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 […]
February 17, 2012 at 12:32 pm
Professor Daniel Hudon (Core Natural Sciences) writes… What’s the best kind of conversation to have, with those who share your views or those who don’t? If you want to have anything beyond a mutually agreeing chat, then you’re going to want to seek out interlocutors who don’t share your views because they’re the ones who […]
February 8, 2012 at 1:32 pm
Erin McDonagh (Core ’08, CAS ’10), a member of the EnCore steering committee, writes: In this article by Carlos Fraenkel of Boston Review, we learn that Brazil’s public education policy has surprising stipulation: According to a 2008 law, students are required to study philosophy for three years in high school. The law is a political […]
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 9:20 am
Prof. Thornton Lockwood writes… In my CC204 lecture on race earlier this month, I raised the issue of the Historian’s fallacy, post hoc, ergo propter hoc (Latin for “after this, therefore because of this”), which consists in attributing a causal sequence between two events based on the fact that one event follows another. My lecture […]
February 1, 2011 at 2:12 pm
In his lecture last week for CC102 on Aristotle’s concept of virtue, Prof. David Bronstein made a fascinating point about Aristotle’s understanding of the relationship between virtue and pleasure. Prof. Bronstein explains: Does it feel good to be virtuous? Hear what Aristotle has to say: We may even go so far as to state that […]
November 30, 2010 at 5:29 pm
You can’t become a good writer by watching YouTube, texting and e-mailing a bunch of abbreviations. — Marcia Blondel, a teacher of English at Woodside High School in California, as quoted in “Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction,” one in a series of articles The New York Times is publishing in order to explore how […]
October 12, 2010 at 10:00 am
Andy Kroll, in doing an investigative report on the growing list of unemployed and underemployed Americans, takes the case study of Rick Rembold to give a face to the economic struggle of aging middle-class Americans (via TomDispatch): “Wouldn’t that be better than no job at all?” I ask. Rembold gnaws on the question. “I can’t […]
