Tagged: Humanities

From The Chronicle of Higher Education: Engineers Need the Liberal Arts, Too

STEM has its roots in the humanities. If our intellectual foundations are uprooted, then, naturally, the natural sciences and their applications are in danger of withering away. This is a strong reason for the protests that followedPresident Trump’s beginning attempts to deforest our education, which might have had in mindthe prospect of recreating America in […]

From The TLS: How Should the Humanities Make The News?

Rightly, Mary Beard in a recent article for the TLS takes for granted the question about whether the humanities should make it in the news at all. In a sense, it would be derogating from one of the signal purposes of the humanities if they were to be made the subject of more headlines. For […]

Analects of the Core: Woolf on music

‘Like’ and ‘like’ and ‘like’ — but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing? now that lightning has gashed the tree and the flowering branch has fallen and Percival, by his death, has made me this gift, let me see the thing. There is a square; there is an oblong. […]

Study philosophy for better welders?

When Marco Rubio declared “We need more welders and less philosophers,” he was greeted with quite the bit of applause. This push for vocational work (shall we call it a populist appeal?) has become a central thread in the public conversation of this election season; this is likely motivated by continuing concerns about economic recovery […]

When Humanities and Natural Sciences Meet

It can be strange to think sometimes of the humanities and sciences meeting. A poetic stanza has very little to do with a mathematical equation one would think; not Edna St. Vincent Millay. In this poem, “Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare”, the Father of Geometry can see what poets, those so attuned to […]

David Green on Core and the canon

Prompted by Dean Sapiro’s lecture on Mary Wollstonecraft to question why there are so few women authors in the Core Humanities, Prof. David Green had his CC 202 students this week  momentarily put aside Pride and Prejudice and the question of whether happiness in marriage is a matter of chance to consider the criteria for […]

The Major #1: English?

Looming above many college students is the uncertainty of choosing a major. The Core does not have specific instructions on how to make this important decision… However, here we highlight some of the common opinions on the matter. Today’s topic is the English Major: In a thoughtful though rather biased article from The Chronicle Review we […]

Steven Pinker: Science Is Not Your Enemy

In an engaging article for New Republic, the acclaimed psychologist, linguist and author Steven Pinker discusses the underlying dislike of science residing in some “humanities people”. This matter is especially relevant to the integrated way sciences and humanities and learned in the Core. Here is an extract from Pinker’s introduction: These thinkers—Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, […]

William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’

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

Postcards to the Core: from Paris

Dear Core, Hola! I am on a mini-break from Paris, in Madrid right now, where I had the treat of spending the day in the Prado. Velázquez and Goya close up are really an experience. I never really “got” the singular appeal of Las meninas or The 2nd of May until I was there, in […]