Change & Tradition

William Walsh

It is a momentous day! You sit for the first time in the dreaded C&T class, not knowing what to expect, but certain that you will be soon be oppressed. Relax just a little. A student confessed to me recently that C&T was not as bad as people say it is.

In fact I believe very strongly in the course, which I have been doing since the program began. The rap on the course is that it is unrelated to one's major--and thus useless. Oddly enough, one is not entirely defined by one's profession. Many of you are people too. It is because you are human that I believe humanities courses are relevant to you. The humanities are that branch of the liberal arts and sciences that study the condition of being human, and the inevitable questions about the meaning and purpose of life. Perhaps we will not be as grandiose as all that, and I suspect that you will already have some ideas about your own life. In this course we are concerned with other possible constructions of life's meaning, which may be different from ours and thus inferior-or does that follow? Is difference acceptable? May it even provide some perspective on our own values? Is it worth understanding difference, otherness? We will be trying to get over the idea that the world would be a better place if everyone were just like us. I don't expect that you will remember the dates for Confucius or Mohammad much past Christmas, but I expect the course to open your mind-give it a chance.

In addition, the course has a variety of goals for the development of learning skills: critical thinking and writing. You will receive a C&T Writing Guide later, but I want to stress that assignments will ask you to think critically about the readings and to draw conclusions from them. In many ways, this body of materials from other cultures is fresh information about which you will not have previous knowledge or biases; it is an ideal medium for fresh thinking on your part. Obviously our own culture will form a constant frame of reference for our thought; this information will allow us to take a fresh look at ourselves.

Dick McGowan

By its character and curriculum, Change and Tradition is an LAS course. There must be something important about the liberal arts and sciences. But it is worth noting what Plato wrote in the concluding pages of his greatest work: "Here is the whole risk for a human being, as it seems. And on this account each of us must, to the neglect of other studies, above all see to it that he is a seeker and student of that study by which he might learn and find out who will give him the capacity and the knowledge to distinguish the good from the bad life, and so everywhere and always to choose the better from among those that are possible…From all this he will be able to choose between the worse and the better life." (Republic, Bk. X, 618b-d; trans. Allan Bloom)

This section of C & T, an LAS course, is taught by "a seeker and student of that study," i.e., philosophy, the most important of all LAS disciplines for living a good life.