Classic Learning in Black History: Part I
Dr. Anika Prather of Howard University gives us a three-part series explaining how she went from being suspicious of the Classics to being truly captivated.
Liberal Arts
Student Essay: The Power of Music
The study of music is not merely a pleasant pastime; it merits its status as one of the seven liberal arts, and belongs in all students’ education.
The Great Conversation: Rhetoric
The techniques of persuasion have been so habitually separated from logic and wisdom, it’s assumed that rhetoric is persuasion through bad reasons for bad purposes. But in truth, the art of persuasion is as necessary for good arguments as it is for bad ones.
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.
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.
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.
Avicenna: Proof of the Truthful
Avicenna laid the groundwork for the philosophy of the Scholastics, particularly developing the logic of Aristotle.
Aquinas: Truth Above All
Wonder glimpses an elusive knowledge worth pursuing, and this desire permeated St. Thomas’ mind and heart.
Sayers: The Centrality of Accuracy
“Is not the great defect of our education today that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils ‘subjects,’ we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think?”
Machiavelli: The Power of Education in the Classics
“I enter into the courts of ancient men and am welcomed by them kindly, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born.”
