The Quest for Excellence

Liberal Arts, Sciences, and Core Texts. Selected Proceedings from the Seventeenth Annual Conference of the Association for Core Texts and Courses

Edited by Dustin Gish; Chris Constas and J. Scott Lee

Liberal education aspires to excellence through the cultivation of free human beings who excel in thought, word, and deed. But what exactly is excellence, and why do we admire it? How do we conceive of what is excellent? What constitutes excellence—either for human beings, or in the realms of philosophy, literature, science, and politics? Why is excellence an aim of liberal education? What kinds of texts, courses, and inquiries contribute to achieving this end? Such questions animate the studies herein. The essays in this volume reflect on the idea of excellence embedded within core texts, as well as how such texts influence and ennoble higher education. In its chapters, we consider rival forms of excellence from ancient Greece and Rome, through modern Europe and America, and beyond. The world of antiquity and its accounts of excellence, as represented in the works of Euripides, Aristotle, Plato, Archimedes, and Cicero, are here brought into dialogue with diverse modern perspectives on excellence, as articulated by Shakespeare, Descartes, Newton, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Austen, Darwin, Lincoln, Tennyson, and Nietzsche, as well as (more recently) by John Dewey, Martin Luther King Jr., Cardinal Newman, and Eboo Patel. Our desire to seek and understand excellence transcends borders, and the purpose of this volume is to help perpetuate in contemporary higher education the study of core texts essential to the cultivation of excellence in the liberal arts and sciences.

Hamilton Books

Pages: 220 • Trim: 6 x 9

978-0-7618-6812-5 • Paperback • August 2016 • $43.99 • (£35.00)

978-0-7618-6813-2 • eBook • August 2016 • $41.50 • (£35.00)

Series: Association for Core Texts and Courses

Subjects: Education / Standards (incl. Common Core), Education / Curricula, Education / Teaching Methods & Materials / Arts & Humanities, Education / Teaching Methods & Materials / Language Arts, Education / Higher

The Quest for Excellence

Liberal Arts, Sciences, and Core Texts. Selected Proceedings from the Seventeenth Annual Conference of the Association for Core Texts and Courses

Paperback

eBook

Summary

Liberal education aspires to excellence through the cultivation of free human beings who excel in thought, word, and deed. But what exactly is excellence, and why do we admire it? How do we conceive of what is excellent? What constitutes excellence—either for human beings, or in the realms of philosophy, literature, science, and politics? Why is excellence an aim of liberal education? What kinds of texts, courses, and inquiries contribute to achieving this end? Such questions animate the studies herein. The essays in this volume reflect on the idea of excellence embedded within core texts, as well as how such texts influence and ennoble higher education. In its chapters, we consider rival forms of excellence from ancient Greece and Rome, through modern Europe and America, and beyond. The world of antiquity and its accounts of excellence, as represented in the works of Euripides, Aristotle, Plato, Archimedes, and Cicero, are here brought into dialogue with diverse modern perspectives on excellence, as articulated by Shakespeare, Descartes, Newton, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Austen, Darwin, Lincoln, Tennyson, and Nietzsche, as well as (more recently) by John Dewey, Martin Luther King Jr., Cardinal Newman, and Eboo Patel. Our desire to seek and understand excellence transcends borders, and the purpose of this volume is to help perpetuate in contemporary higher education the study of core texts essential to the cultivation of excellence in the liberal arts and sciences.

Details

Hamilton Books

Pages: 220 • Trim: 6 x 9

978-0-7618-6812-5 • Paperback • August 2016 • $43.99 • (£35.00)

978-0-7618-6813-2 • eBook • August 2016 • $41.50 • (£35.00)

Series: Association for Core Texts and Courses

Subjects: Education / Standards (incl. Common Core), Education / Curricula, Education / Teaching Methods & Materials / Arts & Humanities, Education / Teaching Methods & Materials / Language Arts, Education / Higher

Author

Dustin Gish is a member of The Honors College Faculty at the University of Houston, where he teaches Great Books seminars and courses in Political Theory. His teaching career spans almost two decades, having previously taught political philosophy, classical studies, and American government courses at The American University of Rome and College of the Holy Cross. His scholarly work has appeared in journal articles, book chapters, and edited volumes on classical and early modern political philosophy – especially the political thought of Xenophon, Plato, Shakespeare, and the American Founding, including, most recently, his co-authored book, Thomas Jefferson and the Science of Republican Government (Cambridge University Press).

