Tag: language
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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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 20, 2023 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. George Bull translated the Penguin Classics version of Machiavelli’s The Prince (1999). In the introductory materials, Bull notes some of the difficulties of translating Machiavelli’s language. I find his comments particularly enlightening since they also address the problematic nature of virtue. Machiavelli clearly …
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 …
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 …
June 2, 2023 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. Last week’s blog (https://hmu.edu/2023-5-26-reading-rabelais-part-ii/) concluded with a suggested connection between Book Two of Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel and Monty Python skits. We cannot stop at the end of Book Two, however. Moving into Book Three, we find a lengthy discussion between Pantagruel and …
April 21, 2023 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. Occasionally, I like to write about writing. Today I want to explore writing’s evil stepsister: editing. How does the tangled mess of an idea turn into a polished, organized piece of work? In a blog that I posted last year, I described a few …
February 17, 2023 Thanks to James Robertson, HMU student, for today’s blog. In a poem, Whitman writes “This is no book; who touches this touches a man” (Leaves of Grass). In contrast, Plato has Socrates observe that “writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet …
September 30, 2022 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. Some of the primary texts that we study at Harrison Middleton University date back to the Roman Empire. Obviously we use popular translations of these texts, but it is always a worthy exercise to look at the primary texts. Much information can be …
September 9, 2022 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. Like many American children, I grew up with the rhymes of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I still remember snippets of “Paul Revere’s Ride”: “[T]hrough the gloom and the light,/ The fate of a nation was riding that night;/ And the spark struck out by …
