''The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent'' is an essay in the collection ''The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent, and Other Essays'', published in 1915 by
John Erskine, English professor at
Columbia University
Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...
.
The essay was first read before the
Phi Beta Kappa Society of
Amherst College, where Erskine taught before joining Columbia. Later, it was published in quarterly magazine ''
The Hibbert Journal
''The Hibbert Journal'' was a large, quarterly magazine in softback book format, issued since 1902 by the Hibbert Trust, best described by its subtitle: ''A Quarterly Review of Religion, Theology and Philosophy''. In the early years it was publish ...
'' in 1914. During his tenure at Columbia from 1909 and 1937, Erskine formulated General Honors Course. In the early 1920s he started teaching a ''great books'' course at Columbia, which later founded the influential
Great Books
A classic is a book accepted as being exemplary or particularly noteworthy. What makes a book "classic" is a concern that has occurred to various authors ranging from Italo Calvino to Mark Twain and the related questions of "Why Read the Cl ...
movement.
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History
In 1963, the essay was published in the ''Gateway to the Great Books
''Gateway to the Great Books'' is a 10-volume series of books originally published by Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. in 1963 and edited by Mortimer Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchins. The set was designed as an introduction to the ''Great Books of ...
'' - Volume 10: Philosophical Essays, a 10-volume book series published by Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. in 1963.
Subsequently it was also included in the book of selected essays also titled ''The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: Selected Essays'' (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux) published posthumously in 2000), edited by Lionel Trilling, another Columbia faculty and literary critic, and had an introduction by critic Leon Wieseltier
Leon Wieseltier (; born June 14, 1952) is an American critic and magazine editor. From 1983 to 2014, he was the literary editor of ''The New Republic''. He was a contributing editor and critic at ''The Atlantic'' until October 27, 2017, when the ...
.
Work
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References
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent, The
1915 non-fiction books
1915 essays
American essays
Essay collections
Morality