Last week, I posted brief descriptions of the four classes. St. Vincent runs classes on a M-W-F and a T-R schedule and I gave you my Monday/Wednesday/Friday classes. I've also only accounted for 10 of my 19 credits. So I have three Tuesday/Thursday classes yet to describe.

Tuesday morning begins at 10:00 in a seminary classroom. Oddly enough though, the class is a college class. It simply is taught in the Brownfield Center because this class slot is the most popular class time on campus and they needed to find room somewhere. The class is PL 220-01: Theories of Knowledge. This field of philosophy is better (or worse, depending) known as Epistemology. Dr. Leiner, the chair of the Philosophy Department, teaches the class, which studies whether and how we know what we think we know. If that sounds philosophically dense, it is. Dr. Leiner, though, is an incredibly competent professor and I look forward to learning a lot.

After a short break during which I usually read philosophy in the library and then snag some lunch, I have EL 318-01: The Romantic Age with Dr. Snyder. When I registered for this course, I didn't pay much attention to the course number. I was simply concerned with fulfilling credits for my English minor in a topic that I found interesting. It was until the first day of class that I realized that the first digit of the course number was a 3 and that that meant something. Not only was I taking an English course from one of the toughest professors in the school that I had never had before, but I was taking him for a three-hundred level course. Not that I'm complaining...not at all. I guess I'm merely pointing out a downside of having one's head in some metaphysical clouds most of the time. I love the course so far though. I have always found this era of literature fascinating and Dr. Snyder has already shown me that I won't regret the extra coursework.

My last class of the day on Tuesday is PL 205-01: Contemporary Philosophy with Dr. Flewelling. This might be my least favorite class, though through no fault of Dr. Flewelling's. She is highly proficient in the contemporary to post-modern philosophers and has already helped the class understand a great deal more of Hegel and his phenomenology that we did before. I say it is my least favorite only because I don't feel at home there. Jake, a good buddy of mine, and I were discussing an aspect of studying philosophic fields of inquiry. We noticed that in any philosophical pursuit, we tended to, when applying prior knowledge to the current study, we each had a particular fall-back point. One of Jake's first in-depth philosophical undertakings was in a class on Rousseau. Since that point, everything new that he learns he relates back to Rousseau. For me, I tie everything back to Socrates, Plato, and/or Aristotle (probably focusing on Aristotle the most). This is because the first philosophers that really sunk in for me were these three. Even though I've learned about hundreds (well, scores) of philosophers since then and taken classes that focus on only one, such as Thomistic Philosophy, I still always fall back to these three. The difficulty that then arises is that it is extremely difficult to conflate the post-moderns with the ancients. Their views tend to be somewhat, if not completely, antithetical. Despite this though, I've already learned a great deal in the past three weeks and look forward to learning a lot more.

So that, in brief (or somewhat brief) terms, is my schedule. Two philosophies, a theology, and an english apply to my majors/minor and are rounded out by german, poli. sci., and music. That, I think, is a pretty good example of what a schedule at a liberal arts college is meant to be.