The Koinos

Online educational platform | Restoring humanity to the Humanities

[The Koinos @KoinosProject]

New short film with Professor James Hatley up at the Koinos. He discusses the work of philosopher Henry Bugbee, one of the greatest - yet almost entirely unknown - minds of the twentieth century.

Link to full video in comments.

[Alex Priou @alexpriou]

A short version of my piece on how you, like me, can become a shameless elitist, rightly convinced in your own superiority—now reduced to a single page, for an Extra-Fast Path to Excellence.™

(The longer piece in first reply…)

[The Koinos @KoinosProject]

@thenewthinkery Here's a new link to the finished version if you'd like to check it out. https://t.co/Trfse7VA8t

[The Koinos @KoinosProject]

@dnduplessie @thenewthinkery Or will have beat us to the punch making it!

[The New Thinkery @thenewthinkery]

Old video was a draft, here’s the more polished version.

Looks exciting, can’t wait to see what the final product from @KoinosProject looks like!

https://t.co/TY5y5da2Ru

[Matthew C Dean @MatthewCDean]

I translated the preface to Gan Yang's new book "The Straussian Moment." https://t.co/FlZBK67aik

[The Koinos @KoinosProject]

We are excited to announce Ballroom Sessions - where excellence in the liberal arts meets the preforming arts. A big thanks to our first guest Summerfield. Full length music video drops tomorrow with a podcast to follow this Sunday.

[The Koinos @KoinosProject]

AI “slop” isn’t a technological failure. It’s just corporate speak reaching its final, Platonic form.

[Alex Priou @alexpriou]

Let’s be frank:

The culprit here is a curriculum that doesn’t value close reading and careful analysis. As a student, you’re to churn through and condense large amounts of reading into key (and simpler) takeaways. A.I. can do that. Professors have made themselves obsolete.

Conversely, anything worth reading requires interpretation, which is an act of expanding, not of condensing. Show students this is what should be done, and these objections will disappear.

In short: the solution is not persuading them to read more, but showing them how hard it is to read less.

Yes, it is that simple.

[The Koinos @KoinosProject]

https://t.co/eFApCnKuKy

[The Koinos @KoinosProject]

New seminar episode on Henry Bugbee's The Inward Morning up at The Koinos

Link below

[Michael Strong @flowidealism]

When I was at Harvard, the sociologist David Riesman took an interest in me and personally arranged my transfer to St. John's College in Santa Fe.

At Harvard, I sat in large lecture halls listening to brilliant people talk. At St. John's, I sat around a table with fifteen students reading Euclid, Plato, and Dostoevsky, and we argued about what those texts actually meant.

That experience rewired my brain.

I learned that understanding doesn't come from being told the answer. It comes from wrestling with hard questions alongside other people who are also wrestling. The tutor at St. John's doesn't lecture. They ask questions. They let the silence sit. Their only role is to ask questions, not to lecture.

It’s the practice I've spent my entire career bringing into schools and classrooms. I watched what happened to students, including myself, when the conversation was real and the texts were worthwhile, and I've been sharing this tradition with young people my entire life.

Riesman saw something in a working-class kid and pointed me toward a tradition of learning that changed my life. I've been trying to pay that forward ever since.

[Luke Burgis @lukeburgis]

We're just one day away from the release of Be Not Conformed: René Girard at the Nexus of Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley.

This book represents three years of work: 17 essays that place Girard in conversation with other major thinkers including Dietrich von Hildebrand, Luigi Giussani, and Marshall McLuhan, and new ideas that haven't been explored before from a Girardian lens.

Many of the essays in Be Not Conformed originated from the @ClunyInstitute NOVITĀTE Conference.

I look forward to hearing what you think about the book. It's available for pre-order now and releases tomorrow, April 10th.

[The Koinos @KoinosProject]

@daniel_dsj2110 I'm confused as to what point you are trying to make here: that ideas don't have consequences; that it is unfair for a thinker to be blamed for the actions of their stepchildren; that these are all misreadings of great minds, etc?

[Duncan Reyburn @duncanreyburn]

There are myriad ways to feed the brain’s right hemisphere; to work against the manipulative grip of the left.

Get away from analysis, categorisation, and anything with a whiff of ego-centrism, and make room for embodied feeling and direct experience, as well as with the kind of boredom that’ll allow your mind to wander. Forget what you’re merely conscious of (so heavily overemphasised by our screens) and live your way into surprising patterns, sounds, smells, and interconnections. Befriend the imaginal realm.

It helps to set aside plans for a bit, and do some exploring. Get into nature. Go for a walk. Let your mind wander freely. Pray. Meditate. Write a poem, even a bad one. Relish the flavour of food. Listen to some music. Really listen. Read fiction. Draw a still life image. If you can’t draw, draw anyway. Describe what’s in front of you to yourself. Learn to listen to others without any judgment or anticipation. Be present.

The point is to be open to what is genuinely other, rather than to yield to the easy familiarity of formulaic self-enclosure. This should be a daily thing, especially in this age we’re in, which has all of us far too bound up in artificiality.

[Alex Priou @alexpriou]

Imagine this.

You got a shiny new job at a civic center. You left the woke department whose discipline you were trained in for it. Good paycheck, no more insanity.

But your new colleagues aren’t from your discipline. They’re specialists in the history of political philosophy, in American political thought.

They’re…Straussians.

What do you do?

You’ve heard of these odd creatures. The rumors, the jokes. You’ve read a couple snippets online, maybe an article or even a book. Burnyeat, Norton?

But now you have to work with them, talk with them, engage with them intellectually.

You ask questions to be polite. They have answers, plausible responses. They correct misconceptions and caricatures. Things you’ve never heard.

It even starts to sound sort of sensible.

And somehow they have, as a school, not only resisted the insanity of the contemporary academy, the insanity you’ve just fled—they’ve actually been ahead of the curve in diagnosing it.

Odd creatures!

So, what do you do?

Do you think, maybe, just maybe, your training misled you? About the soundness of its methods? About this school of thought? About alternatives and challenges?

Do you reflect on why your discipline was so susceptible to ideological pressure?

Do you consider, maybe, that reflecting on the regime and its pressures, on persecution and esoteric writing, may be healthy for a scholar, perhaps even part of his task?

Do you even consider joining their ranks?

Or do you continue with the caricatures? With half-baked attempts at engagement and criticism?

I’ve seen a lot of the latter. Some by friends or acquaintances. And all to a letter evince a failure to appreciate the basics of the school, to say nothing of the man himself.

We’ve heard it all before. We know esotericism has its pitfalls. But that doesn’t invalidate the thesis. It means that it should be applied judiciously. Perhaps you could even be of some help.

Talk to your new, strange colleagues. Learn from them. Become one of them. It’s not that bad, I swear.

Submit.

[The Koinos @KoinosProject]

@Jcsolheid @ccpecknold But you repeat yourself

[The Koinos @KoinosProject]

https://t.co/gyYVi50qu6

[The Koinos @KoinosProject]

New short film with Professor James Hatley up at the Koinos. He discusses the work of philosopher Henry Bugbee, one of the greatest - yet almost entirely unknown - minds of the twentieth century.

Link to full video in comments.

[Eric Adler @ProfEricAdler]

It is essential for conservative proponents of the liberal arts to recognize that, as much as they criticize the excesses of wokeness in higher ed, a great deal of the hostility to a broad education based on high ideals comes from right-wing utilitarians.