Last week, I spent three days at a local conference, and it's one that I typically go to every year and occasionally present at (I think I've done three or four talks there over the last 10 or so years), and it's held at Marquette University and called the Aristotle and Aristotelian Tradition Conference.
The theme changes from year to year, so you get different people and different kinds of papers and discussions at each of the conferences, depending on what the theme is and how it ties in with the kind of work that people are doing.
So this year, it was about Aristotle and his predecessors, meaning Aristotle's own discussions, treatments, criticisms, interpretations of people, not just including Plato, his old teacher, but all of these other philosophers that had come before him. And you can find discussions about that sort of thing, for example, in Metaphysics book 1, where he tells us what all these different philosophers thought about the causes of and why they didn't have the four-cause schema that he did, but were on the way to developing it.
Or you can look in other works. For example, there's some references in the Nicomachean Ethics to other people's viewpoints on things. And we don't have to belabor that point. Suffice it to say that Aristotle is very interested in what other people had to say, and he's also equally interested in in taking what's useful or right or even just half developed in their works and incorporating it into his own larger, fairly systematic perspective on matters, but stripping away the things that he thought were off base and saying, at least at certain points in his works, why he thought they were off base.
Now, it's Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition, so it doesn't just include attention to Aristotle himself, but also to later thinkers, some of whom are also writing in Greek, some of whom are in various other places, you know Arabic writers on Aristotle, some works from the middle ages. I don't think there was anything on contemporary aristotelianism but i might have missed that because I had to miss a few of the sessions.
In any case, why am I talking about this conference here?
I had the luxury of not having to present any of my own work. I actually had a thought about what I might propose as a topic. It would have been a little bit out of the usual extent of this, which is much more focused on logic and metaphysics and matters like that, I would have focused on Aristotle and his engagements with predecessors in what we call the ethico-political works, which include the Ethics and the Politics, but also the Rhetoric and the Poetics, and a few other works of those sorts.
So I didn't get a proposal together. And the good news about that was I didn't have to present anything. I could just sit back and see what other people had to say. And that was quite enjoyable. Sometimes I could go up to them afterwards or even in the session, ask questions. And I could also see what other people were interested in asking about or even debating about. And this is what you do at a good academic conference.It's one reason why we have this sort of, let's say genre or format or arrangement for doing that sort of thing.
You might wonder, well, what would I get out of going to an academic conference? And with some of them, it might not be very good at all! Maybe you don't get any good discussion with anybody or you're kind of shut out because it turns out to be a gathering of people who all know each other. But in many cases, it's pretty cool to go because you meet up with other people who share a few things in common with him.
So one of them is an interest in something that is probably pretty uncommon. If you meet up with somebody else who routinely reads Aristotle and wants to talk about metaphysical views on, say, causality or the principle of non-contradiction or the nature of the heavens or whatever, anything like that, that is a very, very small amount of people. You could say it's like a weird, tiny fandom, right?
But it's not just fandom, because people who are interested in these things are putting in the time and effort to study them because they think there's something not just interesting, but potentially useful there, something worth knowing about and talking about. And here's another thing that you share in common with them. They're willing to write papers that very few people in the grand scheme of things are ever going to read, let alone read attentively, let alone read. give them useful feedback and responses about.
So they're not just willing to write that. They're willing to travel, to hang out for three days with other people. They're willing to, to some degree, dress up when they're presenting and take what other people have to say about it seriously, and then perhaps go out for dinner later or meet together and discuss it over lunch. So these are quite often very important ways in which people get stimulation.
And it kind of takes me back. Many of you probably know my first full-time teaching position was at Indiana State Prison. And I was teaching for Ball State University in a four-year degree program. But aside from the other professors in the prison program, and there was only one of them who actually taught any philosophy classes, you wouldn't get a lot of what we call peer interaction. I mean, the students were pretty good on the whole, interested, older, so a bit more mature. Very motivated, at least at a certain point, to learn and discuss and get as much as they could out of their education. but they didn't have access to the kinds of materials that we did because of the prison regime.
And typically they were working on their bachelor's. So they weren't people who had done graduate work on Aristotle, or Hegel, or Maurice Blondel, or pick whoever else it happens to be. You do want — most people, I would say if you're an academic — you do want to engage with other people who are not just on your level in terms of their background and preparation and education and research, but who have a similar level of interest in what it is that you're focused on.
And so for me, I mean, you do get some good interaction through reading other people and you can correspond by email or (we didn't have social media back then) but nowadays you could do it in social media. But there's something about actually being in the same space, the same place, the same conversation as other people that is quite valuable.
And I think this is something that many people out there are quite starved for, have this deep desire. I think it's something much more important common and widespread among human beings who are interesting people, because they're interested in interesting things. And so those of you who are listening to this may recognize yourself in there.
Even if you don't have a background academically in philosophy and you came to it kind of late, you might say to yourself, yeah, this is something that I wish I could get more of. And so academic conferences and do satisfy that desire to some degree. They're often more intense, but we could think about other venues in which this can happen.
For example, something that I was fortunate to be invited to participate in just last year, Stoic Camp out in Wyoming, where a bunch of people, some of whom are academics, but many, most of whom are are not, and are from all sorts of walks of life, but are interested in Stoicism, get together way out in the wilderness at a camp and hang out and, you know, do camp things like eating meals together and taking hikes and bonfires, but also intensively study, and talk about, and practice this philosophy as a way of life together for some time.
And you get to know people as you're doing this and I think that's quite valuable it's quite enjoyable it's something that has a lot of dimensions to recommend it so I thought I would talk a little bit here about what it's like to participate in an academic conference.
I think now that I've said it, this is actually a very small subset of a much larger set of ways in which we engage each other about things that matter to us, and really have some substance and depth to them, so they can be explored and shared in common.
And I think that's probably where I'll end. You can think about that yourself, whether you crave, need, desire those sorts of engagements or whether you do just fine without that and what the reason for yourself happens to be for being disposed one way in this matter or in the other direction.
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