I taught my first class 67 years ago as a young graduate student Teaching Fellow in the Harvard philosophy department. In the intervening two thirds of a century, I have taught in philosophy departments, history departments, economics departments, political science departments, sociology departments, and Afro-American studies departments in colleges and universities around America. Teaching is what I love to do.
I was teaching most recently in the UNC philosophy
department in the spring of 2020 when Covid hit. I finished the course on zoom
and since then, apart from some appearances virtually in Laramie, Wyoming,
Cornell, New York, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania I have been unable to teach.
Next semester, I will return to the classroom at the University of North
Carolina, an opportunity that cheers me greatly.
I am limited by age, by infirmity, and by family obligations
from traveling to college and university campuses, but I would really like to
continue to teach – not simply to write, or to offer opinions on a blog, but
actually to spend time talking with students even if only via the
intermediation of zoom.
I do not need travel money, I do not need honoraria, what I
need is groups of students who would like to meet with me, talk with me, learn
from me, and give me thereby the opportunity to continue to do what I have done
since 1955, namely to teach.
This blog reaches widely into the academic world, it is my
impression, and so I have decided to use my blog to offer my services wherever
they might be desired. I would be happy to appear in graduate or undergraduate
courses as a visiting zoom lecturer, either for a single session or for
several.
Any takers?
Maybe you could specify exactly what courses you offer to teach, on what philosophers and/or on what philosophical topics.
ReplyDeleteI recently came across the Catherine Project, where teachers of classic books offer for free great reckonings in little zooms. It looks like they could use a class from you on Das Kapital. I'm at the other end of the love-hate teaching spectrum from the professor, but the modest nobility of this project is attractive: https://catherineproject.org/
ReplyDeleteI would suggest that a survey course on political philosophy, similar to the one you were scheduled to teach at UNC, starting with Plato, Locke, Hobbses, Mill, through Marx and Rawls, would be more likely to get traction than a course limited to Marx’s Kapital.
ReplyDeleteThe History of Consciousness department at UCSC might be a place to look.
ReplyDeleteJohn Rapko
ReplyDeleteIs the Catherine Project an outgrowth of St. John's College in Annapolis? St. John;s has long had a program of community seminars; I've been attending few each year for more than a decade--did one last weekend on Beowulf. Can you imagine discussing Beowulf for six hours? But we did!
You may not wish to impose on your son, but I suspect a class could be arranged at the University of Pennsylvania Law School of law students, many of whom are former philosophy majors, interested in a refresher survey course on political philosophy. You might even be able to arrange a joint teaching project with your son teaching constitutional law, in conjunction with your teaching political philosophy, discussing the connections between the Constitution and the thoughts of Locke and Rosseau, for example.
ReplyDeleteAlternatively if you just teach online whatever you like, I'll definitely be joining! You can make your own course. I don't think it'll be hard to get students. Similar to those great Hume lecture.
ReplyDeleteNat p.
David Palmeter,
ReplyDeleteThe 'Current Leadership' section of the Catherine Project's website lists 8 people, 3 of whom are or have been connected to St. John's, but there's nothing to suggest any official affiliation. I'm very interested to read of your Beowulf experience. I'm still in recovery from the trauma of a quarter of a century of teaching at 8 or so different colleges and universities. But recently I finally got around to tackling the Oresteia in Greek, and I'm alarmed to find myself thinking I'd like to teach it . . .
John Rapko,
ReplyDeleteAs you may know, a St. John’s seminar begins with an opening question, something apparently “minor” which, almost magically, ignites a discussion—not a frenzied discussion, there may be long pauses, but a deep one. The tutor was David Townsend who is superb. His seminars fill up almost immediately. We used Seamus Heaney’s translation in which, as he described in his introduction, he worked hard to reflect as much as possible the original Old English poetry while translating it into contemporary poetry. But the seminar didn’t get into any of this—not the alliteration, not the kennings. Townsend referred to some specific lines and asked “What does Beowulf think he wants to do? Can he do it?” We pondered. Someone suggested an answer. Someone else picked that up and elaborated on it, and it went on from there.
I don’t think that experience can be duplicated with group—however well-educated and intelligent—in which some, perhaps most, have experience with the format. The rule is to concentrate on the text. References to other works are strongly discouraged.
A few years ago I led an OLLI study group in which we read a philosophical essay each week 10 weeks. For one of those weeks I selected Kant’s Idea for a Universal History. I had participated in a St. John’s seminar on that a few years before and still had my notes. As luck would have it, I had a chance to do it again with another St. John’s tutor just a month before my group sessions were to begin. So I had two St. John’s “opening questions.” I began by asking the first. Dead silence. Not just dead silence, but blank faces. No one was mulling it over. So I tried the second question. Same result.
