Category: Imaginative Literature
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 »
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 …
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 4, 2023 Thanks to Dave Seng, HMU alumnus, for today’s post. In our last two posts we examined the nature of difficult questions—questions which cannot be reduced to utility or calculation and the rationality of humans contrasted with the functionality of AI. In this post I want to explore the question of wisdom. I …
July 28, 2023 Thanks to Dave Seng, HMU alumnus, for today’s post. To read the previous post in this series, visit hmu.edu In our last post we looked at the importance of questions and why self-reflection as individuals and a society is important. It seems part of the human situation to ask questions in order to …
July 21, 2023 Thanks to HMU Alumnus, Dave Seng, for today’s blog post. I recently participated in the fall discussion series, What the Greeks can Teach us About AI. The series focused on four Greek plays — Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus; and Herakles, The Bacchae, and Medea by Euripides. The discussions were insightful and explored …
July 7, 2023 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. Summer recess makes me want to … read, of course! I spend hours lining up books to fill my spare time (of which there is very little actual spare time). The library is one of my favorite destinations and most of my summer …
June 23, 2023 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. To all the “honest drinkers” – as Rabelais would have it – congratulations! We made it to the final post in this series on Rabelais. Hopefully the various connections have enriched your experience of what is often considered difficult reading. Today’s blog concludes …
