The ancient Erechtheion on Acropolis Hill, Athens. Photo credit: pexels.com
Why did Columbia historically require Latin and Attic Greek, and what can we learned from the annulment of this requirement? And why care at all? As is no secret, Columbia College once enforced a Greek admission requirement and required all students to study at least two years of Latin. It wasn’t until Columbia moved to its current home, the Morningside Campus, that it waived this admissions requirement and reduced its Latin requirement. It wasn’t until 1916 that Columbia eliminated its Latin course requirement completely.
We all know the history: with the socio-academic upheaval directly causally linked to the Protestant Reformation and its preoccupation with pervasive literacy, preeminent academic writings rapidly began being produced in the vernacular, rather than in Latin. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), the illustrious philosopher, mathematician, and diplomat, was one of the last of his kind in this respect, writing his philosophical treatises in ecclesiastical Latin. By the time Kant rocked the academic world with his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), the vernacular was the standard linguistic medium. Given that no form of Latin (let alone Classical Latin) was a lingua franca for academia in the early 20th century, why in the world was Columbia still requiring it?
I do not wish to delve into the linguistic data regarding the benefits of inter-linguistic competence, although the data is conclusive. Rather, through my anecdotal accounts of research in both the humanities and mathematics, and further through plausible a priori assumptions and inferences, I wish to make a case for budding scholars dedicating their time to, at the very least, familiarizing themselves with basic lexical items in Attic Greek and Latin and how they tend to linguistically interact with English roots and stems. This, being a weaker thesis than that Columbia should resurrect its Latin and Greek requirements, will also shed light on the virtues of an extinct pedagogical practice that ought to be preserved, even if the practice per se is to remain extinct.
First, for the anecdotes: I’ve spent the past three years conducting independent research in Aristotelian Logic and pedagogy under Columbia faculty for the purpose of developing accessible philosophical logic curricula for under-resourced students around the world. Of course, our original research and interpretation of Aristotle’s Categories has benefitted from understanding some of the important Attic Greek lexical terms that function prominently in the Aristotelian corpus. However, and perhaps prima facie counterintuitively, Latin is equally helpful for tasks of this type. We can thank hundreds of years of excellent Roman Catholic scholastic commentary on the relevant texts for that, explaining the semantic link between the original Greek and our English terminology, mediated by Latin translation.
This seems like a trivial example, however. Of course, research in ancient Greek philosophy is made auspicious by knowing some of the Classical lexicon! But the potency for benefit generalizes in important ways. My research at Columbia in contemporary anglophone analytic philosophy (about as far away from the ancients as one can get in the Western tradition) has been significantly complemented by an understanding of the Classical lexicon – neologisms such as “anomalous monism” (Davidson), “ante rem structuralism” (Shapiro), or “Latitudinarianism about de dicto/de re” (Chisholm) are all linguistically constructed through Greek and/or Latin sub-terms that make intuitive why such neologisms denote the theories they do. The difference in competently understanding the relevant academic literature is extraordinary. For instance, to take the Donald Davidson example, “anomalous monism,” (don’t worry what it means) is introduced along with and contrasted with four other potential views: “anomalous dualism,” “nomological monism,” and “nomological dualism.” Initially, this is daunting, and memorizing all of these terms to comprehend the underlying philosophy is at least as daunting. But, once one understands the meanings of an-, nomos, and monos, one doesn’t even need Davidson to explain what these terms mean for one to understand the relevant details.
This type of example is pervasive in the philosophical literature, regardless of the tradition in which one is working. Memorizing terminology metalinguistically (i.e. without understanding why it denotes what it does) is much more difficult than memorizing some basic Classical lexical terms and roots and intuiting how they fit together to form terms. This extends to radically different domains as well, such as mathematics. Once one understands some (very) basic Greek, memorizing the differences between epimorphisms, homomorphisms, homeomorphisms, diffeomorphisms, isomorphisms, endomorphisms, etc. becomes intuitive and simple. One of the fundamental conditions to understanding any theory, whether it be in philosophy, mathematics, literature, biology, economics, or any other domain, is understanding its basic terminological scheme. Knowing some basic Latin and Greek revolutionizes one’s ability to do just that.
My proposal and advice here should not be taken as drastic or radical. I maintain that, although it might be best to not resurrect the tradition of Classical language requirements for Columbia students, any budding Columbia scholar, regardless of the discipline, does well to invest time in memorizing some of the basic Classical lexicon. The fruits are tremendous.