Episode 39 - Why Academics Enjoy Going To Conferences

Last week, I spent three days at a local conference, and it's one that I typically go to every year and occasionally present at (I think I've done three or four talks there over the last 10 or so years), and it's held at Marquette University and called the Aristotle and Aristotelian Tradition Conference.

The theme changes from year to year, so you get different people and different kinds of papers and discussions at each of the conferences, depending on what the theme is and how it ties in with the kind of work that people are doing.

So this year, it was about Aristotle and his predecessors, meaning Aristotle's own discussions, treatments, criticisms, interpretations of people, not just including Plato, his old teacher, but all of these other philosophers that had come before him. And you can find discussions about that sort of thing, for example, in Metaphysics book 1, where he tells us what all these different philosophers thought about the causes of and why they didn't have the four-cause schema that he did, but were on the way to developing it.

Or you can look in other works. For example, there's some references in the Nicomachean Ethics to other people's viewpoints on things. And we don't have to belabor that point. Suffice it to say that Aristotle is very interested in what other people had to say, and he's also equally interested in in taking what's useful or right or even just half developed in their works and incorporating it into his own larger, fairly systematic perspective on matters, but stripping away the things that he thought were off base and saying, at least at certain points in his works, why he thought they were off base.

Now, it's Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition, so it doesn't just include attention to Aristotle himself, but also to later thinkers, some of whom are also writing in Greek, some of whom are in various other places, you know Arabic writers on Aristotle, some works from the middle ages. I don't think there was anything on contemporary aristotelianism but i might have missed that because I had to miss a few of the sessions.

In any case, why am I talking about this conference here?