December 14, 2012 at 12:56 pm
Dedicated to all sleep-deprived Core students and faculty preparing their battlements for the approaching finals’ week, and relating to the work of CC201, here is today’s analect from Cervantes’ Don Quixote: All I know is that while I’m asleep, I’m never afraid, and I have no hopes, no struggles, no glories — and bless the man [...]
December 3, 2012 at 11:41 am
In his recent work Gilgamesh: An Epic Obsession (http://bit.ly/TDl2BN), Theodore Ziolkowski takes a look at the ways in which the epic has manifested into our literature, art, music, and popular culture. The students of CC101 experienced this through David Ferry, whose translation of Gilgamesh they read this semester. David Ferry has also written: Bewilderment (http://bit.ly/RwrwnD), which [...]
November 29, 2012 at 5:28 pm
Relating to the reading that the students of CC201 have done on Descartes’ work, here is today’s analect: Although in approaching the flame I feel heat, and even though in approaching it a little too closely I feel pain, there is still no reason that can convince me that there is some quality in the [...]
November 26, 2012 at 1:01 pm
On Thursday November 29th, Professor Barfield will lecture to the students of CC203 about anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski and his ideas of exchange and reciprocity. Thinking about Malinowski’s continuing if too-little acknowledge impact on our society, we present this clip from The Young Indiana Jones. In it, our young protagonist is asking the elderly, wise ethnologist for [...]
October 14, 2012 at 7:57 am
Silber’s lifelong meditation on the strengths and limits of Kant’s ethics was like Jacob wrestling with the angel. A Germanophile, Silber was haunted by the fact that the noble Germanic philosophical tradition best represented by Kant had not been able to do more to prevent luciferian National Socialism: He thought this revealed an inadequacy in [...]
March 21, 2012 at 11:14 am
According to Prof. Pat Johnson (in yesterday’s CC102 lecture), “any BU undergraduate could have found a better way to dump Dido than Aeneas did in Book IV of the Aeneid“: She was the first to speak and charge Aeneas: “You even hope to keep me in the dark as to this outrage, did you, two-faced [...]
September 8, 2011 at 11:19 am
Professor Nathan Phillips, of BU’s Department of Geography and Environment, coordinator in Spring 2012 of CC106, has earned a reputation as a passionate advocate for sustainability. In 2007, BU Today recognized him for maintaining a zero-emissions office, powered by a bicycle generator. This summer, he made headlines in the Boston Globe for using a personal [...]
September 7, 2011 at 4:45 pm
Prof. David Eckel welcomed the class of 2015 at the start of yesterday’s CC101 lecture, inviting them to think about what it means to succeed in college and in the Core Curriculum. he suggested that our challenge is to “make the strange familiar and the familiar strange”: If the books seem familiar to you, ask [...]
