Randy Pausch and Teaching Life’s Big Issues
By Rod Kessler

The issue of Parade that caught my eye some time ago showed a forty-something fellow on the cover attractive enough to be a film star, but the accompanying headlines suggested otherwise: “Terminally ill professor Randy Pausch tells his students—and us—what matters in life.” Pausch, a computer-science professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer last year and given only months to live.

Big Issues Writ Small: One Man, One Student
By Rick Branscomb

In his essay “Some Remarks on Humor,” noted New Yorker writer E. B. White wrote, “to young writers who want to get ahead without any annoying delays: don’t write about Man, write about a man.”

In Praise of General Moral Principles
By Michael Mulnix

One commonly held belief in the study of ethics takes moral claims to be somehow dependent upon social and individual circumstance, wherein the moral status of an action is a function of the environment in which it is carried out. The position of ‘moral particularism’, however, uses this commonsense belief to argue for the further claim that each moral situation is importantly unique from all other moral contexts, and hence, any attempt to discover general moral rules is futile.

A Chaotic Revolution: Studying the Past to Expand our Experience
By Annette Chapman-Adisho

In a graduate seminar on the French Revolution, the conversation turned to the ‘chaotic’ nature of this revolution of revolutions. I’ll admit, the observation took me aback a bit. A student of the revolution for a decade now, I had not been struck by its chaotic nature. It was chaotic, that was a given, weren’t all revolutions? The seminar participants begged to differ.

New SOAS Faculty 2008
Introducing the newly hired faculty of the School of Arts and Sciences

What, Then, is Education?
By Christopher Fauske

Much of the current issue deals with questions of teaching and learning. Indeed, almost all issues of ASpect have dealt with this, regardless of what the broader themes might have been. This seems appropriate. Surely the main concern of faculty in the School of Arts and Sciences should be teaching and learning?