For my sins, I was reading last night Hume’s essay in which he argues that all activity of the mind can be reduced to two categories–impressions and ideas, and that these further can be reduced to simple and complex.
I must say, that our students advanced a series of complex impressions and developed into them a rather complex idea. They traced what they called were the “templates” of the metaphysics and psychology of the “aerial bodies” from Homer’s “gibbering souls” through Vergil’s “empty images and hovering bodies” to Dante’s insubstantial souls who cast no shadows. [They examined closely Purg. canto 25--Statius' discussion of the three stages of life, the first embryological stage of which one of the students called the "spongey, vegetative state"]. Their dialogue managed to incorporate lots of quite eloquent and concise descriptions from the texts as evidence; and they contemplated both the metaphysics of the soul itself and the progression (from Homer to Vergil to Dante) of physical contact between human and shade.
My colleague was absolutely right to suggest that we make explicit to our students that what we want them to do is to model what we are doing. First of all, watching two very bright students interact in a way that was quite similarly structured in terms of the way in which F. and I interact was almost eerie. F. brilliantly described it thus–our own dialogues are parents, and we hope that their children, what we have called the “micro-dialogues” look like they are descended from their parents. I thought to myself as I was a member of the audience listening to two students prompting each other in a circle of carefully exchanged ideas, that they not only looked like their parents–in good, Homeric fashion, they surpassed them.
