Category: Great Books
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 …
Ahab Rages and Odysseus Weeps: Trauma as a Core Concept for Humanistic Inquiry June 24, 2022 Thanks to David C. Yamada, a 2022 Fellow in Ideas, for today’s post. The Great Books of the Western World series includes the two-volume Syntopicon, An Index to the Great Ideas, which contains 102 core ideas and accompanying entries …
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 …
October 29, 2021 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. When Gulliver travels to Brobdingnag, he describes many things with disgust. Therefore, it seems fitting, for a Halloween treat, to revisit some of Swift’s grotesque elements from the world of Brobdingnag. If you find this overly terrifying, keep in mind that Gulliver survives …
May 29, 2020 Thanks to Peter Ponzio, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. The introductory course at Harrison Middleton University is called “The Great Conversation: The Cornerstone Course.” It includes short readings on a wide range of subjects and serves as an introduction to our methods. One of these readings, The Expanding Universe, by Sir Arthur …
May 24, 2019 Thanks to James Keller, HMU student, for today’s post. Borrowing from Bradbury, Great Books Chicago 2019 was titled: Something Wicked This Way Comes. Taken as a statement rather than a title, it is a somewhat comforting thought—at least initially. If the wicked thing is coming, it is something outside and not of …
May 17, 2019 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. Great Books Chicago is a weekend of book discussions held in Chicago. We meet at the Great Books Foundation and break off into separate rooms for discussions. We also attend events as a larger group. This year’s theme was Something Wicked This Way …
February 1, 2019 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. I have a number of questions still rumbling around after Harrison Middleton University’s January Quarterly Discussion. We read Archimedes’ Sand Reckoner and G. H. Hardy’s Mathematician’s Apology. I put these two pieces together because I am interested in mathematical discourse separated by thousands …
November 30, 2018 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. Recently, I read The Story of My Life by Helen Keller. (I have already expressed my appreciation for the way she describes language in a previous post.) I was also quite taken with her reflections on nature, which played a large role in …
November 2, 2018 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. For the October Quarterly Discussion, we read four chapters from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. As usual, I distributed some questions beforehand intended to help start the conversation. Each discussion lasts 1.5 hours in which I (mostly) lead. I enjoy the responsibility …
