“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Medieval OOO

It's great to see Bruce Holsinger's essay in print. He was telling me about it at UVa.

There has been steady engagement by medievalists with OOO, for many reasons. But perhaps most of all because OOO reconfigures the consensus about what the "middle ages" might be, philosophically speaking.

When I first got into OOO I spent a lot of time reading medieval and in particular Arabic philosophy. There are intuitive parallels, because of the Aristotle. The dismissal of Pre-Kantian stuff as scholasticism, and indeed the term "medieval," are clearly pejorative symptoms of what has happened in the last two hundred years.

In Past Talks there is a graduate class at Rice from 2010 that I taught on this theme, funnily enough.



1 comment:

Anonymous said...

In my humble opinion, the Anglo Saxon enigmata in the Exeter book are the best things ever