Introduction
The Blount Undergraduate Initiative is premised on the assumption that the examined life is an end in itself and thus intrinsically worthy. Education in the liberal arts, we believe, is the best way to achieve this end. The liberally educated person is one who possesses a lifelong commitment to the pursuit of knowledge and to the search for connecting ideas. He or she is also the best equipped to master the skills of any profession and possesses the means to become a free and responsible citizen.
The liberal arts education requires the study of foundational works-- texts of words, symbols, notes, and pictures-because these works express in classic form the ideas by which contemporary life is knowingly or unknowingly conducted. Foundational works are both timely and timeless; they illuminate questions of enduring significance; and they bear directly on the problems of the present. Such questions include the following: What is truth? What is the character of knowledge, and what are its limits? What is the difference between reason and desire, between rational thought and aesthetic experience, and between interpretation and explanation? Can the imagination disclose important dimensions of reality that are inaccessible to reason? What is beauty, and what connection does it have with the true, the morally good, and the merely pleasant? Students of the Blount program discover these questions through deep encounters with the texts and in dialogue with each other and their instructors.
Foundational texts are chosen not because of their status as members of a canon, but because they represent in classic form the tension between opposing views regarding the nature of truth and the possibility of knowledge. They are not of a piece, nor do they convey a central message or dogma. On the contrary, the tradition we call "Western" is a historical dialogue between radically competing perspectives, united over time by the questions it asks and the problems it considers. Like the Western liberal arts tradition itself, the intellectual center of the Blount program is dialectical -- that is, a conversation across competing perspectives. We choose as foundational texts those works that help us teach the conflicts that animate the dialogue, and that provide continuing rich sources of inquiry and debate across a range of changing topical and contemporary interests.