COURSES > LIFELONG | COURSES > ONLINE
Like its counterpart “How to Read Classic Texts,” this course aims to help students improve their reading skills as they approach reading religious texts as literature. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Socratic Method
How to Read Classic Texts
COURSES > LIFELONG | COURSES > ONLINE
One of the foundational premises of the Basic Program is that reading is a skill. And that like many skills, one can get better at reading through theoretically-informed practice. In this short course, we will examine the theoretical perspective on good reading contained in Mortimer Adler’s famous How to Read a Book, which we will practice through a close examination of the beginnings of a range of classic texts. After all, if we don’t understand the beginning of a work, how can we hope to understand the ending? Continue reading
Fighting Theater with Theater: Plato’s Dialogues as Philosophical Dramas
WRITINGS > UNFINISHED
Description coming soon … Continue reading
“It Can’t Happen Here”? Sinclair Lewis on Tyranny in America
COURSES > LIFELONG | COURSES > ONLINE
In a time when many believe that contemporary events are unfolding in ways that bode ill for the future, the dystopian classics of youth are the focus of renewed interest as possible guides to “what might happen”. This course will be devoted to a careful, mature consideration of one such classic, It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis (the first American writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930) as we seek both to understand the text as a literary work originating in its own time and place and to glean possible insights into our own time and place. For the first class, please read chapters 1-13.
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Flaunting It: The Logic of “Conspicuous Consumption” in Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class
LECTURES > PREVIOUS
Although “wealth” has long been subjected to economic analysis (which postulates humans as rational beings) and more recently to behavioral analysis (which postulates humans as emotional beings), Thorstein Veblen’s groundbreaking Theory of the Leisure Class famously subjected “wealth” to anthropological analysis (which postulates humans as social beings). From this point of view, “wealth” is important not so much for what can be done with it or for the internal feelings that it can evoke, but rather for what it can signal to others about the social dominance of its possessor. This lecture will offer an overview of Veblen’s theory as originally presented in 1899 and consider its usefulness in making sense of the contemporary phenomenon of Donald Trump. Continue reading
Could It Happen Here? Now? Dystopian Novels for Our Time
COURSES > LIFELONG | COURSES > ONLINE
In a time when many believe that contemporary events are unfolding in ways that bode ill for the future, the dystopian classics of youth are the focus of renewed interest as possible guides to “what might happen”. This course will be devoted to a careful, mature consideration of four such classics as we seek both to understand each text as a literary work originating in its own time and place and to glean possible insights into our own time and place. The texts are: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World; Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here; George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four; and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Continue reading
Does Humanity Have a Death Wish? Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents
COURSES > LIFELONG | COURSES > ONLINE
Although most famously known for his “erotic” theories that postulated a fundamental human drive for sex, reproduction and the continuation of life itself, during the period between the two world wars Sigmund Freud began to consider whether or not humanity also had a fundamental drive for self-destruction — a drive that was exacerbated by the conditions of modern, civilized life. After a brief introduction to Freud’s seminal theory of the human mind, this course will focus on a close reading and discussion of one of Freud’s last books, Civilization and Its Discontents, paying particular attention to Freud’s claim that “the fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether [they] will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction.” Continue reading
The Nature of Knowledge: Plato’s Theaetetus and Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy
COURSES > LIFELONG | COURSES > ONLINE
In an age of “alternative facts”, it is perhaps worthwhile to revisit the foundational texts that have helped establish a longstanding conviction that some “facts” are more equal than others. This course will be devoted to a close consideration of two such texts: Plato’s ancient dialogue Theaetetus and Descartes’s modern monologue Meditations on First Philosophy. In the first, Socrates and his interlocutors examine three different notions of knowledge (and Socrates proclaims himself a “midwife of the soul”). In the second, Descartes claims to demonstrate the indisputable truth of (a) the existence of God and of (b) the existence of the immortal human soul — not to mention of (c) the existence of himself (because he thinks). In addition to seeking to understand each text on its own terms, we will compare and contrast them as alternative approaches to “certain knowledge”. Continue reading
Shakespeare’s “Letter to the Ephesians”: The Comedy of Errors as a “Christianized” (Not “Plagiarized”) Pagan Play
COURSES > LIFELONG | COURSES > ONLINE
Perhaps because it is one of Shakespeare’s earliest and “lightest” plays, The Comedy of Errors has long been understood primarily as little more than an Elizabethan re-telling of an ancient Roman farce, The Brothers Meneachumus by Plautus. By reading Shakespeare’s work in conjunction with Plautus’s and also Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, however, this course will explore the possibility that Shakespeare not only modernized Plautus’s play but also (and more importantly) Christianized it, thereby giving The Comedy of Errors a much deeper significance than is generally realized. Continue reading
Jesus for Jews (and Others)
COURSES > LIFELONG
Although the figure of Jesus has permeated Western culture for nearly 2,000 years, many Jews and other non-Christians find the figure of Jesus a problematic one, difficult to study and comprehend. As a result, many of the great Western works that presuppose a sympathetic understanding of Jesus remain opaque. This course provides a sympathetic introduction to the figure of Jesus as well as an exploration of some of the challenges that Jews in particular often face in dealing with Christianity’s appropriation of one of Israel’s greatest sons. Readings from the Bible will be supplemented by Chaim Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. Continue reading