A friend was complaining to me today about the two exams he had to write with finals approaching.  I said to him that I will often save time with what I call the “Putnam question,” named after my teacher, Hilary Putnam.

You may have heard the supposititious story about the philosophy professor who gave the one word exam, “Why?”  (And then stories differ over whether it was “Because” or “Why not?” or some other short answer that got full credit.)   Well, Putnam was eccentric, but not that eccentric.  He gave the same exam in every one of his courses, consisting of just a single question:

Compose a question suitable for an exam in this course, and answer it.

Naturally students would write complicated, multi-component questions–before going on to write equally complex answers–but in any case effectively writing the exam for the professor and taking away that onerous job.  Since then, as I said, I have often used the Putnam Question myself, at least for the essay portion of an exam.  The genius of it is that one gets to grade the student on the difficulty of the question, the excellence of the answer, and the match between the two.

But as a student I wanted to save labor as much then as I do now as a professor.  And so one year (in Putnam’s course on “Scientific Knowledge”) I determined to answer Putnam’s question by simply writing it twice:

Compose a question suitable for an exam in this course, and answer it.

Compose a question suitable for an exam in this course, and answer it.

The first instance obviously counted as a suitable question, because it was Putnam’s own, and the second was obviously an answer, just as the first was an answer to Putnam’s own.  Putnam gave me a straight A.  And that was easy, right?

Yet, quite unlike itself, it was an answer never to be repeated.  After that year Putnam always took care when announcing the final to add the explicit condition: “But you won’t get credit if you answer the exam recursively!”

That he was born in Worcester: NNDB, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Encyclopedia Britannica, The Library of Congress, IMDb

That he was born in Providence, R.I.: Wikipedia, The New York Times, The Telegraph, NYU, Library of Congress

We forget the deceased too quickly. Let this post serve as my remembrance–on the one year anniversary of her death– of Frances Hackett, president of Hackett Publishing Co, whom I had the pleasure and blessing of staying with and getting to know on a visit to Indianapolis. Her obituary is here.

To be honest, I held my punches.  If I had tried my best, I’m confident I would have won the debate handily.  Not because atheism is true, but because it’s the easier view, the view which goes with the flow of science and technology, and also, as Newman said, it’s possible to raise a dozen serious difficulties in a few minutes, but it might take an hour to reply satisfactorily to even one of them.

Blessed are those men who are poor in spirit: they are the men to whom the Kingdom of Heaven belongs.
Blessed are those men who mourn: these are the men who will receive consolation.
Blessed are those men who are meek: these are the men who will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those men who hunger and thirst for righteousness: these are the men who will be satisfied.
Blessed are those men who show mercy: these are the men to whom mercy will be shown.
Blessed are those men who are pure in heart: these are the men who will see God.
Blessed are those men who instill peace: the title, “Sons of God,” will be given to these men.
Blessed are those men who are persecuted for the sake of justice: they are the men to whom the Kingdom of Heaven belongs.

I don’t mean so much the admittedly heavy-handed inclusion in this translation of the pronoun, “men.”  True enough, in Greek, Christ uses these masculine pronouns and articles– and his words would have been heard as applying in the first instance to the adult men who were listening (after all, the crowds that listened to him were counted  in relation to how many adult men were present). However, of course, by extension and participation, his words would have been naturally taken to apply to everyone else.  (One might call this an “extended” use of the masculine forms, rather than, as is often said, an “inclusive” use.)   It is still possible, I think, to say and to hear the masculine forms with that kind of extended meaning today. However, if this way of speaking is offensive to you, then, more conservatively, simply change the above as is usual to “Blessed are those who are poor in spirit: they are the ones to whom the Kingdom of Heaven belongs” etc.  And that would be a simpler and more elegant rendering as well.

But by “exclusive” I rather mean that the Beatitudes seem to be stated in such a way that they give not only sufficient but also necessary conditions for happiness.  What Christ seems to be saying is not simply “If you are poor in spirit, you are and will be happy” but additionally “Only those who are poor in spirit are and will be happy.”  This meaning, I believe, is connoted by the emphasis implied by the inclusion of the pronoun:

μακάριοι οἱ πενθοῦντες, ὅτι αὐτοὶ παρακληθήσονται.

μακάριοι οἱ πραεῖς, ὅτι αὐτοὶ κληρονομήσουσιν τὴν γῆν.

Now if one goes to a website which allows for the comparative study of multiple translations (for example, here), one finds that only the translators of the International Standard Version have accepted this point.  For example:

Douay-Rheims Bible
Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

New American Standard Bible (©1995)
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Holman Christian Standard Bible (©2009)
Those who mourn are blessed, for they will be comforted.

International Standard Version (©2012)
How blessed are those who mourn, because it is they who will be comforted!

King James Bible (Cambridge Ed.)
Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

What is the significance of this?  The obvious ascetical one, that the Beatitudes are not simply pronouncing a blessing upon persons who already are of a certain type, and live in a certain way, but also setting a condition and criterion, and urging those who do not yet meet that condition to do so, while they can — “aim to become included in that group.”  Arguably, it is a lot less easy to read the Beatitudes with syrupy sweet feelings when one reads them in this somewhat bracing way.

John M. Rist

Professor Rist was educated in classics at Trinity College, Cambridge. He taught Greek at University College in the University of Toronto from 1959 to 1969, and from 1969 to 1980 was a professor of classics at the University of Toronto. He taught from 1980 to 1983 as Regius Professor of Classics at the University of Aberdeen, and returned to the University of Toronto, where he was professor of classics and philosophy from 1983 to 1996, with a cross-appointment to St. Michael’s College from 1983 to 1990. In 1997, Rist became professor emeritus of the University of Toronto in 1997. He has been part-time visiting professor at the Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum in Rome since 1998.

St. Thomas Aquinas

In 1976 Rist was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and in 1991 he was elected a life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. In 1995 he was the Lady Davis Visiting Professor in Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Among Rist’s books are: Man, Soul and Body: Essays in Ancient Thought from Plato to Dionysius (1996), Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized (1994), The Mind of Aristotle (1989), Platonism and Its Christian Heritage (1985), Human Value: A Study of Ancient Philosophical Ethics (1982), On the Independence of Matthew and Mark (1978), The Stoics (1978), Epicurus: An Introduction (1972), Stoic Philosophy (1969), Plotinus: The Road to Reality (1967), and Eros and Psyche: Studies in Plato, Plotinus and Origen (1964).

This year’s Aquinas Lecture is fittingly given on the very feast day of St. Thomas Aquinas.  The two previous Aquinas Lecturers were AMU alumna Professor Therese Scarpelli Cory (Seattle University), and Fr. Ron Tacelli (Boston College).

Therese Cory

So much for professional ethics. I like to flatter myself that Aristotle scholars around the world read English well enough.