Tag: Quarterly Discussion
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 22, 2024
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
As usual, after completing the October Quarterly Discussions, I am left with more questions than answers. But more importantly, more vital to me, is the fact that many questions have been deepened. During discussion, these ideas evolve and morph into three and four dimensional figures, versus the two dimensional beginnings. Whether you call it Socratic dialogue or inquiry-based discussion,
August 16, 2024
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
The Summer Quarterly Discussion on Erasmus covered a lot of territory. Participants brought a wealth of knowledge which we used to explore Erasmus’ language, satire, use of myth and religion, and social critique.
One of the questions that continues to interest me is why Erasmus uses a mythological figure to discuss religion. Folly goes through great pains to link herself to the Greek pantheon.
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 the princely cause since he successfully tricked and killed his opponents,
April 28, 2023
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Our recent Quarterly Discussion spanned thousands of years, jumping from a play by Aeschylus to a short story by Jhumpa Lahiri. We began with Aeschylus’s “Suppliant Maidens” and then transitioned to the short story “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” by Lahiri.
In Aeschylus’s play, a group of fifty (or so) women attempt to flee forced marriages to their cousins.
February 10, 2023
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Before reading the ideas in this blog, I invite you to view a piece by artist M.C. Escher and listen to the “Endlessly Rising Canon” by Bach.
In his book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas Hofstadter paraphrases Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem as follows: “All consistent axiomatic formulations of number theory include undecidable propositions.” Although this is not where January’s Quarterly Discussion started,
November 4, 2022
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
For the October Quarterly Discussion, we read Plutarch’s “Coriolanus” and a speech by David McCullough titled “Knowing History and Knowing Who We Are.” I was not really sure if this combination would work because of the great differences between the two pieces. Plutarch’s biography portends to be history, but is simultaneously a commentary on culture,
September 2, 2022
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Years ago, under the pressures of student life, I read the full volume of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (often referred to as Parallel Lives). Honestly, I was dreading it because I harbored assumptions about some of these ancient texts. (And we all know what a mistake it is to assume anything.) At that time,
July 22, 2022
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Last week, we discussed C.S. Lewis’s “Meditation in a Toolshed” and the beginning of St. Anselm of Canterbury’s Proslogium. Though different in both tone and purpose, these pieces fit very well together in discussion. Proslogium begins with an explanation of its title, which translates to “A Discourse.” Since both pieces foreground the idea of meditation and discourse,
July 15, 2022
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
In studying up on St. Anselm of Canterbury for the July Quarterly Discussion, I keep thinking of the song “Sigh No More” by Mumford & Sons. The song repeats the idea that the heart cries out to be pure, to be what it was “made to be.” In concert with this, St.
April 29, 2022
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Humans try to make sense of things. Is this a noble or foolhardy pursuit? In her book, In June the Labyrinth, poet Cynthia Hogue writes, “the labyrinth is not a maze but a singular way/ to strike ‘the profoundest chord’/ across aspire” (in “(‘to walk the labyrinth is amazing’)”). In other words, the journey of our lives is also,