The Great Conversation: Citizen
The relation between citizenship and legal rights, sex, ethnicity, religion, economic class, and a host of other things has a complicated history.
The Great Conversation: Temperance
“The archer that shoots over, misses as much as he that falls short, and ’tis equally troublesome to my sight to look up at a great light, and to look down into a dark abyss.” Michel de Montaigne
The Great Conversation: Space
A vacuum is defined precisely by not being anything, unless sheer empty space is a thing. But if it is, what is it? How do you define it?
The Bhagavad Gītā: Jewel of India
Though it has been available in European languages for only a couple of centuries, the Bhagavad Gita has had a tremendous influence on the world’s culture.
The Great Conversation: Nature
The natural can be opposed to the artificial, the immoral, the moral, the civilized, the supernatural, the unnatural—and all of these have further ramified senses, including some that combine with each other.
John Milton: The Blind Bard of Christendom
Images of mutual and contrasting courtesies between the God and angels, angels and man, Adam and Eve, are some of his most persistent; even the damned angels cannot function without a parody of heavenly order.
The Great Conversation: History
“Such is the unity of all history that anyone who endeavors to tell a piece of it must feel that his first sentence tears a seamless web.” — Sir Frederick Pollock
Cicero: A Tongue of Gold
Cicero’s formulation of ethics was a major influence on minds as diverse as St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Locke, Voltaire, and Thomas Jefferson. Perhaps we would do wisely to return to a fountain that has watered so many so well.
The Great Conversation: Eternity
During quarantine, ideas like eternity and time dilation can go from “abstract speculation” to “oh, I could have told you that.” Eternity can therefore be a very useful point of entry into the great conversation, in which it has (appropriately) been a perennial topic.
Lucretius: Heir of the Void
Although his philosophy was never held by more than a small fraction of the Roman people, his work had a major impact on the poets that succeeded him and remained popular for centuries, and went on to influence many eminent scholars.
