Word: makings
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...make matters worse, the Crimson was facing the absence of its leading scorer, freshman forward Brett Nowak, who has taken a temporary absence in order to play for a national select team...
Stodgy traditionalists make happy habit of lamenting the place of the Western canon in college curricula. How odd, they say, that Western civilization's leading educational institutions produce men and women largely unfamiliar with, and hence unsuited to maintain, the intellectual patrimony they will inevitably inherit...
Which is fine, and maybe beneficial, so long as other courses are sufficiently foreign. Trouble is, several of the most promising courses seem determined to make attractively difficult material into familiar, almost banal, fare. Professor Michael Sandel's well-known and well-respected Core course concluded recently to a much deserved, if customary, standing ovation. "Justice," undoubtedly one of the best taught Cores, examines great philosophers and practical present-day applications of their theories, bringing daunting philosophies to bear on familiar contemporary debates...
...forcing great thinkers into modern political debates with Procrustean zeal, Justice makes mere politics of political philosophy. Kant should be an end in himself. One should not, and does not, have to locate his thinking on our political spectrum to make him interesting. But students in Justice are required to pluck Kant from the clouds, fumble with him in their untutored hands and mold him to a present-day problem--like smashing a butterfly between one's fingers in order to admire its wings. Such familiarity breeds, if not contempt, at least a false and dangerous sense of intimacy...
...thoughts on a free market for women's eggs, and then there is the 20 year-old Friedrich Schelling writing to Hegel. "We must take philosophy further! Kant has destroyed everything; but how is everyone to notice? You would have to crush it to bits before their eyes to make it tangible to them!" Or the 19 year-old Marx who, upon reading Hegel, wrote to his father, "There are moments in one's life which are like frontier posts marking the completion of a period but at the same time indicating a new direction." Or John Stuart Mill whose...