wherein Liz grumbles about college and stuff

[edenfalling]

My first essay for the Economic History of the West is due on Sunday. I have been rereading this module's assigned texts in search of useful quotes, and I am renewed in my conviction that Aristotle is a bizarre mix of "that makes perfect sense and you explained it well," "I disagree, but given different cultures, technology levels, and time periods, I can see why you think that," and "FUCK NO WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?!" The third category is of course a subset of the second, but there are limits on what I can swallow as just being cultural differences. Some things are morally wrong and I don't care how much sophistry or appeal to tradition you use to justify them.

Also, Thomas Aquinas is mind-numbing to read, because he is so formulaic. On the one hand, it's helpful to realize that all his arguments follow a similar structure -- you don't get lost, and it's always clear which points he agrees with or disagrees with. On the other... Here's a short sentence. It has four words. Here's another short sentence. These sentences get boring. The pattern is deadening. The mind blanks out. It's hard to focus.

Aquinas isn't doing that exact thing, obviously, but the porridge-brain aspect of his incessant, unbroken pattern is very similar. Plus he's... well, he's very medieval Catholic and while he makes some allowances for practicality, the society he'd like is, shall we say, very straitlaced and restricted.

...

I mean, yay primary sources and all that! Yay actual windows on actual people's thoughts in different times and situations! But frankly, I like the other two textbooks we've been using in this module MUCH more.

Comments

[heliopausa]

Joining you in yay, primary sources! Though actually I've never read Aristotle, and it's a century since I read T.Aquinas (I read the lot, and was majorly unimpressed, but that was a long time ago, and who knows, if I read him now?).
I hope the essay topic is stimulating.

[edenfalling]

The essay question: How did economic growth and technological advance interact and drive the rise of Western Civilization through 1500? So the primary source economic theory book is mostly there to add 'what people thought about money and economics' flavor rather than any 'how the world worked in practice' sort of thing... though obviously people's theories about economics affected the laws they made and the expectations they had when taking various actions.

The book I'm using only has excerpts from Aristotle's Politics and one very tiny section from the Nicomachean Ethics, so I can't speak for his work as a whole, but the excerpts are very... lecture-y. And also filled with attitudes toward women, non-Greeks, and slavery that make me want to scream. :-(

Aquinas is impressive in the sense that he has clearly read ridiculous amounts of stuff and taken a long time to painstakingly synthesize it and do his best to iron out any contradictions in the sources he respects. But that ironing out leads to an awful lot of hair-splitting, and also, I don't personally respect the authority of his sources, so that enormous amount of work strikes me as largely irrelevant. Plus he has a really weird conception of money -- he talks about it as a thing that's consumed, like food or drink, so that once you use money to buy something you don't have it anymore... but I would say that money is not a 'thing' in and of itself but a marker of the value of actual things, so you don't lose anything by spending; you just change the form in which you are holding a quantity of 'value,' so to speak. And that position renders a bunch of his arguments nonsensical.