Lehrman American Studies Center

Concluding thoughts on the nature of true philosophy and authentic liberal arts at a Christian school.

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Propriety involves knowing good limits, just like a farmer knows the limits of the land. But much education presses these limits and even exists to transgress them. When do we say "stop"?

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My syllabi are to have course outcomes, measurable course outcomes, the sort of outcomes a scantron can measure. But such a model is fundamentally antithetical to liberal education and ought to be resisted by a "solidarity of the shaken."

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Does teaching ethics turn students into relativists? Should ethics be taught from within traditions to avoid relativism, or does that foster ideology?

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Most of the students in my introductory political theory class are enrolled because they have to be. They cannot graduate as political science majors without taking at least one course in political thought. That presents a special challenge for me as their teacher because I need to convince them that they want to be in my class—or at least I’d like to convince them. Obviously not every student will be persuaded, but I think many of them can be, so I’m looking for ways to make the class more interesting for them. One of the key ways to achieve this, I have found, is to give them examples of the relevance of the materials for life today.

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I try to design my classes so that students will learn both the materials and important skills that they will continue to use for the rest of their lives. In the coming semester, I want to focus in particular on writing ability, and I’m trying to devise a system that will help my students to develop their writing skills over the course of the semester.

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How to evaluate a liberal-arts college's teaching excellence? As I see it, it must strike the right balance between philosophical questioning and the existentially open mindset this requires, and religious and metaphysical truth, which must constitute the institutionally embodied telos of the college, for truth is the telos of the mind, and truth about God is the telos of this telos, as it were.

The first criterion for evaluation is the rigor and sophistication with which the college trains the student in the liberal arts. How well does the particular college teach, and not just give the appearance of teaching, grammar, logic, rhetoric, and dialectic; history, mathematics, and philosophy? The second is the rightness of the end, purpose, or telos for which the liberal arts are taught, around which they are hierarchically integrated, and in the light of which the pedagogy is ordered.

Excellence or rightness in either of these criteria by itself does not make fo…

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Towards the end of his second term as President, Thomas Jefferson received a letter from his granddaughter, who mentioned that she had been reading from the works of the Roman historian Tacitus. In his reply, Jefferson wrote: “Tacitus I consider the first writer in the world without a single exception. His book is a compound of history and morality of which we have no other example.” Given that Jefferson was extraordinarily well-read, one cannot help but wonder what he found so compelling. I would suggest that in order to understand Jefferson’s unique claims for Tacitus we need to consider two questions from Jefferson’s perspective: What is the historian’s role in a democratic republic? and Does Tacitus fulfill that role?

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My husband (a historian) and I (a philosopher) are planning a colloquium examining the cognitive requirements of a free society.

The general questions we want to raise for discussion are: Does liberty repend upon rationality? If so, rationality understood in what way? If free institutions require thinking men to conceive, create, and operate them, what habits of thinking are necessary to found and sustain a free society, and how can one inculcate such habits? Does liberty require that the majority of the people be habitually rational, or only the constitution makers or some ruling "natural aristocracy"?

For this proposed colloquium, participants will read and then discuss primary sources that raise these questions. For the reading list, we are considering excerpts from Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Jefferson, The Federalist, and Tocqueville, among other thinkers. Might anyone suggest specific texts that might be appropriate for our purposes? Thanks for your help!

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A methodological gulf exists among disciplines. Political Science and Philosophy rarely discuss context while to Historians (of which I'm one) context is our shibboleth. Because of my training, I find it difficult to fully engage in discussions with both academics and students on these non-contextual issues. In fact, in these discussions I am reminded of the great quip by John Adams: "Facts are stubborn things." My question/concern is, therefore, how can conservative scholars bridge this gap and introduce into our classrooms both context and, for those of us who toil in the fields of events, transcendent issues? Is there a way? Let me add, too, that I struggle with this myself as I believe in a transcendent moral order but think it is necessary—perhaps to an absolute degree—to know the context of events that shapes the debate on this question/answer.