My introduction will provide a brief history of higher education from antiquity to the formation of modern universities, with a special emphasis on humanistic education and its formative role in this historical process. The central part of the talk will focus on rhetoric and dialectic as two typically humanistic systems of knowledge designed to answer our most important political, social, ethical, and existential questions. The Aristotelian and Ciceronian version of these two systems underlies the modern idea of critical thinking and encapsulates the main benefits of humanistic education.

Daniel Markovich is a professor of Classics at the University of Cincinnati. His main fields of interest are Greek and Latin rhetoric, philosophy, and poetry, and particularly the ways in which these three types of discourse shape ancient educational texts. He has published on Lucretius (including the monograph on The Rhetoric of Explanation in Lucretius’ De rerum natura, Brill 2008), Vergil, the Vergilian Aetna, Horace, Martianus Capella, Greco-Roman rhetorical theory, and Greco-Roman philosophical protreptic. His book on Promoting a New Kind of Education: Greek and Roman Philosophical Protreptic (Brill 2022), discusses Greco-Roman exhortations to philosophy (protreptics) as the first texts in Western literature that systematically address the question of the ultimate goal of education. He is currently writing a commentary on Cicero’s rhetorical treatise De partitione oratoria.

The event will be photographed and recorded due to publishing on social networks, the website and other information channels for the purpose of promoting the event and activities of the Institute.