The primary reason why I have for some time not published any posts to this blog is that that my teaching responsibilities took over my professional life. There is also a secondary reason, that I have begun seeing a diminishing of the intellectual returns on my efforts at extracting the arguments at work in Aquinas’s “Prologue” to his Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. But the primary reason is the primary reason and the secondary the secondary.

I have thought, then, that I had to choose between writing for my blog and taking care of my courses and, so thinking, I had to choose the latter. Having, however, reflected over the past couple of weeks on what had happened in the course of the past semester and on what I would like to see happen over the course of the coming semester, I have come to see that my options are not quite so limited. That is, I have come to see that it is quite possible for me to combine my blogging and my teaching activities by writing about matters suggested by or explicitly coming up in my teaching.

It turns out, on the one hand, that I am not teaching a course tightly related to the review I have undertaken of Aquinas’s commentary. I therefore do not foresee my advancing that review any further during the course of the coming semester, though I do envision returning to it once the semester is over. It also turns out, on the other hand, that the coming semester will seem me teaching an “Introduction to Philosophy” course. It is upon matters suggested by or explicitly coming up in my teaching of this course that I have decided to focus the coming posts.

Thus the next post.

Until then.

Richard