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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Great Works & Authors
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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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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The Great Conversation: Prophecy
The secrets of the past, the present, the future, and the transcendental all appeal to the insatiable human mind. The prophet claims to access them.
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The Great Conversation: Mathematics
God himself is regularly described and depicted in art as the supreme geometer, creating all things in number, weight, and measure.
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The Great Conversation: Dialectic
From Socrates to Descartes, dialectic was principally a technique of the mind to discover truth: Hegel suggested that the world itself is a kind of mind.
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Teresa: An Author Profile
It is easy to think of St. Teresa’s ecstasies and visions as alien to our experience — yet her mysticism was shrewd and earthy, not abstract.
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