Today, Texas A&M resumes classes for the spring semester—but a number of canonized texts will not be welcomed back to school. The public research university has lately been caught in the crossfire between state and stupid.
As The Texas Tribune has reported, faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences were informed just last week that “a new system policy restricting classroom discussions of race and gender” is set to take effect today.
The policy, engineered and approved by the Texas A&M University Regents last November, requires that the school’s president sign off on every syllabus with an eye to scrubbing “problematic” content. But the foes were loosely framed.
The hammer came down over the weekend for assorted religion, film, ethnic studies, sociology, communications, and literature classes. And in a truly-beyond-parody move, a philosophy professor, Martin Peterson, was told to “either remove ‘modules on race and gender ideology’” from his course, or be reassigned to teach a different class entirely.
Most philosophy nerds will recognize the “gender ideology” readings in question, which are lifted from the Symposium. The university apparently quibbled with Plato’s reference the the “Myth of Androgyne,” in which Aristophanes describes three genders.
Well… Besides the misuse of AI. Besides the stupidity of the right wing that took over, how it was that Plato’s Symposium was not banned or edited during the dark conservative ages after the fall of Rome?
I think it basically boils down to the fact that Plato’s philosophy, if viewed through the right mindset, actually supports the Christian theological world view. They were happy to ignore his somewhat egregious (from the point of view of the medieval church) views on gender and sexuality, because his overall philosophy seemed, to them, to support Christianity.
Also note it wasn’t that classical works that didn’t conform to the Christian world view were actively destroyed in middle ages, generally. Preserving a book for centuries requires a bunch of of work, it must be copied or it will degrade. The only people doing that work in the middle ages were monks.
The medieval scribes didn’t need to burn a book for it to disappear from the west. Simply not selecting that book for copying would doom it.
Many classical Western texts disappeared in the Mediterranean and Europe, but were safeguarded in Islamic lands. Andalusian Muslims fostered the (re)translation and return of these documents to the West.
But not Plato and Aristotle, they were viewed as supportive of Christian doctrine (and influenced early Christian thinkers like St Augustine). So they survived in Christendom it was other classical works that only survived in the Islamic world. Hence why Plato and Aristotle have such an disproportionate influence on western thought.
For instance, Euclid’s Elements. I don’t think that anyone ever thought that there was anything ideologically problematic in it; it just wasn’t the top of the priority list for European scholars. All modern editions were translated via Arabic.
Alternate universe Bill and Ted [with MAGA hats]
-Socrates? Hey, we know that name.
-Yea. Hey, look him up.
-Oh, it’s under “So-crates.”
-Oh yea. “So-crates: ‘The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing.’”
…
-That’s us, dude!
-Oh yea! And we are proud of our ignorance!
-Let’s ignore this woke guy and bag Aristophanes instead!
-Yeah!!
After I did a dive to the history of what was published or ignored:
I also thought that was it, that Christians liked Plato, or it was by discovering the text in Spanish Arabia, but it seems that inconvenient texts like the Symposium came close to be lost if it wasn’t for Humanistic scholars like Marsilio Ficino.
In the fourteenth century, the poet and Humanist Francesco Petrarch praised Plato as the prince of philosophers. In so doing, Petrarch turned to Plato as an antidote to Scholastic Aristotelianism, which at the time dominated the medieval university curriculum. During the Middle Ages the bulk of Plato’s dialogues—except for the Phaedo, Meno, and parts of the Parmenides and Timaeus—were inaccessible to Western philosophers because they were not available in Latin. Consequently, knowledge of Plato’s philosophy at this time was largely indirect and incomplete. Following Petrarch’s lead, early fifteenth-century Humanists (such as Leonardo Bruni) saw the importance of studying classical Greek, and they translated, among other things, a handful of Plato’s dialogues into Latin.
Ficino’s translation represents the fulfillment of these early Humanist aspirations for a Latin edition of Plato. It is difficult to overstate the significance of this achievement, or the impact that it had on the development of early modern philosophies.
So, close but no amphisbaena :). Yes, regarding Phaedo, Meno, and parts of the Parmenides and Timaeus; Christians liked Plato. But, it seems that a big number of Plato’s dialogs, like his Symposium, came close to be forgotten thanks to the medieval selective copying and translations.
I believe the obsession with gender, binarity and the morals of it all is a very recent US centered thing. Plato’s musing about halves of beings that come together in manifold combinations were obviously wrong, so no need to be worried about them. Somebody saying that the political rival offers transgender to everybody would have been unconceivable thirty years ago (yes, that is what I mean by recent). Not only inconceivable, people would not have understood what the heck was the subject.
So Plato survived because that part was not controversial. Not for the Arabs, anyway. Bemusing, perhaps. I read extracts ages ago: it was so wrong and detached from reality that it was funny.
That was what The Name of the Rose boiled down to. For the Catholic Church, personalized in the blind monk Jorge: Plato good, Aristotle bad.
Though at that point you are at the Renaissance or close to it, and you had people other than monks copying manuscripts. It was the preceding millennium or so that the only people copying them was monks and so only stuff they cared about was preserved.
Because the people reading Plato were the elite, who were trusted to interpret it in accordance with the then-current norms, and were expected to be able to argue about ideas. Apparently, Texas feels that “gender ideology” is so inherently appealing (or that its students are so easily led) that even hearing about it will be life-changing - a compliment to Plato, to be sure.
