Date: March 24 | 7-9 p.m.
Location: Coor Hall Conference Room (Room 6631)
Join SCETL's MA faculty and students for a deep dive into poetry and philosophy through T.S. Eliot and Alasdair MacIntyre.
Two of the great reflections on the nature of reason and its relation to tradition appear in the critical works of the Anglo-American poet T.S. Eliot and the moral philosophy of the Scottish-American philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre.
Both of them propose that traditions are the condition of possibility and constituted body of ongoing arguments: traditions make rational discourse possible much the way language makes speech possible.
In this lecture, James Matthew Wilson will consider the implications their theory of tradition has for both philosophical reasoning and poetic practice and suggest, contra Eliot and MacIntyre alike, that tradition provides sufficiently strong conditions for the practice of reasons that even the appearance of the fortuitous or the fragmentation and forgetting that occurs within a tradition can prove a fruitful means of arriving at understanding.
Not every instance of forgetting within a tradition should be understood as decadence; many in fact are the means to new pathways of reflection and understanding that refresh and deepen the life of reason. The history of poetic practice in English serves especially well to illustrate what this entails.
James Matthew Wilson is Cullen Foundation Chair of English and Director of the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Saint Thomas. The author of eleven books, he is Poet-in-Residence of the Benedict XVI Institute, Editor of Colosseum Books, and Poetry Editor for Modern Age magazine.