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The university at Rotenek would allow a woman to attend lectures--for a fee--but that was no guarantee of an education. Akezze Mainus had been skeptical when Margerit Sovitre wanted to hire her services as a philosophy tutor over the summer. She needed to build a nest egg for the school she wanted to start, not fill her time for little more than room and board. But the salary that Maisetra Sovitre named convinced her, and she was determined to return its value.
* * *
“Where did you want to start?” Margerit asked. “You know I’m not very strong on the modern philosophers, but I’ve been told that Wolff and Mazzies would be useful for my work.”
“We begin at the beginning,” Akezze intoned. “Your knowledge is all bits and pieces. I can’t build without a sound foundation.”
“What? All the way back to Aristotle, then?” Margerit asked, half-joking, but not dismayed when Akezze nodded.
Those first few weeks flew by quickly, if tediously. There was some frustration at going through the baby steps again, but she was on sure ground. The classics had always been her favorites. The blithe confidence of the ancient authors that all the world could be distilled down into simple truths was restful if inadequate. When they moved on to the medieval commentaries her flaws began to show. The tangled arguments of the sophists had always seemed a pointless distraction. And as a guest at the university lectures she’d never had a chance to take part in the disputations that might pry sense from them.
“It’s not just an academic game,” insisted Akezze. “You’d be surprised how many mysteries rest on faulty propositions and mistaken definitions. It can be more important to know how to spot a flawed argument than to construct a sound one.”
And that was what made Akezze’s lectures more than dry exercises. They pulled out Bartolomeus’s Lives and Mysteries of the Saints and worked their way through the logical structure of some of the older ceremonies. When, after covering Descartes, they paused in the course of philosophers to take in the grammarians, even more began to fall into place.
* * *
“Where did you want to start?” Margerit asked. “You know I’m not very strong on the modern philosophers, but I’ve been told that Wolff and Mazzies would be useful for my work.”
“We begin at the beginning,” Akezze intoned. “Your knowledge is all bits and pieces. I can’t build without a sound foundation.”
“What? All the way back to Aristotle, then?” Margerit asked, half-joking, but not dismayed when Akezze nodded.
Those first few weeks flew by quickly, if tediously. There was some frustration at going through the baby steps again, but she was on sure ground. The classics had always been her favorites. The blithe confidence of the ancient authors that all the world could be distilled down into simple truths was restful if inadequate. When they moved on to the medieval commentaries her flaws began to show. The tangled arguments of the sophists had always seemed a pointless distraction. And as a guest at the university lectures she’d never had a chance to take part in the disputations that might pry sense from them.
“It’s not just an academic game,” insisted Akezze. “You’d be surprised how many mysteries rest on faulty propositions and mistaken definitions. It can be more important to know how to spot a flawed argument than to construct a sound one.”
And that was what made Akezze’s lectures more than dry exercises. They pulled out Bartolomeus’s Lives and Mysteries of the Saints and worked their way through the logical structure of some of the older ceremonies. When, after covering Descartes, they paused in the course of philosophers to take in the grammarians, even more began to fall into place.
