Tag: Knowledge
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 5, 2025
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Try to define idea in your own words. It’s a good exercise. Much of our lives are spent dealing with abstractions that we struggle to define.
As students, our entire coursework at HMU revolves around great ideas. When outlining the Great Books curriculum, Mortimer Adler limited his selection of great ideas to about one hundred.
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 will further develop why the hard irreducible questions might be a source of wisdom and then I want to explore how information is structured for human understanding which might lead to wisdom. Using this foundation,
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 better understand who we are and how to navigate the world. In our discussion series,
October 28, 2022
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Fortunately for us, David Hume wrote a lot of his thoughts down in his book A Treatise on Human Nature. Yet it might not have been so. At the end of Book I, Hume admits, in lengthy detail, that he doubts himself, his work and his ideas. I find this reassuring for the rest of us who question our ideas as well.
October 7, 2022
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
“a man’s vision is the great fact about him” – William James
At the outset of The Pluralistic Universe, William James asks that all citizens learn to think for themselves. Furthermore, he feels that students should think for themselves rather than expect, await and rely upon classroom lectures for insight. He encourages interest in patterns of thought,
September 23, 2022
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
As recently discussed on this blog, I have begun a journey through the great idea of Knowledge. I want to better understand our sources of knowledge, how we think we know what we think we know. Really, I am trying to assess at what point a thought, idea or belief becomes something akin to knowledge. So much of my studies stem from what we now term the “Western world.” In How the World Thinks,
August 26, 2022
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
From Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:
“I wonder whether what I see and seem to understand about nature is merely one of the accidents of freedom, repeated by chance before my eyes, or whether it has any counterpart in the worlds beyond Tinker Creek. I find in quantum mechanics a world symbolically similar to my world at the creek.
June 26, 2015
The search for knowledge is a crucial piece of humanity that traces back to the beginnings of man. Our ability to contain knowledge began as an oral tradition and slowly developed into readable texts, from ancient cave drawings to scrolls and, finally, to books. In the Advancement of Learning, Francis Bacon claims: “We see then how far the monuments of wit and learning are more durable than the monuments of power or of the hands.