Loading...

PODCAST

New Humanists

Ancient Language Institute

Join the hosts of New Humanists and founders of the Ancient Language Institute, Jonathan Roberts and Ryan Hammill, on their quest to discover what a renewed humanism looks like for the modern world. The Ancient Language Institute is an online language school and think tank, dedicated to changing the way ancient languages are taught.

education language learning

All Episodes

82:29

Erotics and Harmonics, feat. Patrick Downey | Episode...

New Humanists ·

2026/09/08

Send us Fan Mail Patrick Downey, professor of philosophy at St. Mary's College of California, returns to New Humanists to discuss Book Three of Plato's Republic. Why does Socrates permit lies in his city? And why does he kick Homer out? Downey gives answers to these questions, as well as raising others about Plato's attempt to transcend comedy and tragedy in the form of dialogic philosophical drama. We also discuss the ideal location in which to conduct philosophical inquiry (California, obvi...

en-us

80:04

The Ring of Gyges and the City of Pigs, feat. Pavlos...

New Humanists ·

2026/08/05

Send us Fan Mail Glaucon restarts the conversation about justice at the beginning of Book Two of Plato's Republic with this stipulation: Socrates must prove that justice is good in itself, not just good for the reputation it buys. Socrates says - perhaps to the reader's surprise, and even doubt - that he can show justice is the best possible thing to have. Pavlos Papadopoulos, professor at Wyoming Catholic College, returns to the podcast to walk through Book Two of Plato's Republic including ...

en-us

89:04

How Not to Define Justice, feat. Colin Redemer |...

New Humanists ·

2026/07/01

Send us Fan Mail When you first pick up the world's most famous work of philosophy, Plato's Republic, you might be surprised to find that it starts with Socrates describing a day trip he took with his friend Glaucon to check out a festival happening just outside Athens. Where are the syllogisms? Where is the metaphysics? It does not seem very grand, at least at first. Colin Redemer joins the podcast to kick off part 1 of a 10-episode series on Plato's Republic, to give some suggestions for ...

en-us

68:11

The Charlotte Mason Episode | Episode CXIV

New Humanists ·

2026/06/15

Send us Fan Mail Charlotte Mason argues that all education is ultimately self-education. Unless a student makes the choice to assimilate knowledge into himself, he will not learn anything. If this is so, what role is there for a teacher? Can a student actually be educated into virtue or wisdom? In this episode, Jonathan and Ryan read and discuss the opening chapters of Charlotte Mason's book A Philosophy of Education. Charlotte Mason's A Philosophy of Education: https://bookshop.org/a/256...

en-us

71:19

Real Culture, or Culture as Costume? | Episode CXIII

New Humanists ·

2026/06/01

Send us Fan Mail Properly understood, politics is an expression of culture. But the politician would like to use culture for political ends. In doing so, he boils his people's culture down to the merely aestheticized: food, traditional dance, music, dialect or accent. But this is culture as mere costume, not as a vital force that incarnates the total, religious experience of a people's life. Similar to the way a shallow version of culture gets deployed for political ends, so education...

en-us

61:13

Protestant and Catholic Culture | Episode CXII

New Humanists ·

2026/05/15

Send us Fan Mail Since the time of the Reformation, England has had an established Church alongside a rich variety of Protestant Dissenters as well as a group of Roman Catholic hold-outs. The country exemplifies the tense but productive diversity in "sect and cult" which T.S. Eliot describes in his book Notes Toward the Definition of Culture. A proper balance of unity and diversity in religion is one of the three necessary conditions, Eliot says, for a thriving culture. In this episode, Jonat...

en-us

68:57

Nationalism and High Culture | Episode CXI

New Humanists ·

2026/05/01

Send us Fan Mail T.S. Eliot argues that cultural vitality depends in part upon a balance of unity and diversity in a nation with respect to its various regions. But this raises all sorts of questions: What distinguishes a nation from a region? Isn't a nation just a region with guns? Would it be better or worse for high culture for a thriving region to get political independence? Jonathan and Ryan consider Eliot's argument for regionalism in light of Sparta, the French Revolution, American pol...

