Contact Information:
Email: jmackey@stanford.edu
Office: Sweet Hall, Second Floor, a small cubicle somewhere in the middle of the room
Office Hours:
By appointment
Biography:
Beinecke Scholar
Lionel Pearson Fellow
B.A., University of Texas at Austin, 2002
M.St., Christ Church, Oxford, 2003
Ph.D., Princeton University, 2009
Jacob (Jake) Mackey had only a year and a half of high school. As a result, college did not initially appear to be in the cards. However, after becoming frustrated by years of doing poorly paid, unskilled labor at a natural foods grocery, he realized that he could be paid just as poorly for doing something he enjoyed more. He decided to enroll at Austin Community College and, with hard work and good grades, to attempt to gain admittance to UT Austin as a transfer student.
The ploy worked. As an undergraduate at UT Jake would have told you he was studying Classics and Philosophy because this would allow him to comprehend the poetry of the western tradition, which was (and is) dear to him. As it happens, he was also gathering the resources required to solve, or rather dissolve, the apparently dichotomous choice posed to him by his father, a philosopher and Christian theologian of an Augustinian bent, and his mother, with whom he cumulatively spent several years as a youngster on an ashram in south India, practicing Advaita Vedanta. When he at last came to the conclusion that in Coleridgian terms both these options, East and West, were essentially varieties of Platonism, and that he himself was more or less an Aristotelian, he was relieved to find that he could quit worrying about either and get on with more agreeable pursuits.
As a Pearson Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford, Jake did just that. He studied comparative philology and historical linguistics, because one cannot call oneself a good Classicist unless one can debate the merits of the case for reconstructing three laryngeals in the Proto-Indo-European Muttersprache. And he studied Greek papyrology because he wanted to know what the ancients were really reading. Finally, he wrote his M.St. thesis on the implications of a papyrus fragment from Herculaneum, which he edited, for the Epicurean theory of the origin and development of language.
At Princeton Jake made many dear friends to whom he now struggles to fulfill his epistolary obligations. He wrote his dissertation, Rethinking Roman Religion: Action, Practice, and Belief, in an attempt to lay to rest the widespread theoretical commitment that in Roman religion only ritual behavior, not belief, played an essential role. In pressing his argument, he appeals to Aristotle’s theory of action, Searle’s theory of the ontology of social institutions, cognitive science, and, of course, ancient evidence for the religion of the Romans.
Here at Stanford, Jake began teaching in the Structured Liberal Education (SLE) program in Autumn ‘09, where he finds that he is on roughly as steep a learning curve as the program’s students, many of whom are encountering Stephanus numbers and the theory of the oral composition of the Homeric epics for the first time.