New Humanists

Send us Fan Mail When you first pick up the world's most famous work of philosophy, Plato's Republic, you might be surprised to find that it starts with Socrates describing a day trip he took with his friend Glaucon to check out a festival happening just outside Athens. Where are the syllogisms? Where is the metaphysics? It does not seem very grand, at least at first. Colin Redemer joins...

Send us Fan Mail Charlotte Mason argues that all education is ultimately self-education. Unless a student makes the choice to assimilate knowledge into himself, he will not learn anything. If this is so, what role is there for a teacher? Can a student actually be educated into virtue or wisdom? In this episode, Jonathan and Ryan read and discuss the opening chapters of Charlotte Mason's book...

Send us Fan Mail Properly understood, politics is an expression of culture. But the politician would like to use culture for political ends. In doing so, he boils his people's culture down to the merely aestheticized: food, traditional dance, music, dialect or accent. But this is culture as mere costume, not as a vital force that incarnates the total, religious experience of a people's l...

Send us Fan Mail Since the time of the Reformation, England has had an established Church alongside a rich variety of Protestant Dissenters as well as a group of Roman Catholic hold-outs. The country exemplifies the tense but productive diversity in "sect and cult" which T.S. Eliot describes in his book Notes Toward the Definition of Culture. A proper balance of unity and diversity in re...

Send us Fan Mail T.S. Eliot argues that cultural vitality depends in part upon a balance of unity and diversity in a nation with respect to its various regions. But this raises all sorts of questions: What distinguishes a nation from a region? Isn't a nation just a region with guns? Would it be better or worse for high culture for a thriving region to get political independence? Jonathan and...

Send us Fan Mail Two ways to support the show and unlock bonus episodes: Download and subscribe to Ekho: ancientlanguage.com/ekho/ Subscribe to New Humanists+ for bonus episodes: buzzsprout.com/1791279/subscribe Plato's Academy was not just a philosophic debating society. It was, in the words of the historian H.I Marrou, "a seminary that provided councillors and law-givers for republics...

Send us Fan Mail Two ways to support the show and unlock bonus episodes: Download and subscribe to Ekho: ancientlanguage.com/ekho/ Subscribe to New Humanists+ for bonus episodes: buzzsprout.com/1791279/subscribe In his comedy Clouds, Aristophanes turns Socrates into the arch-sophist of Athens: financially voracious, obsessed with verbal trickery, and preoccupied with irrelevant investigations. In...

Send us Fan Mail Two ways to support the show and unlock bonus episodes: Download and subscribe to Ekho: ancientlanguage.com/ekho/ Subscribe to New Humanists+ for bonus episodes: buzzsprout.com/1791279/subscribe What's the matter with meritocracy? Shouldn't college acceptances and jobs and awards be distributed on the basis of merit? The alternative, some sort of quota system, seems unju...

Send us Fan Mail Download Ekho: ancientlanguage.com/ekho/ Subscribe to New Humanists+ for bonus episodes: buzzsprout.com/1791279/subscribe Pop culture. Cancel culture. Judeo-Christian culture. Everyone likes to talk about "culture," but what actually is it? One of the greatest writers of the 20th century, the poet and essayist T.S. Eliot, wrote a short book, Notes Toward the Definition o...

Send us Fan Mail When the Loeb Classical Library was launched, the greatest language teacher of the age, W.H.D. Rouse, wrote an essay meant to promote the Loebs by extolling the magnificence of Greek literature and Latin literature. And boy did he. "Your mind cannot live without them. All the great intellectual impulses begin in Greece; the modern world only grows crops from the Greek seed.&q...

Send us Fan Mail Liberal education is for the man of leisure: Either a gentleman engaged in politics, or a philosopher engaged in contemplation. What role, then, can liberal learning have in a mass democracy? In the lecture "Liberal Education and Responsibility," the political theorist Leo Strauss defends his statement that "Liberal education is the ladder by which we try to ascend...

Send us Fan Mail What do you think of laryngeals? How should we refer to the Anatolian languages? Where do you stand on Gimbutas and Renfrew? In this episode of New Humanists, Dr. Colin Gorrie helps guide us through the Indo-European family tree. We follow the various branches as they spread out across Europe and Asia: Anatolian, Tocharian, Celtic, Germanic, Italic, and more. This episode covers t...