en-us

61:19

Plato the Educator | Episode CX

New Humanists ·

2026/04/15

Send us Fan Mail Two ways to support the show and unlock bonus episodes: Download and subscribe to Ekho: ancientlanguage.com/ekho/ Subscribe to New Humanists+ for bonus episodes: buzzsprout.com/1791279/subscribe Plato's Academy was not just a philosophic debating society. It was, in the words of the historian H.I Marrou, "a seminary that provided councillors and law-givers for republics and reigning sovereigns." The Academy was small, elite, and functioned like a fraternity whose members coul...

en-us

58:49

Socrates and the Sophists, feat. David Talcott |...

New Humanists ·

2026/04/01

Send us Fan Mail Two ways to support the show and unlock bonus episodes: Download and subscribe to Ekho: ancientlanguage.com/ekho/ Subscribe to New Humanists+ for bonus episodes: buzzsprout.com/1791279/subscribe In his comedy Clouds, Aristophanes turns Socrates into the arch-sophist of Athens: financially voracious, obsessed with verbal trickery, and preoccupied with irrelevant investigations. In most of the dialogues written by his student Plato, however, Socrates is not an arch-sophist, b...

en-us

63:33

The Case Against Meritocracy | Episode CVIII

New Humanists ·

2026/03/15

Send a text Two ways to support the show and unlock bonus episodes: Download and subscribe to Ekho: ancientlanguage.com/ekho/ Subscribe to New Humanists+ for bonus episodes: buzzsprout.com/1791279/subscribe What's the matter with meritocracy? Shouldn't college acceptances and jobs and awards be distributed on the basis of merit? The alternative, some sort of quota system, seems unjust and intolerable. In his book, Notes Toward the Definition of Culture, T.S. Eliot makes a case again...

en-us

69:49

Defining "Culture" | Episode CVII

New Humanists ·

2026/03/01

Send a text Download Ekho: ancientlanguage.com/ekho/ Subscribe to New Humanists+ for bonus episodes: buzzsprout.com/1791279/subscribe Pop culture. Cancel culture. Judeo-Christian culture. Everyone likes to talk about "culture," but what actually is it? One of the greatest writers of the 20th century, the poet and essayist T.S. Eliot, wrote a short book, Notes Toward the Definition of Culture, attempting to answer exactly that question. Written in the latter days of World War Two, as the A...

en-us

53:29

Technology Versus the Classics, feat. Timothy...

New Humanists ·

2026/02/15

Send a text When the Loeb Classical Library was launched, the greatest language teacher of the age, W.H.D. Rouse, wrote an essay meant to promote the Loebs by extolling the magnificence of Greek literature and Latin literature. And boy did he. "Your mind cannot live without them. All the great intellectual impulses begin in Greece; the modern world only grows crops from the Greek seed." While Rouse admitted that his space was short, and so he had to "be dogmatic," this essay, "Machines or Min...

en-us

75:19

Straussian Aristocracy, feat. Pavlos Papadopoulos |...

New Humanists ·

2026/02/01

Send us a text Liberal education is for the man of leisure: Either a gentleman engaged in politics, or a philosopher engaged in contemplation. What role, then, can liberal learning have in a mass democracy? In the lecture "Liberal Education and Responsibility," the political theorist Leo Strauss defends his statement that "Liberal education is the ladder by which we try to ascend from mass democracy to democracy as originally meant. Liberal education is the necessary endavor to found an arist...

en-us

58:51

Out of the Steppe, feat. Colin Gorrie | Episode CIV

New Humanists ·

2026/01/15

Send us a text What do you think of laryngeals? How should we refer to the Anatolian languages? Where do you stand on Gimbutas and Renfrew? In this episode of New Humanists, Dr. Colin Gorrie helps guide us through the Indo-European family tree. We follow the various branches as they spread out across Europe and Asia: Anatolian, Tocharian, Celtic, Germanic, Italic, and more. This episode covers the second half of Laura Spinney's introduction to the field of Indo-European studies, Proto. Laur...

en-us

70:44

Enter the Indo-Europeans, feat. Colin Gorrie |...

