Category: Tutor Post
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 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 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 …
September 15, 2023 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. I recently participated in a three day online festival hosted by The Chronicle of Higher Education. The topics to be discussed mentioned AI and technology which happen to be recent fascinations of mine. Though I did not know what to expect, I immensely …
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 …
