Oct 31, 2019
One year ago, Karl decided to give up his 20-year teaching career as a university professor of humanities and philosophy. Why did he make this decision? In Karl’s own words, “It was no longer rewarding for me or valuable to the students.”
Towards the end of his teaching career, Karl started to notice a decline in...
Oct 24, 2019
In this week’s episode, Scott and Karl pay homage to the recently deceased Harold Bloom, a great ally to our mission at Online Great Books.
Once hailed the most notorious literary critic in America, Bloom was a professor of humanities at Yale and a fierce defender of canonicity. His version of the canon, with...
Oct 17, 2019
This week, Scott and Karl read Chapters 1-3 of Gabriel Marcel’s Man Against Mass Society.
Mass society doesn’t just include people for Marcel, he also includes art, media, and technology. Marcel is concerned with human existence, or more specifically, with the quality of human life in relation to the transcendent.
Oct 11, 2019
Thomas Hobbes is the type of writer you love to hate– but he’s also the guy you’d love to play cards with. Scott believes Hobbes’ Leviathan is one of the most fruitful books he has ever read. It’s a founding text of western thought filled with original ideas that are still relevant to contemporary politics.
Oct 3, 2019
Scott is joined by Karl Schudt in this week’s discussion of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, “Self-Reliance.”
For Emerson, authentic, unmediated thought has some sort of divine truth in it. This is crucial to our mission at Online Great Books. In seminar discussion, everyone has a unique perspective that we need to...