Propaedia

As the Syntopicon was a topical index of ideas in Great Books of the Western World, the Propaedia was an outline of knowledge for the latest print edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica. As the latter's online version explains in its entry on itself,

"Upon [Robert Maynard ] Hutchins’s retirement in 1974, [Mortimer J.] Adler succeeded him as chairman of the Board of Editors. Under the stewardship of Adler, [William] Benton, and Charles E. Swanson (president of the company from 1967 to 1985), a vast editorial effort was assembled, resulting in the first publication of Britannica 3, or the 15th edition, in 1974. The new set consisted of 28 volumes in three parts serving different functions: the Micropædia: Ready Reference and Index, Macropædia: Knowledge in Depth, and Propædia: Outline of Knowledge. ..."

In its entry on "Encyclopaedia", the section on Content arrangement concludes,

"The Propædia specifically was a reader’s version of the circle of learning on which the set had been based and was organized in such a way that a reader might reassemble in meaningful ways material that the accident of alphabetization had dispersed."

While there is not a specific Britannica article on Propaedia, there is one at Wikipedia which includes the outline of its 10 Parts, 41 Divisions, and 167 Sections.

Herbert Ratner: Apostle of the Culture of Life

Donald DeMarco recalls Herbert Ratner, at the National Catholic Register

In 1937, Robert Maynard Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, appointed Ratner as senior member of the Committee of Liberal Arts. There, he did research on the history of medicine as an assistant to Mortimer Adler, the founder of the Great Books program.

Adler, who was a Thomist, spearheaded a re-examination of the classical thinkers, particularly Aristotle and Aquinas. Impressed with the philosophy of Aquinas, many became attracted to the Catholic Church.

In 1938, Herb converted to Catholicism and remained a faithful and devoted member of the Church throughout his life. He was a longtime and active member of the Chicago Catholic Physicians Guild and served as the president of the Catholic Medical Association.

Having studied Aristotle and Aquinas, he realized all the more clearly the essential role of nature, not only for medicine, but also for the family.

"In an article entitled, 'The Family: Nature’s Institution,' he pays homage to what the great Thomist and historian of philosophy Etienne Gilson said of St. Thomas’ thinking:

'The central intuition which governs the whole philosophical and theological undertaking of St. Thomas is that it is impossible to do justice to God without doing justice to nature, and that doing justice to nature is at the same time the surest way of doing justice to God.'

Thus nature was a vicar general (or God’s representative in the natural order). And just as the vicar is of one mind with his superior, so, too, nature has a similar relationship with her Creator. In an address to members of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars in 1988, Ratner told his audience, "The notion of nature as a vicar general is a realistic and dynamic concept of nature which recognizes man as an integral part of biological nature and the universe 'tied within the divine mind by an indissoluble knot.'"

With regard to the family, he stated: 'The battle for the survival of the family centers in good part around the explication of the family as a natural institution communicating nature’s wisdom with its inherent power to persuade human reason and free choice.'

#family #nature

Richard Rorty: Life, Pragmatism, and Conversational Philosophy

Santiago Zabala at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

A lot was expected of Rorty both intellectually and socially even at an early age. This is probably why he was sent at the age of 15 to the Hutchins College at the University of Chicago, which had recently begun accepting high school students to educate them in the great books of the Western tradition. However, there was a problem at Hutchins: the pragmatism of John Dewey, who was a hero to Rorty’s family, was considered vulgar, relativistic, and self-refuting. "As they pointed out over and over again,' Rorty recalls,

"Dewey had no absolutes. To say, as Dewey did, that 'growth itself is the only moral end,' left one without a criterion for growth, and thus with no way to refute Hitler’s suggestion that Germany had 'grown' under his rule. To say that truth is what works is to reduce the quest for truth to the quest for power."

The Hutchins program, as Neil Gross recalls in his biography of Rorty,

"was too out of sync with the rest of the American university system for other schools to know what to do with someone who had graduated at age eighteen after only three years of coursework. Richard decided to stay on at Chicago, and the experiences he underwent during his next three years there would prove formative for his later thought."

#education #philosophy

Prisoners, professors discuss great books, life of the mind

David Waters at USA TODAY NETWORK – Tennessee.

"The Iliad is a tale of rage and desire, delusion and deception, forgiveness and redemption, homecoming and exile.
...
"As incarcerated women, they can relate."

#education #punishment

The Unreality of Time

John Ellis McTaggart, from Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy 17 (1908): 456-473, at DiText

(via Joshua Spencer)

#time

Who needs the Great Books?

'A personal and political history of Directed Studies—Yale’s boot camp for freshmen who dare, by Molly Worthen, at the Yale Alumni Magazine.

