Sapere aude—dare to know. With this bold exhortation, Immanuel Kant claimed to have summoned an entire age to ‘intellectual awakening.’ It was the clarion call of the Enlightenment, a command for mankind to liberate itself from the presumed shackles of authority and immaturity and to begin thinking independently. In the philosophical revolutions of the seventeenth […]
There is a kind of education that chills the soul. It operates with impressive order, produces well-timed outputs, and maintains impeccable discipline—yet something essential is missing. No spark leaps between minds, no encounter lingers after the lecture, no personal memory anchors the learning. The institution runs smoothly, but no one remembers why it began. It […]
Classical rhetoric arose as a discipline designed to aid speakers before courts of law and other public settings. By identifying three primary means of persuasion—appeals to authority (ethos), appeals to emotion (pathos), and appeals to reason (logos)—it taught speakers to calculate more precisely which combination of these three would produce the desired effect in an […]
The difference between atheism and theism is fundamentally a difference between mythic and scientific thinking. That is to say, it is a difference between those who insist that reality is what is revealed by rational procedures, and those who retreat from the demands of critical thinking to the cover provided by imaginative storytelling. Which camp […]
“[…] we have seen beauty to result from the highest ideal and must therefore be sought in the most perfect union and equilibrium possible between reality and form.” When Friedrich Schiller published his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man in the 1790s, Europe was reeling. The French Revolution had promised liberty, equality, and fraternity—and […]
07
Jan
Jan
The following is the graduation address by Martin Cothran, provost of Memoria College, delivered last July. Welcome to the 2025 Graduation Ceremony for Memoria College, where we will be honoring this year’s graduating students. I would like to say a few things about why we are here doing this—“we” being the instructors and staff, friends […]
16
Dec
Dec
I have fond memories of waking up on Christmas morning, the realization slowly dawning on me that our house had been visited during the night, and that presents had been left under the tree. This was mysterious to me and magical. And the mystery became both more complex and more magical the older and more […]
The first line of A. T. Murray’s 1919 translation of Homer’s Odyssey reads thusly: “Tell me, O Muse, of the man of many devices, who wandered full many ways after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy.” It trips off the tongue: “Tell Me, O Muse, of the Man of Many devices, who Wandered full Many Ways after he had Sacked the Sacred Citadel of Troy.” In […]
To be a teacher, you must have some level of mastery of the subject matter to be taught. Perhaps you have volunteered as a substitute teacher and scrambled to learn the material. Perhaps you have homeschooled a child and found the need to brush up on a subject you barely remember. Or perhaps you have […]
I recently read a social media post that listed the nine books Elon Musk has been reading and recommending to others. These are the kind of books one might expect to find on the nightstand of the world’s most famous technician. Now I recognize that it’s probably hard, when you are so busy launching rockets […]