I’m impressed with your being able to read The Oresteia in Greek. One of the things I enjoy doing is comparing translations. I’ve found that the story line is rarely changed, but the translations can be radically different:
“Dear gods set me free from all the pain,
the long watch I keep, one whole year awake…
propped on my arms, crouched on the roofs of Atreus
like a dog.” Robert Fagles
“You gods in heaven—
You have watched me here on this tower
All night, every night for twelve months,
Thirteen moons—
Tethered to the roof of this palace
Like a dog.” Ted Hughes
“You gods, release me.
Crouched like a dog, I watch always, all year long
on the tower of the sons of Atreus.”
—David Grene and Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty.
David Palmeter,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your quite marvelous response. Yes, class discussion is a tricky thing. I once taught an intensive seminar on Adorno in Finland, and someone warned me in advance that the Finnish students would not talk. They were right. Another time I had the liveliest imaginable class in 'Performativity' (don't ask) at an art school; the 20 students chatted away for 15 weeks and, as far as I could tell, learned absolutely nothing.--I also get quite a kick from comparing translations, although for the major European languages I check them against the original. For the ultimate in such comparisons, I cannot resist recommending the astounding little book by Eliot Weinberger, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei.
John Rapko
ReplyDeleteI pretty well mangled the first sentence of the second paragraph in my prior post. Never mind what I put on paper, this is what was in my head:
“I don’t think that experience can be duplicated with a group—however well-educated and intelligent—unless some, perhaps most, have experience with the format.”
A few years ago the New Yorker ran piece entitled “The Translation Wars” about the jousting translators of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. The two leading current translations of War and Peace are incredibly different. Repetition is or was a favored rhetorical device in Russian prose. There’s a sentence in War and Peace in which Tolstoy uses the Russian word for “now” 21 times in a single sentence.
Most translations, beginning with Constance Garnett through the end of the 20th Century, reduced the number of “nows” greatly and broke the single long sentence up into a few shorter ones.
But early in this Century Penguin came out with a new translation by Anthony Briggs that does not use the word “now” at all in that sentence, which he also broke into several sentences. And Russian soldiers, in his translation, speak with Cockney accents.
A year or two later the Pevear and Volokhonksy translation appeared with all 21 “nows” in that one sentence. Briggs says his version reads better in English. Pevear and Volokhonsky say that’s a matter taste and it isn’t what Tolstoy wrote.
Someone, I don’t recall who, once said or wrote that translations are like lovers: the true are seldom beautiful and the beautiful are seldom true.
I’ve read both the Briggs and Pevear and Volokhonsky translations though, and my preference is strongly with P&V and what Tolstoy wrote—or as close to it as possible.
David Palmeter,
ReplyDeleteI'm glad to hear your views on the P & V translations. Last year I read their translation of The Idiot and loved it, but then I came across a reviewer claiming, specifically with regard to Chekhov, that they had no 'ear' for dialogue. I have no way of judging (I don't know any Russian, though my wife has published translations of a bit of contemporary Russian poetry). I seem to recall that Wittgenstein read The Brothers Karamazov in Russian by looking up every word; and Max Weber taught himself Russian in a month so that he could follow newspaper accounts of the Revolution.
John Rapko
ReplyDeleteI can imagine that Weber in a month of rather intense study could learn enough of a language to follow newspaper accounts. But trying to read a novel one word at a time, with the nuances of a language, without being immersed in it, seems improbable. The difference to the ear of "Ask not what you can do for your country" and "Don't ask what you can do ..." could well escape anything short of long and relatively deep immersion in a language.
I think the success of P&V is due to something like this. He knows little Russian, but that is her first language. So she transliterates a text, generally using the original Russian syntax. He then turns that into more stylish English--and they both go over that text. Every time I look up it seems like they've translated another Russian work, but so far I don't think they've done anything with Turgenev.
@John Rapko
ReplyDeleteThat story about Wittgenstein is almost certainly false. In 1933-35, Wittgenstein, along with Francis Skinner, had private lessons in Russian from Fania Pascal, who wrote about it in the collection Recollections of Wittgenstein. As she reports, he read Dostoevsky with her, and possibly also with Nikolai Bakhtin, with whom Wittgenstein had a friendship.
Warren Goldfarb,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the correction; you are of course right about the lessons with Pascal. But wouldn't it be accurate to say that Wittgenstein in part taught himself Russian as I recalled? I haven't read any biographical material on Wittgenstein since reading Monk's biography shortly after it was published; but still the (imagined?) story about Wittgenstein's heavily marked copy of The Brothers Karamazov has the ring of truth. In my experience reading the first book in a non-native language (for me 5 languages; I abandoned Sanskrit and Japanese before I got that far) requires looking up and writing down most words for a great many pages.
In the midst of overwhelmingly learned individuals
ReplyDelete