Aristotle is an authority worthy of our attention. But our interest in his work extends beyond its historical significance. When we turn to his Nicomachean Ethics, we can readily see that Aristotle’s questions are also our questions. His inquiry into the human things is not bound by time or place, but speaks to what is basic and universal in our concerns, here and now.

Fundamentally, Aristotle wants to know how to live the best possible human life. What is the human good? How do we attain it? The stakes of these questions could not be higher. If we are honest with ourselves, there is nothing more pressing that we want—that we need—to know.

Our time together will focus on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, with each meeting being organized around a key theme.

Register now!

Schedule

Seminars will be held on Tuesdays from 12:00pm to 1:45pm. Lunch is included.

1. February 24th — Happiness (Book I)

2. March 3rd — Happiness (Book I)

3. March 10th — The Question or Problem of Virtue (Books II-III)

4. March 24th — The Question or Problem of Virtue (Books II-III)

5. March 31st — Habit and Choice (Books II-III)

6. April 7thst — The Moral Virtues (Books III-IV)

7. April 14th — Pleasure and Pain (Books III, VII)

8. April 21st — Friendship (Books VIII-IX)

9. April 28th — The Contemplative Life (Book X)

Location

Highland City Club
885 Arapahoe Ave
Boulder, CO 80301

Pricing

$600 for the series, or $75 per seminar (lunch included)

Registration

Registration is now closed. Reach out to founders@parnassus.house if you're interested in joining the wait list, or sitting in on a session.

Why choose to study with Parnassus House? First and foremost, studying with capable teachers will allow you to more fully access the depth and meaning of the texts and ideas we study. Secondly, meeting in person and engaging in dialogue will bring the ideas to life in ways that are hard to achieve otherwise. Lastly, you will meet new friends, and enjoy a delicious lunch on the beautiful grounds of the Highland City Club in downtown Boulder.

If you have any questions, please reach out to founders@parnassus.house.

Registration is now closed. If you would like to join the wait list, please reach out to us at founders@parnassus.house.

Since the mid-twentieth century, the “Great Man Theory of History” has fallen out of favor as the principal means of explaining the past. Instead of understanding human affairs through the deeds and speeches of preeminent figures, today’s historians and social scientists look to the impersonal forces of commerce, trade, disease, food, colonialism, sex, etc.

Much of this democratizing in the social sciences and humanities is motivated by a legitimate impulse to tell a more complete story about our world. There are, however, at least three problems that attend this move—problems which require us to turn back to traditional modes as the appropriate corrective.

First, much of human history is shaped by elite players. To understand Athens and Sparta, you must study Solon and Lycurgus; Rome—Cicero, Caesar, and Augustus; France—Charlemagne and Napoleon; The United States of America—Washington, Lincoln, the Founding Fathers; and so on. And what is true in political history is often true in other domains. Each one has a pantheon of live players who shape and re-shape our sense of what is possible. To understand the history of science, religion, or the arts you need to study its greatest teachers, innovators, and practitioners.

Second, the democratizing tendency leads us to underestimate the significance of elite influence on the world. As Machiavelli argues, great founders establish the “modes and orders” that structure and inform civilization. This isn’t to say that all social phenomena are created on purpose. There is a role for emergence, local influence, change, and drift. The point is, rather, that all of the highest orders of complex social organization are the products of intentional design. Great founders don’t create their working materials, but they do shape their “clay” into forms that it otherwise wouldn’t take. Too often we forget, or take for granted, the purpose of the institutions we live within. But when we try to fully understand our social world, we are compelled to tell the story of these structures from the moment of their design.

Third, the study of great foundings helps us to better appreciate the nature and limits of collective enterprise. Great foundings allow us to see the “matter” in the light of the various “forms” that it takes. Any well-articulated social entity has its own order and principles—what we can call its “regime.” The regime is shaped decisively by the mind and will of its founder. It is then transmitted to his leadership corps, to be piloted and successively transmitted for as long as it continues to work effectively.

Our democratizing culture wants to do justice to the parts of history that it feels have been unduly neglected. Again, there is a legitimate motive here that we must respect. But when we steer away from understanding human life in light of the peaks of leadership, vision, and achievement, we cut ourselves off from a most useful window into human phenomena. To understand our world—to take stock of the promise and potential of our institutions—we need to climb to the higher altitudes of the great founders.

