A Question and a Comment
So, Joe, how was your trip to Belgium? You gave a general lecture and then led a seminar?
I heard from Matt Groe recently - he has accepted a 3 year position at Jacksonville University down in Florida.
I heard from Matt Groe recently - he has accepted a 3 year position at Jacksonville University down in Florida.
Posted by Gregory Hoskins on
Saturday May 26, 2007 at 11:55am
Thanks for asking about the trip to Belgium. It went well, despite the fact that I barely slept--I stayed (because of a colleague of mine at Loyola who made the arrangements) at a seminary in Leuven with the most uncomfortable bed I have ever come in contact with (a form of pennance, perhaps?).
In any event, it was a pleasure to visit the Institute of Philosophy there. It is something quite different from your standard phil department in the U.S.--rather than being comprised of a main department office and a few faculty offices on one floor of a building like SAC, the Hoger Instituut voor Wijsbegeerte (which would translate as "Higher Institute of Philosophy"--but when they translate it they drop the "Higher" for some reason) is made up of several buildings arranged around a kind of triangular-shaped cobblestone "square," with a big iron entrance gate that says Higher Institute of Philosophy in both Dutch and French. It is quite imposing, and easily the largest philosophy department (or "faculty", as they would say) I have ever seen. They also have their own library which, for a library dedicated to one department, is enormous. All of this is housed in buildings which I assumed, from the look of them, were really old (meaning at least partly medieval), but I was later told that they were built in the 19th century in medieval style, during a period when the university wanted to recapture/reassert its catholic, thomist past...
According to the schedule I gave a lecture and a "doctoral seminar"--as it turned out, though, the two events ended up being basically the same. In each, I presented a paper (first one on Horkheimer's moral philosophy from the 1930's, and then one on Hegel's remarks on architecture) that I partly read and partly summarized extemporaneously. Although neither had a terribly large attendance (it was, I think, the last week of school before exams), each paper was followed by vigorous, and quite helpful, question and answer periods. Then, after each paper I was taken out for beers, which was of course great (I am now a big fan of Westmalle dubbel). They also took me out for two meals, which gave me the chance to sample the famous Belgian asperagus.
All in all the trip was quite good, then, and Leuven is a very nice place to visit. For some pictures of Leuven and the Institute of Philosophy that show off something of its grandure check out this link. The pics were taken by a woman named Carrie Jenkins, who spoke at the institute a month or so before I did, I think...