The Bhagavad Gītā: A Book Profile
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.
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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.
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Milton: An Author Profile
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.
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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
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Cicero: An Author Profile
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.
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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.
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Lucretius: An Author Profile
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.
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The Great Conversation: Astronomy
The paradoxes in how gravity, light, and atomic nuclear forces operate have prompted subtle theories about not only nature, but reality as such—bending science back towards its parent discipline of philosophy.
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The Great Conversation: Virtue and Vice
“All the things I really like to do are either illegal, immoral, or fattening.” — Alexander Woollcott
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Aesop: An Author Profile
Like Tennessee Williams’ Tom Wingfield, Aesop gives us “truth cleverly disguised as fiction,” conveying wisdom imaginatively and indirectly.
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