Templeton Honors College

This was my undergraduate senior thesis.

In the notorious class "Justice and the Common Good," my friends and I learned to ask philosophical "what is" questions, like "What is Piety?" and "What is a Person?" We never came up with any good answers. By drawing from the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, I want to show that we failed because those questions themselves make no sense and are therefore unanswerable; they make false expectations of language, and they seek after rules that do not exist. By moving away from them, we can clarify our thinking, prevent bad problems, and continue productively in both philosophy and theology.

This dialogue is an attempt to understand, take seriously, and move beyond cultural relativism. It is my response to what I think was a failure in my undergraduate thesis.

Six friends, drawn by an ordinary remark about couches and chairs, dive into a conversation about language, reality, relativism, traditions, paradigms, genocide, and friendship.

Conventional education rests on an anthropology of the human being as primarily a consumer of material goods. It therefore trains students to seek material goods. A Classical Education rests on an anthropology of the human being as oriented towards the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, and so trains its students to turn their loves towards higher things.

In this document, I want to share my best attempt thus-far at developing pedagogy for a classical classroom. I will explain the teaching practices I use: what the students and I do in class. This centers on four main activities: Catechism, read-alouds, seminars, and occasional lectures.

How should a classical teacher assess their students? I present six principles of classical assessment: emphasize qualitative feedback, downplay quantitative feedback, emphasize self-assessment, embrace subjectivity, give students a chance to try again, and contact parents when students fail

This dissertation examines the function in Biblical Hebrew (H) and translation into Greek in the Septuagint (G) of 'ayyeh, yesh, `ôd, 'ên, and hinneh, which belong to a H form-class called "predicators of existence". A translator-centered study, it addresses one aspect of the matrix used to characterize translation technique--namely, consistency of rendering. It asks how each word functions in H in order to determine how the translators may have understood it. It then discusses its translation in every passage where the usual rendering was not used (book by book). Each word has a usual rendering; these can be divided between those which entail a form of eimi and those which do not, reflecting both the nature of the syntagms within which these words occur, and their primary functions. 'ayyeh (pou eimi) yesh (eimi), and 'ên (ou eimi) are primarily syntagmatic predicators of existence and only secondarily, if at all, adverbs. `ôd is usually represented by eti,...