Quest for Excellence

Liberal education aspires to excellence through the cultivation of free human beings who excel in thought, word, and deed. But what exactly is excellence, and why do we admire it? How do we conceive of what is excellent? What constitutes excellence—either for human beings, or in the realms of philosophy, literature, science, and politics? Why is excellence an aim of liberal education? What kinds of texts, courses, and inquiries contribute to achieving this end? Such questions animate the studies herein. The essays in this volume reflect on the idea of excellence embedded within core texts, as well as how such texts influence and ennoble higher education. In its chapters, we consider rival forms of excellence from ancient Greece and Rome, through modern Europe and America, and beyond. The world of antiquity and its accounts of excellence, as represented in the works of Euripides, Aristotle, Plato, Archimedes, and Cicero, are here brought into dialogue with diverse modern perspectives on excellence, as articulated by Shakespeare, Descartes, Newton, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Austen, Darwin, Lincoln, Tennyson, and Nietzsche, as well as (more recently) by John Dewey, Martin Luther King Jr., Cardinal Newman, and Eboo Patel. Our desire to seek and understand excellence transcends borders, and the purpose of this volume is to help perpetuate in contemporary higher education the study of core texts essential to the cultivation of excellence in the liberal arts and sciences.

Dustin Gish is a member of The Honors College Faculty at the University of Houston, where he teaches Great Books seminars and courses in Political Theory. His teaching career spans almost two decades, having previously taught political philosophy, classical studies, and American government courses at The American University of Rome and College of the Holy Cross. His scholarly work has appeared in journal articles, book chapters, and edited volumes on classical and early modern political philosophy – especially the political thought of Xenophon, Plato, Shakespeare, and the American Founding, including, most recently, his co-authored book, Thomas Jefferson and the Science of Republican Government (Cambridge University Press).Chris Constas is Associate Professor of the Practice of the Humanities in the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences Honors Program at Boston College. ​J. Scott Lee is the Executive Director of the Association for Core Texts and Courses and Series Editor for the ACTC Annual Proceedings.