Online Great Books Podcast

#42- Harold Bloom, You'll Be Missed

#41- Gabriel Marcel on Avoiding The Loss Of Our Humanity

#40- Hobbes' Leviathan

#39- Emerson on Self-Reliance

#38- On Love

#37- A Scandal In Bohemia

#36- The Lord of the Rings Part 2

#35- The Lord of the Rings Part 1

If you don't believe in anything, how can you make meaningful art? Scott and Dr. Karl Schudt discuss their first encounter with philosopher-novelist Iris Murdoch. Her essay "Against Dryness" addresses that question, along with the ideas and forces that brought that question about.

Scott and Dr. Karl Schudt discuss Walker Percy's essay on how preconceived ideas about experiences cause us to overlook their essence.

Plato's Seventh Letter has it all - history, politics, epistemology, pedagogy. And the complaints of an old man who has watched his life's work...fail?

In the second installment of the Moments miniseries, seminar leader Karl Schudt reflects on the capricious and tenuous nature of our current political environment. As Thucydides reminds us, extreme partisanship is nothing new: "reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal supporter... prudent hesitation specious cowardice." And where there is partisan rancor, violence and revolution is often not far behind.

Scott says it all the time -- if you can start your own Great Books  group at home, do it! There's nothing that can truly replace the camaraderie, the deep shared intellectual experiences, and the accountability of an in-person group. Several years ago Scott started his own Great Books group in the tradition set forth my Mortimer Adler in his foundational How to Read a Book. The group is still going strong, and one of its members, Thad Hensley, joins today's show to discuss his experience with the group.

This week we're trying something new at Online Great Books: a new series of short episodes reflecting on one aspect of the Great Books. We're calling them Moments. We'll hear personal reflections from the seminar staff and from members. This week Karl Schudt reflects on Medea and the uncomfortable -- even terrifying -- rationality of her decisions.

Scott Hambrick and Karl Schudt discuss Friedrich Nietzsche's book The Joyful Wisdom, Book 3, which contains his infamous proclamation "God is dead." Nietzsche is perhaps best known for his writings about nihilism, the rejection of God and moral principles, or of any notion of meaning in life. From the nihilist's perspective, nothing in the world is real; it's merely a representation of the real, a concept that hearkens back to Plato's Allegory of the Cave.