"Directed Studies could have encouraged us to slide into self-indulgent pseudo-philosophy—we had enough of that in late-night hang-outs in the common room, thank you—were it not for the discipline of weekly papers based on close readings of difficult books."

#education

A Defense of Presentism

By Ned Markosian, available in Dean Zimmerman (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, Volume 1 (Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 47-82. Reprinted in Michael Rea (ed.), Arguing About Metaphysics (Routledge, 2009); and in Sally Haslanger and Roxanne Marie Kurtz (eds.), Persistence: Contemporary Readings (MIT Press, 2006), as well as at his website.

#time

'The Internationalists': A timely book that instructs and delights

Bob Kohn, one of the Senior Fellows here at the Center, reviews The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World, by Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro, at Amazon.

#war

Classic books find a home on the radio, online and at Eureka Books

The Times-Standard reported,

"In 1993, the North Coast Great Books Discussion Group was founded. Every month the group has been meeting and producing a short radio show called 'Classics Now!' on the KHSU Magazine."

#education

How do you translate the Quran? New book digs into history

Patrick T. Reardon reviews The 'Koran' in English: A Biography, by Bruce B. Lawrence, at the Chicago Tribune.

"For this new book looking specifically at the English version, Lawrence uses the transliteration Koran in the title and often in the text because it is the word most often used in English in the past and still best known by English speakers. In addition, he often uses the spelling Qur'an. Many news organizations, including the Tribune, employ Quran.

"Lawrence is elaborate in his praise for a 2015 translation American Qur'an, which he describes as an 'illuminated' version of the holy book. In this large-format work, artist Sandow Birk offers each sura beautifully handwritten and framed by scenes of American life. An image from that book is on the cover of The 'Koran' in English."

#religion

Teaching the Constitution

Tomorrow is the anniversary of the ratification of the United States Constitution in 1787.

"Engaging in a Socratic dialogue with students at St. John’s College in Annapolis, philosopher and educator Mortimer Adler offers insights in 'America’s testament'."

Transcript at Moyers & Company.

Why 'Great Books' Programs are Enjoying a Resurgence in Popularity

Dakota Buhler of George Fox University at Study Breaks.

"Great books programs are founded on the Socratic Method. They generally consist of small cohorts that read through history’s most prominent Western writers, and then discuss the works in a Socratic style. The specific curriculum varies from program to program, but it generally includes authors who have been set apart as great philosophers, theologians, political theorists, scientific thinkers and literary geniuses of their times. These authors’ works become the core texts on which great books programs are built.

#education

The Fabric Of The Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

Brian Greene at Higher Intellect.

#space #time

Exchange of papers between Leibniz and Clarke

Five papers and replies by Gottfried Leibniz and Samuel Clarke, November 1715 to 9 October 1716, posted by Jonathan Bennett at Early Modern Texts.

(via Joshua Spencer)

#religion #space

Getting the classics back in the classroom

Winston Brady at North State Journal.

"When introducing the iPad 2, Steve Jobs said, 'Technology alone is not enough,' because the best technology needs the liberal arts to stoke its creative fires. Jobs even attributed his edge in the tech world to studying calligraphy, not courses in engineering.Classical education already unites the arts and sciences. In history, students study the Scientific Revolution and its prominent figures; in logic, they learn the rules these thinkers applied in studying the natural world; and in science they conduct experiments with Galileo’s boldness and curiosity."

Here is a video of Mr. Jobs on technology and the liberal arts.

#education

The real reason there are so few conservatives on campus

Damon Linker at The Week.

"Professors are trained as graduate students to become scholars — and scholarship in our time is defined as an effort to make progress in knowledge. The meaning of progress in the hard sciences is fairly obvious. But what does it mean to make progress in our knowledge of, say, English literature? One possibility is to find obscure, previously neglected authors and make a case for their importance. (This could be described as making progress in knowledge by way of expanding the canon.)

"Another possibility is to bring new questions to bear on old, classic texts. But where will those new questions come from if not the concerns of the present?"

(via Elliot Kauffman at National Review)

#education

Why Read Great Books?

David Randall at First Things says

"The problem is when you focus too much on the civic arts and not enough on formation of character."

#education

Political animal

Lauro Martines reviews Machiavelli's Politics, by Catherine H. Zuckert, Be Like the Fox: Machiavelli’s lifelong quest for freedom, by Erica Benner, and Machiavelli on Liberty and Conflict, edited by David Johnston, Nadia Urbinati and Camila Vergara, at The Times Literary Supplement.

