Life at Marquette

I've been in my grad program at Marquette for about a month now, so I figured that a post on how my life is going would be in order. I have three classes: Plato, Aristotle, and Medieval Islamic Philosophy. The Plato and Aristotle profs tend to banter back and forth between classes. Medieval Islamic Philosophy is interesting, though there is a ton of dense reading for the course; we're basically reading through major works of several thinkers of the Classical Rationalist period in Islamic philosophy. We started with a paraphrase of Plotinus (the so-called "Theology of Aristotle") and another Neo-Platonist paraphrase which came in the Latin West as the Liber De Causis. From there, we've been through al-Kindi (who was in charge of an early translation circle and very keen on showing the unity of Greek thought and how it fits with Islam) and al-Farabi (called "The Second Teacher" after Aristotle, at least once Farabi's work was discovered).

I'm also in a couple of reading groups, for Latin and Arabic. The same prof (Dr. Richard Taylor) heads up both, as well as the Islamic Philosophy class. So, the Arabic reading group usually takes on texts which we are already reading in class. The Latin reading group is working on a text from Aquinas which ties into the Aquinas and the Arabs project, on which I'll be doing some work as a student participant. It looks like I came to the right place for cross-cultural medieval philosophy.

Getting away from school concerns, we recently (as in, a month ago) got ourselves a cat: a rather slender Russian Blue by the name of Starshine. She's taken a bit to get used to me, but now she's an attention hog. Last weekend we introduced her to Tiger, our rabbit. Much to Starshine's consternation, Tiger has taken up cat-chasing as a new hobby.