Gotta luv John Goodman as Charlie Meadows, aka "Madman Karl Mundt," in the Coen Brothers' movie, Barton Fink!
Anywho, I've been dealing with the life of the mind of late, namely finishing five incomplete papers at Loyola. (Yeah, that's not a good thing to cause yerself.) But as of this morning 'tis done. I have finished my last Loyola paper--the precursor in fact to my dissertation proposal--which begins:
Aristotle's text at De Anima 3.5 on the two intellects, active and potential, has been notoriously difficult to understand. Making this task more complex are related passages at Metaphysics 12.7 and 9 in which Aristotle appears to conjoin divine intellect and human intellect in thinking the forms. This has not surprisingly yielded several different interpretations. The task of this paper will be to formulate and contextualize the questions surrounding these Aristotelian texts, and to survey five ancient commentaries on the unity or divergency between the divine and human intellects.
As you can see, I've also been dealing with the life of the mind in terms of my paper, as well.
After some twenty-odd pages and a summary conclusion, I strike out into what I hope will become certain themes in my dissertation:
But that the understanding of these texts is important may well be assumed. What may not be so clear is the application of such an understanding to wider Aristotelian concerns. Two of those concerns have to do with the development of Aristotle's own thought and how such development may further alter one's interpretation of the two texts under consideration here, and what role the Organon plays in metaphysical considerations such as I have undertaken here. The ancient authors understood the Aristotelian corpus to be unified, even if there were significant questions on the harmonization of two or more seemingly, and generally understood the Organon and the metaphysical texts to be addressing two separable fields of inquiry. These are not generally the modern views.Another area of further inquiry would entail the tensions Aristotle explores in the Nicomachean Ethics X.7ff, and what sort of human life would be the result of certain interpretive stances taken here on these texts. That is to say, if thinking the divine thoughts was the highest end of human happiness, it will make some difference whether one conceives of that sort of intellective union as naturally internal to the human knower, or brought about externally of his own intellect. The framing of such a way of life in light of those concerns might then take on slight shifts of distinction which may nonetheless alter how one understands Aristotle to balance these tensions.
If you want to take a gander at this twenty-six-plus-page bad-boy, you can view it in a pdf file here.
Posted by Clifton at June 9, 2005 04:50 AM | TrackBack