Category: Ethics
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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August 8, 2025
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
I have been a competitive athlete for much of my life, which just means that I am not good at being still. Even now, watching from the sidelines stifles something inside of me. Obviously, I lack the agility and recovery of today’s athletes, but I still like to participate. Reading through some of the Stoic literature has given me reason to pause,
August 1, 2025
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Charity is not one of Adler’s great ideas, despite the fact that St. Paul claims: “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity” (King James Version, 1Cor. 13:13). Charity is not one of Adler’s great ideas, despite the fact that many of the great authors construct entire sections of ethics based on charity itself.
May 23, 2025
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor for today’s post.
I recently explored The Handbook of Epictetus with a group led by David Saussy of Symposium Great Books Institute. As with many texts, I gained a lot of ideas by exploring it with a group. We used close textual analysis and slow reading to better understand a number of Epictetus’s thoughts. While short in length,
February 21, 2025
Thanks to Rachel D. Perez, a 2025 HMU Fellow in Ideas, for today’s post.
Cinema, at its most incisive, does not merely tell stories—it unmasks the world. El hoyo (The Platform, 2019), directed by Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia, is one such film, a relentless interrogation of survival, power, and the human condition. Set within a vertical prison where food descends level by level, the film captures the raw brutality of artificial scarcity.
» Read more about: The Horror of Being: A Philosophical Review of El hoyo (The Platform) »
January 24, 2025
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
The Winter Film Series kicked off with the hard-hitting Women Talking. The film, directed by Sarah Polley, profiles a small, isolated Mennonite community in Bolivia. A series of incidents lead the women to discover that some men in the community have repeatedly drugged and then sexually assault them. The women hold a plebiscite on whether to do nothing,
October 11, 2024
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
I recently attended ChronFest 2024, an annual virtual conference hosted by The Chronicle of Higher Education. Similar to last year, the event had a strong focus on AI and technology. Of course, AI has disrupted many practices common to educators. For my purposes, I’m most interested in how we will continue to assess a student’s understanding of subject matter.
September 6, 2024
Thanks to Tyler Wright, a 2024 HMU Fellow in Ideas, for today’s post.
How must we approach signs of life which defy our present understandings of what it is to be alive? Viruses, for instance, are periodically reexamined by scientists as they exist in a sort of transitory area between the living and nonliving (Villarreal, 2004). A specimen might exhibit characteristics so unique that a new branch of life begins to emerge.
February 2, 2024
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Though we near the end of Bleak House, our focus remains on notions of charity. Next week will conclude our book club discussion with the eighth and final post. We have skipped much of the mystery and murder. I apologize for that, but I would hate to ruin the suspense for those who have not kept up the pace.
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****@*mu.edu for more information). I was also thinking about how one might teach this work, how to bring it to life in the eyes of the students.
May 13, 2022
Thanks to 2022 Fellow in Ideas, David Yamada, for today’s post.
Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life by Zena Hitz
As the humanities and social sciences face core threats fueled by higher education budget cuts and political divisions, they are conventionally defended on vocational and practical grounds. The liberal arts, so the argument goes, provide a strong grounding for successful careers by teaching students how to read,