This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis

Next Semester's Teaching Load

Well, I finalized things yesterday with Loyola, so my teaching load looks a bit like this come January:

Mon: Phil 105 Logic (Oakton Community College/Des Plaines) 6:30-9:20
Wed: Phil 180 Being Human (Loyola University Chicago/Lake Shore) 7:00-9:30
Thur: Phil 106 Ethics (Oakton Community College/Skokie) 6:30-9:20

I've recently changed up my Ethics course to come at it in a more Pierre Hadot/Philosophy-as-a-Way-of-Life sort of approach. It seemed to work fairly well the first go 'round this semester, and I'll be able to fine tune it for next term.

I'm excited to be able to teach a 180 course at Loyola again. It's been since spring 2004 that I last taught it. I also like the change in focus for the Loyola curricula toward a more specific look at human personhood rather than a survey of philosophers--though I'm still pretty much free to go about it however I want. I've tentatively settled on the following required texts:

Stevenson and Haberman, Ten Theories on Human Nature (Oxford)
Aristotle, On the Soul (Green Lion Press)
Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (Vintage)
Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (Vintage)

And (here's what may be a surprise):

St. Maximus the Confessor, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ (SVS Press).

I've wanted to be able to present a robust and fairly concise Christian account of human personhood, but the easiest text to revert to is the selections from St. Thomas' Summa, and frankly that's too much like Aristotle, even with the Christian differences. Besides being robust and fairly concise, the St. Maximus text will also gain by being new. Not that very many of my students come with any acquaintance of St. Thomas mind you, but Loyola is, after all, a Jesuit institution. 'Course the newness could be a weakness as well.

We'll see. I'll be turning in my book order before we head out to see family over the Christmas feast. I'll decide by then. In the meantime, I've been looking over the St. Maximus text, and my fellow parishioner Dr. Rhodes uses it for one of his religion classes, so I'll get his input as well.