“Sense,” Santayana says, “is the foundation of everything.” The task of “making sense” of things is a distinctively modern enterprise, the effect of our having lost a unified, coherent, if sometimes...
In one of the more striking allegories of modern philosophy, Alasdair MacIntyre proposes that the language of morality is, our current situation, in the same kind of “grave disorder” as the language...
“Apocalypse” has become the term of art for expressing a sense of a historical ending, near or remote, terrible or redemptive. In this class, we explore this sense through a variety of classic texts...
Interiority is a distinctly modern invention, emerging from diverse economic, social, and cultural forces, first in the form of a particular moral and religious inwardness but culminating now in what...
It has been said that the most difficult question for the art critic today is not whether a given work of art is good or bad, but whether it is in fact “art.” We take this as an index of how the...
“There was only one Christian,” Nietzsche declared, “and he died on the cross.” Others disagree. In this class, we explore the modern crisis of faith, specifically as it appears in its Christian form...
We will read and discuss Boethius' medieval philosophical work The Consolation of Philosophy.
Do you like Proust? Kafka? Polish painter and writer of Jewish descent, Bruno Schulz (1892-1942), is next of kin. Brutally shot in 1942 by a Gestapo officer, Schulz did not finish his novel, The...
One of the most evocative European writers and thinkers of the twentieth century, Elias Canetti (1905-1994) had special interest in two antithetical socio-psychological phenomena: hyper-individualism...
This is Cather's epic creation on the efforts of historically-based Bishop Jean-Marie Latour and Vicar Joseph Vaillant to establish and "gird up" the nascent Diocese of New Mexico, recently acquired...