In this series, we will study examples of great founders from antiquity to the present. Our main concern will be to make sense of what it means to create a regime—an order of rules that instantiates a mode of life—and how regimes inform collective enterprise, including cities, nation states, companies, and firms.

Schedule

What is a Great Founder?
Tuesday, October 21, 12:00pm-1:45pm

Plutarch on the Spartan Regime
Tuesday, October 28, 12:00pm-1:45pm

Livy on the Dual Founding of Rome
Tuesday, November 4, 12:00pm-1:45pm 

America’s Great Constitutional Founders 
Thursday, November 13, 12:00pm-1:45pm
* meeting on Thursday due to Veterans Day closure on Tuesday

Lincoln’s Refounding of America
Tuesday, November 18, 12:00pm-1:45pm

– Off for the week of Thanksgiving –

Great Founders of Industry and Finance (Henry Ford, Ray Dalio)
Tuesday, December 2, 12:00pm-1:45pm

Great Founders of Futurism and Technology (Walt Disney, Steve Jobs)
Tuesday, December 9, 12:00pm-1:45pm

Contemporary Founders and Leaders (Lee Kuan Yew, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk)
Tuesday, December 16, 12:00pm-1:45pm

Location

Highland City Club
885 Arapahoe Ave
Boulder, CO 80301

Pricing

$600 for the series, or $75 per seminar (lunch included)

Registration

Registration is now closed. If you would like to join the wait list, please reach out to us at founders@parnassus.house.

Why choose to study with Parnassus House? First and foremost, studying with capable teachers will allow you to more fully access the depth and meaning of the texts and ideas we study. Secondly, meeting in person and engaging in dialogue will bring the ideas to life in ways that are hard to achieve otherwise. Lastly, you will meet new friends, and enjoy a delicious lunch every seminar on the beautiful grounds of the Highland City Club in downtown Boulder.

If you have any questions, please reach out to founders@parnassus.house.

But the various traditions that comprise our civilizational legacy do not speak in one voice on technology. The myths of ancient Greece warn of technological and intellectual hubris in the figures of Daedalus, Prometheus, and Oedipus. The book of Genesis, similarly, warns of the false promise of empire and technology. Greek philosophy, especially the work of Plato and Aristotle, explores the positive and negative effects of techne (craft intelligence) within the horizon of the city state. Even later thinkers like Francis Bacon and Adam Smith, both proponents of a new vision of science and politics, see the dangers entailed by unrestrained technological power.

We stand now, with one foot planted in the age of AI, both hopeful and concerned about our technological future. Having barely understood the lessons of the Industrial Revolution, we find ourselves needing to grasp new layers of “tech” forming around labor, industry, art, politics, warfare, and commerce.

How should states prepare for the age of AI? How should our leaders form their plans and strategies for our new digital era?

Thinking seriously about our technological future requires us to recover the wisdom of the past. Parnassus House’s series on technology and statecraft proposes such a recovery. Together, over nine seminars, we will read various works and explore the perennial problems identified by some of the greatest minds in our tradition as they illustrate how to best come to terms with the promise and problems of technological dependence.

July 22: Innovation vs. Stability

• Plato, Phaedrus (the myth of Theuth and Thamos)

• Aristotle, Politics (2.8: the critique of Hippodamus)

• Plutarch, Life of Marcellus (the practical genius and self-censoring of Archimedes)

July 29: Enhancement vs. Dependence

• Plato, Phaedrus (the myth of Theuth and Thamos)

• Plato, Protagoras (the myth of Prometheus)

• Jean Jacques Rousseau, Second Discourse (excerpts)

• Neil Postman, Technopoly (excerpts)

August 5: Industry vs. Decadence

• Plato, Republic (Book 2: The True and Healthy City)

• John Locke, Second Treatise (Ch. 5 on Property)

August 12: Adaptation vs. Domestication

• Charles Darwin, Descent of Man (excerpts)

• Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist (excerpts)

• Christopher Ryan, Civilized to Death (excerpts)

August 19: Spontaneous Order vs. Centralized Control

• Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (excerpts)

• F.A. Hayek, "The Use of Knowledge in Society"

• Davidson & Rees-Mogg, The Sovereign Individual (excerpts)

August 26: Social Technology and Civilizational Collapse

• Samo Burja, "Social Technology"

• Samo Burja, "Intellectual Dark Matter"

September 2: Exploration of Core Themes in The New Atlantis

• Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis (Weinberger ed.)

