Recent Acquisitions (or maybe not so recent)

At last, classes are over. Yet there is a very important distinction between the term “classes” and the term “finals”; for although the former are finished, the latter have not yet begun. But since finals week for me won’t be very hectic, I find myself with enough time on my hands to blog. I have no Greek final and no Spanish final, although I do have finals in my other classes: Intro to Communication, Advanced Grammar, Biblical Foundations, and Intro to the Novel. The first one consists of memorizing a long list of definitions and regurgitating them, the second of essays, the third of more essays, and the fourth of yet another essay. For this last, however, I already know the question, and it’s a good one. The professor is letting us bring as many notes and quotations as we like to the exam.

At any rate, here are a few of my recent acquisitions (although some of them can hardly be called “recent” any more). These include some books I had to buy for school, although I’ve omitted most of my actual textbooks.

George Macdonald, Phantastes (Eerdmans, 2000 [1858]).

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Bedford/St. Martin's, 1996 [1848]).

John Butt and Carmen Benjamin, A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish (McGraw-Hill, 2004).

William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (Random House, 1990 [1929]).

Étienne Gilson, Introduction à la philosophie chrétienne (Vrin, 2007 [1960]).

Euripides, Medea (Cambridge UP, 2002).

Euripides, Fabulae III (Oxford UP, 1994).

Sidney Greenbaum, The Oxford English Grammar (Oxford UP, 1996).

Herodotus, Historiae II (Oxford UP, 1927).

Herodotus, Histories Book IX (Cambridge UP, 2002).

Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (Norton, 1999 [1898]).

William Kibler, Introduction to Old French (MLA, 1984).

Gustave Lanson, Histoire de la littérature française (Hachette, 1951).

Molière, Œuvres (2 vols.) (Didot, 1869).

Plato, Rempublicam (Oxford UP, 2004).

Lynn Truss, Eats, Shoots and Leaves (Gotham, 2006).

Aristotle's definition of truth

In Advanced Christian Worldview yesterday, Dr. Boling brought up Aristotle's definition of truth: "To say that what is, is not, or that what is not, is, is false; but to say that what is, is, and that what is not, is not, is true." That prompted me to check Ross's text of the Metaphysics for the original Greek: το μεν γαρ λεγειν το ὀν μη εἰναι ἠ το μη ὀν εἰναι ψευδος, το δε το ὀν εἰναι και το μη ὀν μη εἰναι ἀληθες (Met. 1011b 26ff). It's a difficult sentence for a beginning Greek student like me, but once understood, its elegance reminds me why I wanted to learn Greek in the first place: to read thoughts like these in their original language. After less than a semester of Attic Greek, we can already understand the structure of a basic sentence from Aristotle (not just stuff from Chase and Phillips, the Greek textbook we use, like "Therefore the Greeks stood here," or "When they saw each other, the Greeks were throwing stones"). That's encouraging.