I feel like I owe something of an apology to Aaron for his attempt to begin a conversation about the purpose of the Gospels, but I should warn you Aaron that philosophers have a sad knack for promising apologies that are not really apologies.
My form of apology will articulate what I take to be one of the presuppositions of the Social Foundations series of courses. Namely, how is Social Foundations distinct from Cultural Foundations? Well, as all of you know, it is not necessarily distinct by text, since many of you are reading some of the same texts in both courses. Instead, the SF series are distinguished by the ways that they read these texts, and that is as texts containing intellectual content, and being addressed in terms of their content, rather than primarily in terms of their form.
That is to say, that I presume (having not had the opportunity to teach CF) that one of the goals of CF is to address the great cultural works as artistic works, which means at least in considerable part, as works of tremendous (and historically significant) formal refinement and sophistication.
This is one of the perennial difficulties of the intellectual sort, that when we tend towards the philosophical, we aim at addressing content, frequently abstracted from formal trappings.
In this respect, I think that Aaron is thus quite right in provoking us to do that, particularly as this is an SF course.
My objection comes from a series of intellectual intuitions that I have developed over my fascinating career as an intellectual (and particularly as a result of my formation as a philosopher with a background in literature and an orientation towards the historicity of knowledge). On these lines, I have generally rejected the conceptual distinction between CF and SF insofar as they imply methodological commitments (not insofar as they imply pedagogical or curricular commitments). That is, I reject the idea that content and form may be abstracted from one another.
I'm a good Hegelian as such.
Clear?
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