Complacency

Classics and Its Displacement in Higher Education

John T. Hamilton

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Hardback

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English

University of Chicago Press
26 April 2022

Higher & further education, tertiary education

Series: Critical Antiquities

A critical reflection on complacency and its role in the decline of classics in the academy.

In response to philosopher Simon Blackburn’s portrayal of complacency as a vice that impairs university study at its core, John T. Hamilton examines the history of complacency in classics and its implications for our contemporary moment.

The subjects, philosophies, and literatures of ancient Greece and Rome were once treated as the foundation of learning, with everything else devolving from them. Hamilton investigates what this model of superiority, derived from the golden age of the classical tradition, shares with the current hegemony of mathematics and the natural sciences. He considers how the qualitative methods of classics relate to the quantitative positivism of big data, statistical reasoning, and presumably neutral abstraction, which often dismiss humanist subjectivity, legitimize self-sufficiency, and promote a fresh brand of academic complacency. In acknowledging the reduced status of classics in higher education today, he questions how scholarly striation and stagnation continue to bolster personal, ethical, and political complacency in our present era.

By: John T. Hamilton
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 140mm, Spine: 15mm
Weight: 286g
ISBN: 9780226818634
ISBN 10: 0226818632
Series: Critical Antiquities
Pages: 144
Publication Date: 26 April 2022
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

The Wolf on the Plain Sin in the Academy Colonial Planning Propositional Surfaces Classical Platforms Philology as Ancilla Facultatum Philological Investigations Pleasingly Flat Platea The War on Complacency The Golden Age Institutions The Humanities Notes Works Cited Index

John T. Hamilton is the William R. Kenan Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He is the author of Soliciting Darkness; Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language; Security; and Philology of the Flesh, the latter also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Reviews for Complacency: Classics and Its Displacement in Higher Education

Hamilton has given us an extended essay on the theme of complacency, taking as his starting-point an opinion piece from 2009 by the philosopher Simon Blackburn, which characterizes it as one of the deadly 'sins' of the academy. He draws on etymology and wordplay to explore the imagery and resonances of complacency in different historical contexts from antiquity to the present, not simply in its familiar associations of (self-)satisfaction, but, strikingly, in the imagery of 'flatness' that Hamilton explores in novel and thought-provoking ways. Readers will be diverted and challenged in turn, and all should come away with fresh perspectives on this topic. -- Duncan Kennedy, University of Bristol