Lyceum Digest #13
Everything published on our Substack from March 16 - April 3, 2026 including thoughts on Socratic Tutoring, James Madison and language, Machiavelli's The Prince, and more.
Welcome to our Friday Digest, a bi-weekly email newsletter designed to showcase everything we have published on the Substack over the past two weeks. Below you will find links to our most recent posts. Happy reading!
Structuring an Argument: A Demonstration Through A Close Reading of Machiavelli’s The Prince, Chapter 1
When teaching the first chapter of Machiavelli’s The Prince a few weeks ago, I decided in the moment that it would be best to mark out the arguments one by one for my students as we worked through the text. What I hope to offer in this post is a re-creation of that process as a resource for teachers who want to help their students learn how to find core arguments in the Great Books through reading them carefully. Click here to read on…Courting Disaster, Part 4: Philosophy and the Confrontation with Death in Plato’s Apology
In this series’ final entry (click here for parts one, two, and three), we will seek to answer the following questions: Why does Socrates choose to die when he could have easily left Athens and continued philosophizing elsewhere? Is it not the case that the examined/philosophic life is worth living? Why choose death over life? Click here to read on…Socratic Tutoring After a Year
I am now at the end of my first year as a “Socratic Tutor” with the Lyceum Program at Clemson. Socratic tutoring is one of the defining features of Lyceum’s education; it consists of a faculty member sitting with a student for about an hour every other week without any set plan for discussion. Unlike the classroom where a teacher follows a syllabus with a group of students, tutoring involves taking time to investigate the moral opinions and character of a single tutee in a focused way throughout the course of the semester. It is now my view that this model is indispensable for a good education today. Click here to read on…James Madison on the Limits and Necessity of Language in Political Thought
“The use of words is to express ideas. Perspicuity therefore requires, not only that the ideas should be distinctly formed, but that they should be expressed by words distinctly and exclusively appropriated to them. But no language is so copious as to supply words and phrases for every complex idea, or so correct as not to include many, equivocally denoting different ideas…” Click here to read on…