Monthly Archives: August 2012

Grasping the Liberal Arts

The person at the party who explains the joke is usually just tiresome. But sometimes it’s worthwhile to note that a joke strikes us as funny because it points to something important. So consider one of Gary Larson’s zany cartoons: … Continue reading

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“Break, Break, Break, On Thy Cold Gray Stones . . .

O, Sea!” is not exactly the tone at The Breakers, a resort hotel quite literally atop the beach at Palm Beach, Florida, where the 43rd Phi Beta Kappa Triennial Council gathered a couple of weeks ago. Thanks to careful, off-season … Continue reading

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Not in Battell Onely

I was preparing recently for a seminar ─ liberal arts classics for academic leadership ─ and found myself reviewing an amazing paragraph in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. Hobbes is most famous, perhaps, for his characterization of life in the warlike state … Continue reading

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