The Formation of Civil Society: Cicero’s Role in artes liberales Education Today: Panel discussion (original) (raw)
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Cicero's artes liberales and the Liberal Arts
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This article examines Cicero's concept of the artes liberales within his larger vision for education. Starting with the codification of a curriculum in the work of Martianus Capella, it explores the reception of Cicero's works in the early development of the canon before turning back to the contexts of Cicero's original thinking on the subjects. In particular, it illustrates how Cicero sought to broaden the curriculum and make the artes relevant for life in first-century BC Rome, combining traditional Greek learning with innovative topics on modern history and political science. In so doing I suggest some of the ways in which Cicero's arguments on the value of a broad education still echo in our ideas of the Liberal Arts today before ending with some reflections on the political context in which they were produced.
Cicero, Society, and the Idea of Artes Liberales (Congress Booklet)
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A Booklet for the Second Ciceronian Congress in Poland "Cicero, Society, and the Idea of Artes Liberales" (12-14 Dec. 2019), on the 30th Anniversary of the VII Colloquium Tullianum "Cicerone e lo Stato" in Warsaw (1989). For the Congress website see: http://www.obta.al.uw.edu.pl/en/cicero-congress-materials
2021
The heritage of the ancient Roman politician, orator and thinker Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC), is considered as a set of texts that over centuries have been included in the curricula for humanities students, significantly changing the narrative tradition and detecting a way of understanding what is related to humanities. The key questions for the authors is the following: how and for what purposes was Cicero’s heritage presented to humanities students in educational texts in the first two decades of the 20th and 21st centuries? At the beginning of last century, scholars’ attention to Cicero was largely due to Augustus Samuel Wilkins (1843–1905), Paul Monroe (1869–1947) and his disciple Ellwood Cubberley (1868-1941). Many textbooks compiled by P. Monroe, A.S. Wilkins and E. Cubberley were published one after another. Thanks to the educational books of P. Monroe, A.S. Wilkins and E. Cubberley, different approaches to presenting Cicero's works for educational purposes were developed. It is these approaches that were reflected in educational books for humanists a century later. In Russian textbooks, sourcebooks, and anthologies on history of pedagogy, Cicero was mostly a figure of omission not only in the first decades, but throughout the entire 20th century. At the beginning of the 21st century, many learning books for humanities students appeared. Their authors and compilers consider Cicero as an author who left a conceptual description of pedagogical reality (a detailed description of educational process) and chose a narrative description (description of what happened through the eyes of those who take part in it). We have to regret that the Russian domestic tradition of including Cicero's heritage in the content of humanitarian education has hardly undergone any changes over a century: fragments of his works continue to be presented on a small scale, are practically not grouped according to key issues, and rarely accompanied by pedagogical commentaries. The question of why some texts were selected while others were not, can be asked to every author and compiler who included Cicero's texts in their books for humanities students. The search for answers to this “eternal question” can be associated both with the flexibility of the humanitarian curriculum, and with the personal preferences of the authors and compilers of learning books.
Cicero Cannot Save Us (but He Can Help Us Do Better)
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What can Cicero teach us about how to stabilize disordered republics? How does he shed light on perennial political teachings that we forget at our own peril? This lecture is the first public lecture I gave after defending my disserrtation on "Cicero's Philosophic Politics." In my talk I unpack the significance of Cicero and his political thought for scholars and citizens today, explaining his teaching on the "status" (Latin for "regime" or "constitution"; Grk. "politeia"), the pattern of development experienced by every republic, and importance of the statesman and the mixed regime to stabilizing republics.