September 9: Exploration of Core Themes in The New Atlantis (cont.)

• Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis (Weinberger ed.)

September 16: The Future of Western Civilization: Progress or Return?

• Ross Douthat, “The Age of Extinction”

• Marc Andreessen, “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto”

Schedule: Tuesdays, 12:00pm-1:45pm, July 22nd through September 16

Location: Highland City Club, 885 Arapahoe Ave, Boulder, CO 80302

Price: $600 (lunch included)

Readings:

• Various excerpts, which we will provide (see above)

• Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis (Weinberger ed; Amazon)

Registration: Closed

Why choose to study with Parnassus House? First and foremost, studying with capable teachers will allow you to more fully access the depth and meaning of the text. Secondly, meeting in person and engaging in dialogue will bring the ideas to life in ways that are hard to achieve otherwise. Lastly, you will meet new friends, and enjoy a delicious lunch every seminar on the beautiful grounds of the Highland City Club in downtown Boulder.

If you have any questions, please reach out to founders@parnassus.house.

From March 4th through April 22nd, Parnassus House will host an eight-part seminar series on Machiavelli’s The Prince. Registration is now open, and there are 10 spots available. We hope you will join us.

Registration is now closed. If you are interested in dropping in, or learning more about Parnassus House seminars, please write to questions@parnassus.house.

Reading: The Prince, trans. Harvey Mansfield (find it on Amazon)

Schedule: Tuesdays, 12:00pm-1:30pm, March 4 through April 22

Location: Highland City Club, 885 Arapahoe Ave, Boulder, CO 80302

Price: $600, or $75 per session (lunch is included)

Why choose to study with Parnassus House? First and foremost, studying with capable teachers will allow you to more fully access the depth and meaning of the text. Secondly, meeting in person and engaging in dialogue will bring the ideas to life in ways that are hard to achieve otherwise. Lastly, you will meet new friends, and enjoy a delicious lunch every seminar on the beautiful grounds of the Highland City Club in downtown Boulder.

If you have any questions, please reach out at questions@parnassus.house.

Why choose to study with Parnassus House? First and foremost, studying with capable teachers will allow you to more fully access the depth and meaning of the text. Secondly, meeting in person and engaging peers in dialogue will bring the text to life in ways that are hard to achieve virtually, or alone. Thirdly, you will have a unique opportunity to meet and connect with Boulder locals in a convivial atmosphere.

Who leads Parnassus House seminars?

Parnassus House was founded by Niko Kovacevic and Paul Diduch.

Niko Kovacevic holds a BS in Mathematics from Pennsylvania State University. He has been studying and leading seminars on philosophic texts for several years, with a particular interest in ancient political philosophy and technology. He also has several years of experience as a founder, or founding member, of multiple successful companies. He currently works as a software engineer.

Paul Diduch is Teaching Associate Professor in the Herbst Program for Engineering, Ethics & Society at CU Boulder. His teaching interests include leadership, ancient philosophy, the history of philosophy, moral psychology, the history and philosophy of science and technology, and contemporary issues in science, ethics, and society. He holds an MA in Political Science/Political Theory from the University of Alberta and a PhD from the Institute of Philosophic Studies at the University of Dallas, where his doctoral work focused on Plato's ethics and moral psychology.

Seminar series details

• Reading: Plato’s Republic, translated by Allan Bloom

• Pricing: $85 per session, or $600 for all eight sessions. Lunch is included.

• Timing: Tuesdays 12:00-1:15pm (October 22nd through December 17th)

• Location: Highland City Club, 885 Arapahoe Ave., Boulder, CO 80302

Registration is now closed. If you are interested in dropping in, or learning more about Parnassus House seminars, please write to questions@parnassus.house.