter-century (!) later.

a link to the Cogburn/Ohm paper

On April 4, I made a post about object-oriented hermeneutics in which I refereed to a paper by John Cogburn and Mark Allan Ohm. Just this morning I was informed that I’d forgotten to insert an actual link to the paper. It is HERE.

The link still didn’t work! My apologies to Jon Cogburn. I will make a third post.

ongoing violence in Cairo today following funeral for slain Copts

HERE.

Just asking: who in the hell throws stones at mourners leaving a funeral?