#government #liberty

How I quit smoking and got a little smarter along the way

Ben Mayfield, Special to The Advocate (Baton Rouge).

"Then one day my secretary announced that Mr. Doe with 'The Great Books of the Western World' was here to see me. My former roommate had a set of the books which I enjoyed reading, and from that time on they were on my wish list. Mr. Doe explained that they had a three-year payment plan with monthly payments of $14.73. We had two small children and were living from payday to payday so I knew we could not justify the added financial burden.

"I was about to inform Mr. Doe that I couldn’t do it, when I had an epiphany. I think it was divine. The monthly payment was equivalent to my smoking cost, which was a budgeted item."

#education #habit #GreatBooksOfTheWesternWorld

Say’s law: supply creates its own demand

The third in a series on "Six big ideas" in economics at The Economist.

"His [Jean-Baptiste Say's] greatest work was A Treatise on Political Economy [1803], a graceful exposition (and extension) of [Adam] Smith’s economic ideas. In Say’s time, as nowadays, the world economy combined strong technological progress with fitful demand, spurts of innovation with bouts of austerity.
...
"How then did Say explain the woes of his age, the stuffed warehouses, clogged ports and choked markets? He understood that an economy might oversupply some commodities, if not all. That could cause severe, if temporary, distress to anyone involved in the hypertrophied industries. But he argued that for every good that is too abundant, there must be another that is too scarce. The labour, capital and other resources devoted to oversupplying one market must have been denied to another more valuable channel of industry, leaving it under-resourced."

The books is available in several formats at the Online Library of Liberty.

Papineau vs Dennett: a philosophical dispute

Philosophy Editor Tim Crane introduces this debate between David Papineau’s and Daniel Dennett on the nature of mind, at The Times Literary Supplement.

#mind

Holes

David Lewis and Stephanie Lewis at the University of San Diego

(via Joshua Spencer)

#universal

Gary Becker’s concept of human capital

The second in a series on "Six big ideas" in economics at The Economist.

"As far back as Adam Smith in the 18th century, economists had noted that production depended not just on equipment or land but also on peoples’ abilities. But before the 1950s, when Becker first examined links between education and incomes, little thought was given to how such abilities fit with economic theory or public policy.
...
"Doctoral degree in hand, Becker, then in his mid-20s, was hired by the National Bureau of Economic Research to work on a project calculating returns on schooling. What seemed a simple question led him to realise that no one had yet fleshed out the concept of human capital. In subsequent years he developed it into a full-fledged theory that could be applied to any number of questions and, soon enough, to issues previously seen as outside the realm of economics, from marriage to fertility."

#wealth

Aquinas Leadership International - September 2017 Update

REQUIESCAT IN PACE:

HONORING KENNETH SCHMITZ

Jude P. Dougherty

The Catholic University of America

Jude P. Dougherty reports the recent death of our colleague Ken Schmitz. As a memorial to Ken, he has sent along to us the following reflections he delivered at The Catholic University of America under the auspices the JP II Institute as a tribute to Ken when he was leaving Washington for the last time.

The Threat of Free Speech in the University

Roger Scruton in the symposium 'Assault on Higher Education: Reports from the Front' at Modern Age.

"I do not think there is very much censorship in our universities, other than that imposed impromptu by the students and acquiesced in by a weak establishment. But it has been true for a long time that there are orthodoxies in a university that cannot easily be transgressed without penalty, and that the penalty is not imposed on scholarly or academic grounds but on grounds that could fairly be described as ideological."

#education

Bertrand Russell on Plotinus

Book One, Chapter 30 Plotinus, at YouTube, from the book The History of Western Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell

(via Great Conversation Reading Group)

#metaphysics

James Sloan Allen reviews 'Great Treasury of Western Thought'

"edited with Charles van Doren , [it] is a splendid gathering of important statements from sources as diverse in time and temper as the Old Testament and Sartre, Homer and Einstein."

At The Saturday Review

#education

ALI 2017 Plenary Session 13: Charles Sanders Peirce & Thomas Sebeok as Philosophical Reformers

Fourth Annual Aquinas Leadership International World Congress: "Augustine, Aquinas, and the Apologetics of the New Reformation(s)"

Chair, Brian Kemple, Aquinas Leadership International

• Peirce, Sebeck, and the Semiotic Reformation of Contemporary Communications, by Maria Asuncion Magsino, University of Asia and the Pacific

Streamed live on July 15, 2017

#sign

Previous session ALI 2017 Plenary Session 12: Remembering John Deely as Colleague & Philosophical Reformer

The Invitation to the Great Conversation

Robert M. Woods at Imaginative Conservative.

#education #MortimerAdler #RobertHutchins