Category: Authors
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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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 …
September 8, 2023 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. If it’s been awhile since you have read Machiavelli’s The Prince, you might consider reading an excerpt with us this fall. We will examine two chapters of it in the October Quarterly Discussion. (Reach out to Alissa at as****@hm*.edu for more information). I …
September 1, 2023 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. The following poem is constructed entirely from Sections VI-XI from Chapter III (“The Order of Nature”) in Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality. To create the poem, I simply chose sections of text from Whitehead’s own words. Therefore, none of the remaining words …
August 25, 2023 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s blog. Don’t forget the sensations, Whitehead reminds us. Near the end of “Part II: Discussions and Applications” in Whitehead’s book Process and Reality, he mentions his frustration at the fact that philosophers (logicians, really) have discarded emotion as largely unworthy of discussion. He notes …
August 18, 2023 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. Harrison Middleton University hosts regularly scheduled discussions for the public as well as students. Open to anyone interested in intellectual discussion, short, easily digestible readings are provided electronically. If you’re interested in more information, reach me at as****@hm*.edu. Our most recent Quarterly Discussion …
June 2, 2023 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. Last week’s blog (https://hmu.edu/2023-5-26-reading-rabelais-part-ii/) concluded with a suggested connection between Book Two of Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel and Monty Python skits. We cannot stop at the end of Book Two, however. Moving into Book Three, we find a lengthy discussion between Pantagruel and …
January 27, 2023 Thanks to James Robertson, HMU student, for today’s post. Learning with Harrison Middleton involves immersion in a world of books and of reading, and is often an experience of enchantment, as now this author and now that nearly captures the heart. There is power in these books, ancient though they may be, …
January 6, 2023 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. Libraries are changing from in-person spaces to digital spaces. They are also trending towards shared, collaborative ones. Likewise, Harrison Middleton University’s library has undergone some changes over recent years. For example, a few years ago we added Britannica MODERNA, a Spanish resource which …
December 9, 2022 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. As we enter the season of Scrooge, I couldn’t resist a comparison of Molière’s The Miser with David Hume’s musings on wealth. In A Treatise of Human Nature, published in 1740, David Hume explains that wealth provides humans with a unique sort of …
November 4, 2022 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. For the October Quarterly Discussion, we read Plutarch’s “Coriolanus” and a speech by David McCullough titled “Knowing History and Knowing Who We Are.” I was not really sure if this combination would work because of the great differences between the two pieces. Plutarch’s …
