Tagged: Enlightenment

On Mice and Not Knowing

The Enlightenment was… many things. To seek to define it in one word would, perhaps, be a display of great arrogance. And of course, none of us here with the Core have anywhere near enough self-esteem to be considered arrogant. One of the definitions of Enlightenment, and perhaps the most common, is thus: the Enlightenment […]

From Literary Review: Righteous Reformations

Eric Ormsby at Literary Reviewengages in his latest review with Christopher de Bellaigue’sThe Islamic Enlightenment. The relationship between the two has not been easy, but that it has been unrequited for either is a misimpression that has gained popularity in some circles, namely populist ones. That is too bad, because de Bellaigue argues that the […]

From The Guardian: The Dream of Enlightenment

It’s too easily supposed, after having heard their names used so often in sources not their own, that the enlightenment thinkers, and philosophers generally, have bequeathed to us all they have to say. That philosophy is a done deal, whose original enterprise is now more seriously undertaken by the natural sciences, or theology- kidding about […]

From The New Yorker: “Are we really so modern?”

Down in New York, reviewing the new book The Dream of Enlightenment by Anthony Gottlieb, critic and poet Adam Kirsch has penned a longand wide-ranging essay that considers our modern moment. Are we really as alienated from history in the year 2016, and as disrupted by technology from our cultural forebears, as it is sometimes […]

Alumnus Ben Howe & his Core-themed brewery

Ben Howe (CAS ’07), an entrepreneurial Core Curriculum alumnus, has opened a nano brewery and appropriately named it Enlightenment Ales! To our delight, the titles of his individual ales are, in our minds, very much Core-themed: Cosmos, Illumination, Enlightenment. As Ben describes on the company website, the nano brewery makes Bière de Champagne. For the laymen in brewery […]

Criticism of ‘Jane Austen, Game Theorist’

Relating to CC202’s study of Jane Austen’s work is an article from Slate, in which Adelle Waldman gives her amusing criticism of a recent book that discusses Austen’s insight into human behavior. Here is an extract: Austen, it seems, has something to tell us. And not only us English majors. Mathematicians. Game theorists. Serious thinkers. Even […]

William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’

Relating to CC202’s study of Blake’s work, here is an image from ‘The Tyger’      

Nabokov & His Literature Class

In his article titled ‘An A from Nabokov’, Edward Jay Epstein recounts his experience from Lit 311 at Cornell University, where he studied many of the works that the Core explores in CC202. Here is an extract: The professor was Vladimir Nabokov, an émigré from tsarist Russia. About six feet tall and balding, he stood, with […]

Alumni response to Brooks in NYTimes

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 […]