Send us Fan Mail Supposedly, about half of the world population speaks languages that all come from one root language: Proto-Indo-European. How do we know, and where did "PIE" come from? Ukraine, Anatolia, or somewhere else? Did the Indo-Europeans spread out in a massive, peaceful migration of farmers? Or as small bands of shepherds, stealing livestock and killing anyone standing in the...

Send us Fan Mail The classical education revival movement began in the 1980s as a DIY, grassroots attempt to recover the medieval liberal arts, most notably the Trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. However, the classical ed movement also frequently drapes itself in the garb of Plato: leading students out of the cave, employing Socratic techniques in the classroom, and ensuring its students do...

Send us Fan Mail What is liberal education? It's the prompt that has launched one thousand essays, and in a 1959 lecture at the University of Chicago, the (in)famous Leo Strauss gave his answer. Despite fleeing Nazi Germany and coming to the United States, Strauss wasn't afraid of criticizing the positivism, historicism, and relativism of the American academy. And as is evident in readin...

Send us Fan Mail In celebration of the 100th episode of New Humanists, we do an extended episode that is a retrospective, discussing the history of the Ancient Language Institute and the New Humanists podcast, has some updates on what we're up to at the moment, and a peek behind the curtain so listeners can find out what is upcoming at ALI and on the podcast. We also welcome both Colin Gorrie...

Send us Fan Mail Socrates taught his students contempt for the gods, how to defraud creditors, and useless trivialities about flea-jumping. Or at least, that's how Socrates appears in the comedy Clouds . If you want to understand something of the Athenian hostility to the great philosopher which eventually reached its climax in sentencing Socrates to death, it helps to see how he was lampoone...

Send us Fan Mail In the 4th century AD, two Christian friends - Basil and Gregory - travelled from Cappadocia to Athens to go study Greek literature with Libanius, the leading rhetorician of the time. While there, these two young and wealthy Cappadocians befriended a fellow student named Julian, the nephew of the Emperor Constantine. There in Athens, the three young Christians mastered Greek philo...

Send us Fan Mail We tend to think of the Athenians as philosophers, architects, and mathematicians. But their highest devotion was rather to sports and to music. These priorities are evident from their system of education, in which young Greek men were trained to compete in the Olympics as well as to sing and dance in the chorus. They were jocks. Think of the tragic playwright Aeschylus, who despi...

Send us Fan Mail Everyone knows "The Lost Tools of Learning." But did you know Dorothy Sayers delivered another, longer, and even more interesting lecture on education, all about learning Latin? Sayers recalls beginning Latin lessons with her father at the tender age of 6, but laments that after 20 years of study, she was left barely able to read a line of Latin - and not for lack of try...

Send us Fan Mail "Παιδεία found its realization in παιδεραστία." This is how Henri-Irénée Marrou characterizes the relationship between paideia and pederasty. The latter fulfilles the former. Indeed, few things were so distinctively Greek as their love for boys. Thus a close relationship between an older man and an adolescent was, for centuries, the definitive form of education in Greece...

Send us Fan Mail What if we find Norse myth or Greco-Roman myth more aesthetically pleasing than Christianity? Should we believe in the pagan gods instead? Is the Bible actually good art? Is Christian theology beautiful? Do Christians find their religion beautiful just because they believe it is true? In a 1944 lecture before Oxford's Socratic Club, C.S. Lewis asks and answers these questions...

Send us Fan Mail THIS IS SPARTA. Xenophon said that, even in his day, the rest of the Greeks thought Sparta's laws wholly strange: "all men praise such institutions, but no state chooses to imitate them." Foremost among these strange laws, of course, were the ones concerned with the rearing and education of children. And these laws, he said, were in their own turn developed not by i...

Send us Fan Mail We think of Sparta as a grim place, more of a military barracks with some civilians attached than an actual city. Its inhumane marriage laws, nauseating eugenics program, brutal educational system, obsession with military training, and paranoid suspicion of non-Spartans all led French historian Henri-Irénée Marrou to label Classical Sparta as an ancient fascist state. But there wa...

Send us Fan Mail Plato called Homer "the educator of all Greece." But what is a Homeric education? What were the Greeks learning from their supreme bard? Furthermore, the phrase "Homeric education" contains within it a second meaning as well. What kind of education were Homer's heroes getting? In other words, how did Achilles become Achilles? In this episode, we take a clo...