Category: Great Ideas

Language and Other Abstract Objects: Plato

Language and Other Abstract Objects was published by Rowman & Littlefield in 1981. It discusses the ideas of Plato studied in CC101. Internalization and externalization also explain why, for Plato, poetry corrupts our psyches. Given our psychology, there are two features of poetry which make it an especially potent drug. First, the music and  rhythms […]

Analects of the Core: Locke on the harm of intemperance

Relating to temperance, and the work of John Locke studied in CC203, here is today’s analect: For esteem and reputation being a sort of moral strength, whereby a man is enabled to do, as it were, by an augmented force, that which others, of equal natural parts and natural power, cannot do without it; he […]

‘Who Are You and What Are You Doing Here?’ by Mark Edmundson

In this essay, an important question is asked. Edmundson discusses what real education is, and how one must fight to obtain it and retain it. Here is an excerpt: Your professors will give you some fine books to read, and they’ll probably help you understand them. What they won’t do, for reasons that perplex me, […]

‘Writers and Artists at Harvard’ by Helen Dendler

This month’s issue of Harvard Magazine features an essay by Porter University Professor Helen Vendler, about how important it is to understand, attract, and evaluate applicants whose creative talents might otherwise be overlooked. This is relevant to all universities, including Boston University, and it relates to the principles of the Core Curriculum. Here is an […]

Lecture: Plato’s Republic

On November 20th, Professor Greg Fried (Suffolk University, Department of Philosophy), a long-time friend and colleague of the Core, lectured to the students of CC101 about Plato’s Republic. Here we offer an excerpt from his lecture: MORPHEUS: Do you want to know what it is, Neo? The Matrix is everywhere; it’s all around us, even now in […]

Analects of the Core: Milton on reigning in Hell

Professor Ricks lectured today on John Milton’s Paradise Lost. From this spawns today’s analect: “Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n” (Paradise Lost, Book 1, 258-263).

Analects of the Core: Malinowski on exchange and reciprocity

In view of Professor Barfield’s lecture on 11/29 about Malinowski’s notions of exchange and reciprocity, here is today’s analect: Apart from any consideration as to whether the gifts are necessary or even useful, giving for the sake of giving is one of the most important features of Trobriand sociology, and, from its very general and […]

Women and Reading

An excerpt from The New Yorker magazine on “The Woman Reader” by Belinda Jack. In the history of women, there is probably no matter, apart from contraception, more important than literacy. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, access to power required knowledge of the world. This could not be gained without reading and writing, […]

Aeschliman on Silber

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 […]

A Gilgamesh-inflected indie film

Yet another film project inspired by a classic Core text! The Tube Open Movie is an ambitious 3D animated film project inspired by the Assyrian tablets in the British Museum whose fragments are all that we have of the original Gilgamesh story. The epic centers on the Sumerian king who ruled Uruk, in ancient Iraq, […]