September 8, 2011 at 2:54 pm
Thank Heaven! I am going to-morrow where I shall find a man who has not one agreeable quality, who has neither manner nor sense to recommend him. Stupid men are the only ones worth knowing, after all. – Elizabeth Bennet, in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Volume II, Chapter iv, 151-152 (Penguin Classics edition) * [...]
August 17, 2011 at 10:35 am
You may be asked to summarize the plot of Shakespeare’s Hamlet during your study of the play in CC201 this fall. If so, you couldn’t do worse than to give as precise and cogent an answer as the student author does here: Hamlet was a young man very nervous. He was always dressed in black [...]
August 16, 2011 at 1:00 pm
The financial counseling staff at Kansas State University have published an article addressing financial responsibility for college students. From the piece: Budgeting should begin before a student even sets foot on campus, said Jodi Kaus, program director for Powercat Financial Counseling at Kansas State University. Students may have extra funding from high school graduation gifts, [...]
April 26, 2011 at 12:30 pm
John Armstrong is challenging the academic doxa surrounding wealth in his new book In Search of Civilization: Remaking a Tarnished Idea. The Weekly Standard has a full review: Professors do not like the word: The minority of clear thinkers complain that it admits of no definition that takes in all of its meanings, and the [...]
April 7, 2011 at 12:44 pm
Judson Cowan, Senior Art Director for Morrison Agency and self titled freelance musician offers many free albums on his website, one of which is a remix of the music from Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring), which has often been studied in CC202. His remix adds a more modern emphasis on [...]
March 24, 2011 at 12:52 pm
Next month’s issue of the New York Review of Books features Gary Wills’ biting condemnation of the effort of Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly to reconcile modern nihilism in their new book All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. The problem is not that the book is [...]
A guest post from Core alumna Erin McDonagh, CAS ’10): New York Times columnist David Brooks recently discussed the results, 250 years later, of the split between the French Enlightenment and the English one. The French “emphasized individualism and reason,” while the British thinkers focused on social sentiments. As our modern selves learn to rely [...]
February 17, 2011 at 5:41 pm
Prof. Daniel Hudon, of CC105 and CC106, writes… This month, in their Readings department, Harper’s magazine published a list of questions* from the entrance examination to All Soul’s College at Oxford University. Applicants take four examinations of three hours each, and in the general subject tests must answer three questions from a list. The question [...]
February 15, 2011 at 12:40 pm
American Interest Online offers a book review with commentary on How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell. The review offers first insight into the peculiarities of Montaigne’s approach to his writings, and then on happiness itself, providing humanities scholars a cohesive argument on [...]
February 1, 2011 at 12:15 pm
The Economist summarizes a new book by James Miller, Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche, wherein he explores the troubled lives of some of the world’s most famous philosophers. He proposes that the pursuit of philosophical questions, wrought with uncertainty and self-questioning, has led to similarly unfortunately troubled lives: If one wanted to compile a [...]
