Columbia University now hosts a PDF of my dissertation, Quintilian’s Theory of Certainty and Its Afterlife in Early Modern Italy on their open-access repository, Academic Commons.
The dissertation also has a permanent URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8KP8293.
In the last stretch of editing, I made some significant changes to the template I used to format my dissertation according to the guidelines set by Columbia’s Dissertation office. I changed the typography (particularly spacing) to match the university standard, and I’ve fixed the page numbering for the various front matter elements. If you are just starting to write your dissertation and are worried about getting the formatting correctly (a major hassle, to be honest), you may want consult the template I’ve posted on Github, especially if you’re considering using LaTeX. For a more thorough treatment of the “memoir” LaTeX class that I used for writing, you also might want to scope out this very helpful manual (PDF).
…progress is not inevitable. It’s the result of choices we make together. And we face such choices right now. Will we respond to the changes of our time with fear, turning inward as a nation, turning against each other as a people? Or will we face the future with confidence in who we are, in what we stand for, in the incredible things that we can do together?
Barack Obama, 2015 State of the Union
As Aristotle would have advised, Barack Obama’s final State of the Union address last night was a deliberative speech in the grand style. Not a statistical deluge of policy particulars, but sweeping language about future problems. He reassumed the persona of law professor, but certainly one of the large lecture hall or the legislative chamber, not of the seminar table or the forensic court.
When Obama read the above quotation, perhaps on account of this professorial demeanor, I began to consider his speech in light of some of the political philosophy I’ve been reading with my Columbia students over the past two years. My sense is that several thinkers would view Obama’s understanding of democratic progress differently: on the one hand, someone like Plato might see such change as unstoppable slippage into tyranny, and on the other hand, someone like Hegel (or maybe even Smith) might see it as a kind of genuine progress that we only appear to choose at all.
Immediately preceding Obama’s consideration of progress here, he lists some of its elements: economic recovery, health care reform, the mass legalization of same-sex marriage, and others. It’s worth considering whether and how we choose to make the specific political and cultural changes the president speaks of. In what sense are these changes actually chosen at all? In what sense is Obama’s State of the Union itself merely der Geist seiner Zeit?