OGB Podcast #16: Brett McKay (Art of Manliness) on Dante's Divine Comedy By Katie King Overview  Ever wonder where your conception of hell comes from? You know, the fire and brimstone version? It’s probably less from Revelations and more from Dante’s Divine Comedy.  Our Reader-in-Chief Scott Hambrick talks all things Dante with Brett McKay, owner of [...]

What is a Socratic Seminar? By Katie King What is a Socratic Seminar? Here at OGB, members are given an average of three hours of Great Book reading to complete on their own each week. They aren't just left high and dry though. At the end of the month, our members come together in a [...]

What Does the OGB Crest Mean? By Katie King Ever wonder what the anvil represents in our crest? An anvil, first off, is a metalworking tool made up of a large, flattened steel surface upon which another object can be struck. You'll notice it in the bottom left corner of our crest. It's a great [...]

Logic 2, The First Law, the Law of Identity By Scott Hambrick, Reader-In-Chief In part one of this series, I described a very few of Aristotle’s axioms. He believed that understanding a few primary things about being would allow us to build valid arguments and reasoning for everything that followed, which he called the posterior. To [...]

OGB Podcast #5: Dr. Jordan Peterson on the Importance of Reading Great Books By Katie King OVERVIEW Why should you bother with the Great Books? According to Jordan Peterson, the answer lies in how much unnecessary misery, suffering, and horror you want. When Jordan was at university in Alberta, he was introduced to reading the [...]

Logic, The Beginning By Scott Hambrick, Reader-In-Chief Recently, I’ve had a few dust-ups with folks that don’t understand how VERY basic logic can be used to test for rhetoric and other nonsense.  I’ve also had a number of very kind emails from readers who are interested in learning more about how we might do that.  [...]

Thucydides, Teenagers, and Politics Show notes from Karl Schudt's discussion: #31 – Moments II: Thucydides & The Thin Veneer of Civility There’s a temptation to think that everything starts with us, here and now. Our memories don’t go back very far. If we haven’t experienced something in the last five years, our thought is that [...]

Here at Online Great Books, we read books that are, well, great. The books have stood the test of time, are hefty enough to bear repeated readings, and make some contribution to the ongoing conversation that we humans have been having with ourselves ever since we learned how to commit our thoughts to the physical world in writing. But does all of our reading have to be weighty? Is there room for lightweight reading, for books that aren’t great, for books that aren’t important? Maybe even for books that are bad?

In our open discussion forum in Slack, OGB member Tim Suddarth had a great question. So great, we thought it needed to be fleshed out for the purpose of this blog post.

Making an Entrepreneur By Scott Hambrick, Reader-In-Chief This essay was originally written in April of 1998.  To begin, I want to make sure the reader understands I am not writing a research paper. This is an essay on how I have interpreted Thoreau’s Walden and some of Emerson’s writing. Because this is based on my interpretation, [...]