The Great Conversation is Robert Maynard Hutchins’s classic opening volume to The Great Books of the Western World series edited by Mortimer J. Adler and published by Encyclopaedia Britannica with backing from the University of Chicago.
This brilliant introductory work pulls readers into the historical conversation that has shaped Western ideas for nearly three millennia. In this republished stand-alone volume, Robert M. Woods provides an insightful, new introduction to Hutchins’ work, along with notes and annotations that lend the wisdom of his 30-plus years of observations as a classical educator.
First published in 1952 as the introduction to the 54-volume collection, Hutchins pitches this “great conversation” as an ongoing dialogue between the great thinkers of the western world, from antiquity through modernity.
His main point is that a liberal education is not simply a matter of compiling a large mental warehouse of facts; it’s about entering into this conversation that has taken place between the greatest minds, those who have wrestled with the biggest questions about the human condition, like truth, goodness, justice, religion, and what it means to be truly human.
The Great Conversation is your tour guide to the best that has been thought and written in the western world. It’s a ticket to the proverbial train of thoughts that will allow the careful reader to view his own era through the lens of history’s deepest debates, and to see just how philosophy, poetry, science, and theology are integrated in the pursuit of genuine wisdom.
Preorder by October 31st for free shipping. The books ships on or about November 15th (not November 1st as the video says).
