My First Lecture

Today I gave my first lecture. I was nervous, of course--I put maroon lip liner on my eye lids when I was getting ready. But it went very well--I thought I would run out of things to say, but in fact I didn't get to cover all of the things that I'd prepared. The kids asked lots of questions, which was helpful. Goodness gracious, it was wonderful!

It was hard, however, to make them even smile, not to mention laugh. It took basically the course of the whole lecture to get them used to me. There was nothing when I said, "Aristotle when to Athens at 17 to study at Plato’s Academy until Plato’s death—20 years! (my mother calls me a professional student after only nine years of higher education!"

They did not laugh (although the head teacher did) when I proposed to talk about the four causes of this green dress: "In order to understand what these four causes mean, let’s consider these four causes as applied to one of my favorite things in the whole world [slide]: a green dress. What is the material cause of the green dress? (the fabric, the thread, the leather for the belt) What is the formal cause? (dresses are a shirt and a skirt that are attached—this is the form of a dress—a dress has to have this to be a dress—we do not make “dress” up—we do not invent dresses; rather, we make a particular dress) (To review: we make the dress out of material, which already exists, and we make the dress according to the shape of a dress, which already exists—a dress is already a thing, and we make it according to that, although, of course, there are lots of ways that this can vary. Furthermore, a dress might not be a great example, as the sphere is, which Aristotle used—for maybe someone at some point invented a dress, but no one invented a sphere.) What is the efficient cause of the dress? (the dressmaker or the patterns and the sewing machine) What is the final cause of the dress? (why are we doing all of these things? Why do we take the material and the thread and learn how to sew and follow a pattern? The dress itself is the final cause.)"

They cracked a smile at this: "It is important to note here that Aristotle’s notion of a telos does not include inevitability—the acorn does not have to turn into an oak tree. It can get a disease; it can get uprooted. However, in its nature, there is the potential and the purpose to become an oak tree. It isn’t going to grow into a maple tree. It isn’t going to become a gorilla. Its purpose is to be an oak tree. (This gets much harder when you talk about the telos of a rock, for instance. What is the end of a rock? Can’t it be many different things? I could throw a rock through a window. I can use it to build a pretty wall in New England. But, we can say that part of the end of a rock is to be hard.)"

They were definitely smiling by the time we got to: "Virtue is at the mean—middle between excess and deficiency—but it is the mean that is appropriate for that particular situation—how much it’s appropriate to drink is going to vary—how much it’s appropriate to drink when you’re sitting at home by yourself on a Thursday night is going to be different from the mean of how much your should drink at a celebration, like a wedding."