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The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education

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Preface In the preface, Hutchins communicates why The Great Books of the Western World  project was undertaken, and he defends the selection of books in the set. Concerned about the decline of Western Civilization, Hutchins and the editors of the Great Books set believe that reading and understanding the great books will show the origins of our most serious difficulties. The Advisory Board chose the works included in the GBWW because they believe that they contributed in an important way to the Great Conversation.  The Great Conversation The Tradition of the West In the Tradition of the West , Hutchins defines the tradition of Western Civilization as "the Great Conversation that began in the dawn of history and that continues to the present day". He argues that the dialogue itself, the exchange of ideas, is the ideal to which Western civilization moves. Hutchins emphasizes the fact that the books included in this set have long been central in the liberal education of the West...
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Gateway to the Great Books Volume 1: Introduction and Syntopical Guide

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About the Authors Robert M Hutchins Robert M Hutchins  (1899-1977) was an American educational philosopher. He was the 5th president of the University of Chicago and an earlier dean of Yale Law School. Hutchins became one of the most influential members of the school of secular perennialism. ( Educational perennialism  is a normative educational philosophy. Perennializes believe that the priority of education should be to teach principles that have persisted for centuries, not facts). Hutchins served as editor in chief of both the Great Books of the Western World and Gateway to the Great Books. According to Hutchins: The object of the educational system, taken as a whole, is not to produce hands for industry or to teach the young how to make a living. It is to produce responsible citizens.  Hutchins argues that education had become a poor trade school, a daycare, and a place to for young adults to learn to adjust socially to the world as it is rather than to be truly educ...
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Why I Am Creating This Blog

I am creating this blog as a place to host my notes and blog posts about things that I am reading. I used to have a custom personal website, the code for which can be seen in this GitHub repository , but I got tired of paying AWS fees so I decided to create a website through Blogger. My old personal website contained my own personal GoodReads, Letterboxd, small software projects, and unique blogging system with annotations. I wish that I would have saved the content in the RDS database for the website, but I just became so disillusioned with what I was trying to do that I deleted my AWS account in its entirety. So, it is now all gone.  Having retired from posting from my old personal website for a few months near the end of 2025, I noticed that the lack of a place to write about what I was reading or what I wanted to learn about hurt my drive to continue learning. The reason why I am now creating this Blogger site instead of quickly creating a new personal website is because this l...
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