2019 Workshop Talk | 01:01:17 | All Grade Levels, Culture & Faith
Summary
Sophists v. Plato: How to Escape from the Dark Cave of Relativism and Nominalism
As far back as the Sophists of ancient Athens, critics of religion have declared that goodness, truth, and beauty are all relative terms, that words like justice have no fixed meaning and shift wildly from city to city and culture to culture . Plato played a vital role in establishing the reality of absolute ideas, a key Platonic notion that was echoed by such great Christian thinkers as Augustine and Aquinas, and that helped Christian Realists to resist the Nominalists of the Middle Ages. C. S. Lewis added his own defense of Realism by arguing that a universal, cross-cultural moral code exists and is binding on us.
Speaker
Dr . Louis Markos holds a BA in English and history from Colgate University and an MA and PhD in English from the University of Michigan . He is a professor of English and scholar in residence at Houston Baptist University, where he teaches courses on British Romantic and Victorian Poetry and Prose, the Classics, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, and Art and Film . Dr . Markos holds the Robert H . Ray Chair in Humanities and lectures on ancient Greece and Rome, the early church and Middle Ages, the Renaissance and romanticism for HBU’s Honors College . He is the author of eighteen books, including From Achilles to Christ, On the Shoulders of Hobbits, Literature: A Student’s Guide, CSL: An Apologist for Education, three Canon Press Worldview Guides to the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid, & two children’s novels, The Dreaming Stone and In the Shadow of Troy, in which his kids become part of Greek mythology and the Iliad and Odyssey. His son Alex teaches Latin at the Geneva School in Boerne, TX.
Additional Materials
The Association of Classical & Christian Schools presents Repairing the Ruins, the ACCS annual conference, copyright ACCS. You may make additional copies of this recording for use by your school but please do not sell any copies of the recording, or post it on the internet.
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