Author: Alissa Simon
We’re excited that you’ve joined the conversation! At HMU, we want to continue the great authors’ conversations in a contemporary context, and this blog will help us do that. We look back to Aristotle and the early philosophers who used reason and discourse to gain wisdom and now we endeavor to do the same every day.
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November 24, 2023 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. Each fall, Great Books San Francisco hosts a Poetry Weekend. And if there’s one thing that I’m grateful for in this world, it’s poetry. I love to attend this event because of its hybrid nature. The first day is filled with reading and …
November 17, 2023 Thanks to Chad Greene, a 2023 Fellowship in Ideas recipient, for today’s blog. Of the classes I teach at my community college, the closest to a Great Books class is a course called “Masterpieces of World Literature” that the English department offers every fall. In this class I ask students to …
Classics and Comics: Ancient Content – and Advice – in a Modern Form Read More »
Thanks to Aaron Ducksworth, a 2023 Fellow in Ideas, for today’s post. November 10, 2023 Many movies of various genres have been made about the relationship between humans and anthropomorphic technology and the complicated relationship between them – think The Terminator franchise (1984-2019), I, Robot (2004), Virtuosity (1995), and The Matrix franchise (1999-2021). M3GAN is …
November 3, 2023 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. The October Quarterly Discussion merged two chapters from The Prince by Machiavelli with a chapter from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Of prime interest was the focus on the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus. Machiavelli presents him as a champion of …
October 27, 2023 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. Viola Cordova was one of the first Native American women to earn a degree in philosophy. Born in 1937, she grew up in Taos, New Mexico. Embracing both her own past and her curiosity of the world, she discarded notions that philosophy should …
October 20, 2023 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. George Bull translated the Penguin Classics version of Machiavelli’s The Prince (1999). In the introductory materials, Bull notes some of the difficulties of translating Machiavelli’s language. I find his comments particularly enlightening since they also address the problematic nature of virtue. Machiavelli clearly …
October 13, 2023 Thanks to Ally Zlatar, a 2023 Fellow in Ideas, for today’s post. My journey into the realm of art activism was ignited by my personal battle with severe ill health, which included a protracted struggle with an eating disorder spanning over a decade. Throughout my recovery journey, I came to realize that …
Ally Zlatar: Navigating the Intersection of Art and Activism Read More »
October 6, 2023 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. I recently attended a conference in which the speaker mentioned that, despite all of humanity’s vast resources, there has been no visible or recognizable increase in human wisdom. The speaker desired proof of some growth in wisdom which would demonstrate that, over time, …
September 29, 2023 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s blog. In an effort to understand Aristotle’s use of the term “Discovery,” I will try to update some of his examples which are now obscure, difficult to track down, and sometimes missing entirely. Discovery is a vital plot element according to Aristotle, but without …
September 22, 2023 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. For me, Aristotle’s Poetics is less about advice for the writer than it is about defining structures. By that, I mean that Aristotle wants us to understand how to produce good art that expresses an important aspect of human nature. He goes so …
