{"product_id":"the-quest-for-excellence-9780761868125","title":"The Quest for Excellence","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLiberal 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 excellenceeither 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 thisvolume 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 incontemporary higher education the study of core texts essential to the cultivation of excellencein the liberal arts and sciences.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTable of Contents\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAcknowledgments 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","brand":"Hamilton Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51037888840023,"sku":"9780761868125","price":31.5,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9780761868125.jpg?v=1750938030","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/the-quest-for-excellence-9780761868125","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}