Draw Breath

I'm supposed to be writing a paper for a workshop in May (hence the disturbing tick tock sound inside my head) so, as well as reading interesting papers on accountability, privatisation and Aer Lingus, I'm messing arounds with new ways of organising myself online. read the rest of this post »

It's the time of year again when we academics are welcoming a new crop of students into our classes.

I always have mixed feelings about this time of year. Apart from the obvious that Winter is coming and that the students stay the same age but I get older, the new academic year serves as a reminder of the fundamental questions any teacher worth their salt ought to ask.

It's easy to wonder about the formal aspects of running courses. And you simply have to wonder how you're going to convey all that information between now and the end of semester. The fundamental questions, though, are pretty much contradictory: 'why should the students be interested in what I've got to say?' and 'how much ought I to cater to them?'

One change in my years of teaching, at least at undergraduate level, is that you can't simply assume that students are interested because they have taken the course. Nor can you assume that they'll participate in a way that you can reasonably expect. So part of the teaching-in-higher-education job comes down to explaining to students why they should be more bothered by some issue than they need to be to pass. You also spend your time trying to cajole them into some involvement in their own classes.

Tactics towards the final element in all this are dealt with in the thread started by Chris Bertram over on Crooked Timber. Let the terror of silence begin!

...is the upshot of Pettit's paper. His Powerpoint presentation is available on Trinity College's Philosophy Department's website (pdf).

Excellent lecture, very interesting. As with all the brilliant philosophers I've heard speak, Pettit is a spectacularly clear speaker. Leif Wenar's response was also engrossing. I'll type my notes up at some stage then might comment at great length. In the meanwhile, while I think that the Powerpoint was clear enough to get a sense of what Pettit was on about, at a first glance this paper (pdf) might also explain some of the issues.

The title, by the way, comes from the Jurist Bartolo de Sassoferrato. 12^th Century Perugia, a city republic, was at risk from the arbitrary rule of the Holy Roman Emperor. The Emperor, it was felt, could not intervene where local princes reigned, on the convention that the prince was entirely sovereign in his own lands. Since republics didn't have princes, though, the Emperor had - on occasion - taken it upon himself to ravage them on the grounds that, since there was no sovereign and he was the über-sovereign, he could do what he liked. Describing how this might break the conventions and laws of Italy at the time was an urgent concern for Perugia's jurists.

Anyway, it was Bartolo who came up with the lovely formulation that, in Perugia, the citizenry was the prince.

I'm sure Hobbes read Bartolo too, but the traces through that are for another day...