Here's a copy-and-paste of the Latin recommendations I was thinking of.
https://lyfaber.blogspot.com/2012/11/voluntarism-again.html
Lee FaberDecember 1, 2012 at 1:54 AM
Regarding Latin, I think one just needs to suck it up and start to learn. One shouldn't read just Aquinas and/or Scotus anyway. There's Bonaventure, Ockham, and a host of others. My coblogger Michael taught himself in grad school and his latin is now better than mine (and I'm currently teaching it).
So little Scotus has actually been translated that to really understand what his 'vision' is, you need to read more than Wolter's thin selections. And the Wolter-Bychkov Reportatio should not be touched. It is shameful it was ever published.
Credo, regarding your comment, I suppose it depends on what you intend to do: presumably continue on into philosophy Phd? If you plan on having a medieval AOS, you should have some latin.
Also, who is your best friend? There are so few Scotists, after all… I wonder if I know him.
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Michael SullivanDecember 1, 2012 at 3:01 AM
I agree with Faber that, even if you're largely reading in English, if you have a serious interest in medieval philosophy or in medieval anything - or in western civilization at all - then at least some Latin is a necessity.There is simply no way around it.
Learning Latin is neither has hard nor as easy as some people make it out. What it really takes is commitment. It's true that I never had a formal course in Latin and am as self-taught as one can be. Faber says I taught myself in grad school but I began as a sophomore in college. I got a bare-bones grammar, stumbled through it a little, and bought a Vulgate. Using the King James Bible as a constant reference I inched my way line by line through the gospels. I had by that time had two years of ancient Greek so with a Greek/Latin New Testament I stumbled my way through some more, using the more familiar Greek grammar and the more familiar Latin vocabulary to balance each other out. In my college library I took down the Leonine edition of St Thomas' Summa Contra Gentiles and read it using the English translation as a crib.
Then I began to realize more formal study was necessary if my knowledge was going to be better than ad hoc. After graduating with my B.A. I set myself to study latin in the summer before grad school (I was also on my honeymoon). I worked through Wheelock, which I hated, then discovered Henle, and in the next six months to a year while doing graduate coursework and working my part-time job I worked through the four volumes of Henle, which I thought was much better and under whom I felt like I was starting to get a handle on the language. For some years I did the Liturgy of the Hours (or a lot of it anyway) in Latin, which helped a great deal. I bought a bunch of Bolchazy-Carducci readers and worked my through a number of them. When I wrote my M.A. thesis on Scotus' Questions on the Metaphysics I was able to correct the Wolter/Etzkorn translation against the critical edition.
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