Hunter V. McClure

On my old account I had a long-running thread of art that I liked. I think I'll restart that here.

A hopeful update

It gets worse. They aren’t just AI generated photos; they’re AI generated STOCK photos. So the College paid to license LLM slop rather than either (a) pay a human artist or (b) freely use the many public-domain works of art depicting Plato, Thomas, or Douglass.

Very curious as to why my beloved alma mater @stjohnscollege has opted to use egregious AI slop in the windows of the new campus bookstore.

Less by absence than by malicious inclusion. Saved myself $30 yesterday after looking Strauss up in a book on Francis Bacon and finding a deranged footnote approvingly marshaling Shadia Drury’s unhinged delusions against the “Straussian cult.”

Looking for Strauss in a bibliography is a great way to quickly figure out whether a piece of secondary literature is in any way worth one’s time.

Highly recommend this excellent book (and this translation) to my wonderful friends. One of the better things I have read this year.

@TheCaveBeneath @GregMcBrayer3 Oh yes I am a great fan of Alter’s Bible; it was key for me in “de-sedimenting” the Bible from the framework I was taught to read it in as a child. I’ll certainly be returning to it this time around, together with Everett Fox’s translation.

I’m not sure if we’ve discussed this before, but I would go with Robert Alter’s “The David Story.” Following the footnotes closely is extremely helpful, though there are key elements of the tribal dynamics Alter seems to omit from his commentary. And that’s perhaps why it’s necessary to spend a lot of time reading and rereading the Book of Judges to acquire a firmer grasp on the political dynamics in the transition from Judges to the Samuel account. Sure, there’s much political philosophy to glean from this account; however, if one is not steeped in the messianic tradition, much will be missed.

Anyone have recommendations on secondary literature for Samuel/Kings? Leading a reading group on them this summer with the aim of treating them as political treatises and tragic dramas. Looking for something along the lines of Leon Kass’ book on Genesis or Bob Sacks’ on Job.

If you’ve been wanting to dive into Islamic philosophy but have been scared off by the idea that it must be a very foreign tradition to enter into for the Western reader, pick up Farabi’s Selected Aphorisms and the Political Regime immediately.

Farabi quite literally changed my life. Totally upended how I read the Greeks. Many think I’m jesting when I say he is, for me, one of the five or six absolutely most essential philosophers; I’m not. Few thinkers are more rewarding.

Feels a little too on the nose

📣 Grad students! Working on #Gadamer or hermeneutics? We’re organizing a graduate workshop at @BostonCollege alongside a conference on “Gadamer and/in America” (Oct 2). Great chance to share work & meet others in the field. Interested or know someone who might be? DM/email me.

In the following excerpt from a talk in 2015, St John’s College tutor and former dean Matthew K Davis argued that question of the best life is made - contrary to what one might expect - *less accessible to us* downstream “Locke and his heirs”: “Indeed, if these questions about our genuine experience in any way resonate with you-if, for example, the deepest experiences of your lives have been concern for your friends or love of someone else or the heartfelt belief that one must be courageous or honest and you feel somewhere inside that these experiences are *real*, and not conventional-then it seems to me that we might begin to see a reason, and even a need, for a St. John's education. For the St. John's education begins by considering the works of the ancient and medieval philosophers and poets. And these authors began, unlike Locke, by taking our political and religious beginning point seriously. That is, they began not from a hypothetical view of where society comes from, though they surely considered such hypothetical views, but rather from the world in which we genuinely find ourselves, that is, a world in which we feel deep obligations to our country, our friends, and our family; they began by taking seriously the fact that human beings begin within a political life and may very well be political beings. And because they begin here, they are able to think deeply about the questions that arise in the midst of that life, questions that touch upon those things that I think, at any rate, matter most deeply to our minds and hearts, questions raised directly or indirectly by authors such as Plato and Aristotle and even Homer, questions such as, "what is justice?," "what is friendship?," "what is beauty?," "what is courage?," "what is a citizen?," and so on. Furthermore, because they begin from within political life, from within political and religious communities that did have a “summum bonum," they are also able to raise, and raise seriously, the question that, along with the others that I have just cited, Locke and his heirs, beginning from the view that human beings are fundamentally selfish and free, have made less accessible to us, namely, the question of what the best life might be.” From "Freedom, the Liberal Arts, and St. John's College," lecture delivered by Dean Matthew K. Davis, August 28, 2015 Rest in peace, Matt. He was taken from us too early.

@HeathTaws @stjohnscollege So are countless public domain images of all three.

@greenloeb @stjohnscollege It’s free. That’s why.

@alexpriou @HistorianZhang Hello hello!

@HistorianZhang Very true. I'd happily pay a good copy editor out of pocket, too, if it meant I had full control on the final product.

Copyediting is now mostly nonexistent at academic publishers. You gotta pay your own way for a good copyeditor and also for an indexer, or do it yourself. The last book I reviewed the press screwed up the biblio/glossary so much it made the author look like he can't read Chinese

“The tragedy of the U.S.A. over 160 years is the decline of Adamses. More and more we cd., if we examined events, see that John Adams had the corrective for Jefferson.” Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur, p. 254

It’s the semiquincentennial and yet the @LibraryAmerica has not put the fullness of the wisest founder’s writings back into print. What’s even the point?

"Lumber Schooners at Evening on Penobscot Bay," Fitz Henry Lane.

Never mind the geographic theory of Straussians, the three real types are: Goblinish Straussians, Ghoulish Straussians, and Gnomish (true) Straussians.