The semester is off to a good start! Here we are a few weeks in the semester and so much is happening.
While the country is watching with great interest the happenings of the US presidential race, those of us here at ODU are preparing for another presidential contest. Ohio Dominican University will soon be welcoming candidates to be the next president of the university. This is an exciting time for our community.
Classes are going well. In my introductory philosophy class, Issues in Philosophy, we are finishing up the two famous proofs for the existence of God by St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109 AD). Anselm wishes to demonstrate the existence of God “by the necessity of reason” and “by thought alone,” where absolutely nothing is established by the authority of Scripture. Of course, Anselm believes that Scripture does establish the existence of God, but he wants to show that the existence of God can be demonstrated to those outside of religious traditions if they simply have “a moderate amount of intelligence.” We have had some interesting discussions on this topic!
In my Philosophy of History class, eleven students and I have been working through St. Augustine’s great masterwork, The City of God. Augustine (354-430 AD) reflects on the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410 AD, and he wants to counter those who blame the fall of the city on the neglect of the pagan Roman gods. As part of his account, Augustine tries to show the intellectual inferiority of ancient paganism to Christianity, and in doing so he sets forth a theory of history. In short, history is going somewhere; it is headed in one direction; and Augustine spends about a thousand pages telling us where.
My third class, Philosophy of the Person, has been a whirlwind of ancient Greek philosophy. We have been covering the great Greek philosophers Plato (427/8-348/7 BC) and Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC). Many of the discussions have centered on the question “What is happiness?” We have also been dealing with the questions of whether it is possible to be mistaken about what happiness is, and whether to attain happiness in life you have to be lucky.