New Humanists ·

2026/01/01

Send us a text Supposedly, about half of the world population speaks languages that all come from one root language: Proto-Indo-European. How do we know, and where did "PIE" come from? Ukraine, Anatolia, or somewhere else? Did the Indo-Europeans spread out in a massive, peaceful migration of farmers? Or as small bands of shepherds, stealing livestock and killing anyone standing in the way? How do we even know what a prehistoric language sounded like if we don't have any record of their langua...

en-us

54:17

The Sophists Are the Founders of Classical Education...

New Humanists ·

2025/12/15

Send us a text The classical education revival movement began in the 1980s as a DIY, grassroots attempt to recover the medieval liberal arts, most notably the Trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. However, the classical ed movement also frequently drapes itself in the garb of Plato: leading students out of the cave, employing Socratic techniques in the classroom, and ensuring its students do not lead unexamined lives. But what if classical education, both in its love for the Trivium (and Q...

en-us

72:14

Big Bad Leo Strauss, feat. Pavlos Papadopoulos |...

New Humanists ·

2025/12/01

Send us a text What is liberal education? It's the prompt that has launched one thousand essays, and in a 1959 lecture at the University of Chicago, the (in)famous Leo Strauss gave his answer. Despite fleeing Nazi Germany and coming to the United States, Strauss wasn't afraid of criticizing the positivism, historicism, and relativism of the American academy. And as is evident in reading his lecture "What is Liberal Education?" neither was he afraid of calling into question the value and feasi...

en-us

120:51

Time Present, Time Past, Time Future | Episode C

New Humanists ·

2025/11/17

Send us a text In celebration of the 100th episode of New Humanists, we do an extended episode that is a retrospective, discussing the history of the Ancient Language Institute and the New Humanists podcast, has some updates on what we're up to at the moment, and a peek behind the curtain so listeners can find out what is upcoming at ALI and on the podcast. We also welcome both Colin Gorrie and Luke Ranieri to the show to discuss Ekho: The Ancient Language Streaming App. Alan Jacobs’s The Y...

en-us

65:35

Socrates Had It Coming | Episode XCIX

New Humanists ·

2025/11/01

Send us a text Socrates taught his students contempt for the gods, how to defraud creditors, and useless trivialities about flea-jumping. Or at least, that's how Socrates appears in the comedy Clouds. If you want to understand something of the Athenian hostility to the great philosopher which eventually reached its climax in sentencing Socrates to death, it helps to see how he was lampooned in front of Athenian audiences by his contemporary, the comedian playwright Aristophanes. But Clouds is...

en-us

74:17

Do "Christian" and "Classical" Go Together? feat....

New Humanists ·

2025/10/15

Send us a text In the 4th century AD, two Christian friends - Basil and Gregory - travelled from Cappadocia to Athens to go study Greek literature with Libanius, the leading rhetorician of the time. While there, these two young and wealthy Cappadocians befriended a fellow student named Julian, the nephew of the Emperor Constantine. There in Athens, the three young Christians mastered Greek philosophy and rhetoric at Libanius' feet. Later on, Basil went on to become the bishop of Caesarea, one...

en-us

117 results

Similar Podcasts

Daily Facts

Amalia Dupray and Montgomery Jones.

Les dents et dodo

BFMTV

Psychology in Everyday Life: The Psych Files

Michael Britt

Bedtime Safari

Bedtime History

The Day with Geoff Barton

The Day News and Media Ltd