In 1170, Henry II, King of England, is alleged to have complained to a group of knights within his household, “will no one rid me of this turbulent priest.” Speaking of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Beckett, this statement was alleged to have been interpreted as an order, and a group of knights travelled to Canterbury in the ensuing days, during which Beckett was killed. While the specific...
Some time ago, a colleague of mine was leading discussion in class, and he offhandedly remarked that, of course, we all knew that Aristotle had spoken of the same issue we were discussing in his Nichomachean Ethics. The way in which he made the utterance made it clear that, if we did not, in fact, know this reference, we were somehow lacking, that we had clearly missed out on some key part of...
My first semester of grad school was kind of a wreck: I was constantly sick, my nerves were bound tight with anxiety, and my back and wrists were in pain from the Soviet-era metal chair-desks in a basement classroom. None of this was helped by the ideological distress I found myself in. Two pieces of scholarly advice that found their way to me that semester still linger with me: one, there’s no...