Chris Constas is Associate Professor of the Practice of the Humanities in the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences Honors Program at Boston College.

J. Scott Lee is the Executive Director of the Association for Core Texts and Courses and Series Editor for the ACTC Annual Proceedings.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Dustin Gish and Christopher Constas
The Idea of Excellence in Higher Education
The Rough Magic of Liberal Arts Education: Shakespeare’s The Tempest
David Southward
Friendship and Excellence: Bringing out the Best within Us
Carrie-Ann Biondi
Socratic Perplexity and Communal Aretē: Turning with Socrates to the Wisdom of the Generations
Susan O. Bachman and James V. Bachman
Teaching the Truth of Tragedy: Euripides’ Bacchae
James M. Kee
Classical Liberal Learning and the Integrative Habit of Mind
Dominic A. Aquila
Excellence through the Ages (and the Canon)
The Mast and the Cosmos: The Roman Origins of the Liberal Arts Tradition in Cicero’s Dream of Scipio
Robert E. Proctor
Excellence Redefined: Cicero and the Heroic Ethics
William Stull
Excellence and the Arthurian Ideal in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King
Charlotte England
A Claim for the Less Than Excellent Life: Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice
Samuel Ajzenstat
Descartes and the Great Books: Homelessness as Excellence
Samuel A. Stoner
Faustian Striving, the Quest for Excellence, and the Search for Meaning
Erik Liddell
Plato’s Apology of Socrates and King’s “Letter from Birmingham City Jail”: Excellence in Civic Engagement
David Faldet
Core Texts on Excellence and Education
Ancients
Resisting the Dissolution of the Body Politic in Euripides’ Bacchae: A Corporeal Condition for the Pursuit of Excellence
Dustin Gish
The Divided Soul in Platonic and Aristotelian Philosophy
Lorraine Pangle
Moderation and the Best Life: The Education of Glaucon in Plato’s Republic
Alan Pichanick
Love of Wisdom or Wisdom of Love as a Pursuit of Excellence in Plato’s Symposium
Amy S. Bush
The Love of Beauty and the Pursuit of Excellence: What Plato’s Phaedrus Teaches about Teaching
Margaret I. Hughes
Moderns
A Sound Mind in a Sound Body: John Locke on Education
Trevor Shelley
Both Man and Citizen: Introducing Rousseau’s Emile
Joshua A. Shmikler
Forced to Be Free? Rousseau’s Social Contract
Jon Rick
Core Rhetoric: Lincoln’s First and Second Inaugural Addresses
Leslie G. Rubin
Nietzsche’s Question: A Reading of Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism #1
Matthew K. Davis
John Dewey’s Faith in Progress: An Impediment to Liberal Education
Luigi Bradizza
Expanding the Core in the Name of Excellence
The Sand Reckoner: Archimedes’ Exploration of Large
Numbers
Samuel R. Kaplan
Space, Time, and Place in Newton’s Principia and Aristotle’s Physics
Brian Schwartz
Darwin’s Descent of Man and the Study of Science from a Liberal Arts Perspective
Daniel J. McKaughan
Las Casas’s In Defense of the Indians: Can a Just War Be Waged against Barbarians?
Peter Diamond
Connecting the Good and the Beautiful in Plato and Aldo Leopold
Craig Condella
Inculturation and Global Core Curricula: Primer for Youth (Tongmong sŏnsŭp 童蒙先習) as a Korean Core Text
James Jinhong Kim
Religious Difference and Multiculturalism in the Liberal Arts: Reading Eboo Patel Reading Core Texts and Courses
Wilson C. Chen
Plenary Addresses on Excellence in Education
After the Fall: An Historical Reappraisal of Liberal Education (Everything Has to Change, If Things Are to Stay the Same)
John Dowling
Age of Freedom—Education for Freedom: How Can Kant Speak to Us Today?
G. Felicitas Munzel

The Quest for Excellence

Liberal Arts, Sciences, and Core Texts. Selected Proceedings from the Seventeenth Annual Conference of the Association for Core Texts and Courses

Edited by Dustin Gish; Chris Constas and J. Scott Lee

The Quest for Excellence

Liberal Arts, Sciences, and Core Texts. Selected Proceedings from the Seventeenth Annual Conference of the Association for Core Texts and Courses

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