Evan King
Evan King (BA'10, King's; MA'12, Dalhousie)
"What drew me in fully was seeing that I could study Augustine and do Latin at the same time – that brings reading alive in an entirely new way. That’s a skill you take away, no matter what, when you graduate."
Now a second-year doctoral candidate in late medieval philosophical theology at University of Cambridge (UK), Evan King reminisces about doing his master’s at Dal. “I spent a couple of summer months writing my thesis in the basement of St. Peter’s Cathedral in Charlottetown, P.E.I.,” he says.
Life at St. Peter’s “provided some good daily routines,” Evan recalls. And since his thesis focused on Meister Eckhart, a medieval theologian, philosopher and mystic, the location was appropriate. “In my thesis, I wanted to take Eckhart seriously as a philosopher and understand how his Christian mystical thought harmonizes fully with his reading of Aristotle through Peripatetic Muslim and Jewish commentators.”
From Shelburne, N.S. originally, Evan realized soon after taking courses at Dal that the Department of Classics offered something special. “That one can study late medieval thought in a Classics department is pretty rare,” he says.
Currently, Evan is delving into a fourteenth-century Latin text about the Greek Neoplatonist, Proclus. “It’s really the best of both worlds: I’m keeping in touch with the late antique philosophy I really enjoy while seeing how various traditions are formed around an origin – how the origin has been interpreted and translated.”
Evan also looks back fondly on the seminar courses offered by his thesis supervisor, Dr. Wayne Hankey. “He always made it clear that in seminars, ‘I don’t do the work, you do the work,’” says Evan. “It was really about giving students the role of teaching themselves and one another. Through doing that, one starts to develop his or her grasp of a text or topic.”
This also happened for Evan during his teaching assistantships in the Classics Department. “TAs are given real responsibility,” he says. In tutorials, “I actually had the opportunity to try to translate what I heard in lectures.”
As for life after Cambridge, Evan says, “I’d love to teach ancient philosophy: Plato, Aristotle, but equally their Neoplatonic and Peripatetic commentators. Philosophy, especially when done historically, encourages us to develop a more responsible relation to the world because it situates us more firmly within it, and that merely by reading attentively.” It’s a counterpoint, he says, to “today’s distracted way of looking at the world, when we’re not always aware of our own assumptions.”
“That’s the benefit of looking to the past,” he concludes. “It allows us to see that we do have our own assumptions, about ourselves, the world, and about God, that things haven’t always been this way, and that ours might not be the best assumptions to hold.”