The end of Republic

It would be kind of cool if this blog post landed on some Star Wars fan's google search.

That aside, we actually finished up Monday with his bizarre section on reincarnation. I'm still not sure whether the story of Er is allegory or doctrine or some clever combination of the two, but I do think that Plato's joke at the very end is just silly.

In today's class we looked at the unapologetically empiricist first book of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, and I think the class got a genuine grasp on that ancient difference between idealists and inductivists. After three months of Plato, Aristotle's moral conservatism is almost jarring, and I wonder which way my classes leaned.

The rest of the semester will have to do with constructing and revising the portfolio. That disappoints me somewhat, but I know that I should be focusing on my Spenser paper anyway, so I'll not cry too much.

Now I've got roughly three hours to work until I have to talk to the composition pedagogy class about special sections. I've got a basic working idea of what I'll talk about, and I've only got to fill up eight minutes, but it's still a hair nervewracking.