Trivium University Invitation Lecture 4: Three Spheres: East, West and Digital

Trivium University (TrivU) is an online graduate school that seeks to retrieve the essence of higher education, which is a collaboration of faculty and students who are seeking to understand their own times in preparation for the challenges of the future. The “Trivium” is not “trivial,” rather it was the basis for the early curriculum of the first universities of the liberal arts, that is, the arts of becoming rational. The three-fold path, of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, are the tools of critical and synthetic thinking. Grammar is the structure of every language/technology, and the foundation of all thinking, communication, and understanding. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, and also of judgment, and dialectic appeals to logic.

Our purpose is not a restoration of the past, but the retrieval of wisdom, that is the right use of knowledge, for our contemporary moment. For we are in the midst of a cultural transformation based on digital technology, as profound a shift as the invention of the printing press and the harnessing of electricity, which led to the telephone, radio, and television. Just as these technologies shaped earlier revolutions in the senses, so too has the Digital Age, with the internet, the world wide web, mass surveillance, and the challenges of Artificial Intelligence (AI). We believe there are now three spheres driving global affairs – East, West, and Digital – and are dedicated to studying their interactions to remain human and free.

As an introduction to Trivium University’s core curriculum, we are offering four free invitation lectures in October and November, 2022, online, to invite applications for Triv U’s incoming cohort, in 2023.

1. Oct 16: What are the Roots of Our Current Crisis?
Crisis of Meaning and Collapse of Consensus
Breakdown of Education and Failure of Elites

2. Oct 23: Navigating the Paradigm Shifts
Paradigm shift: From Electric to Digital
How has new digital paradigm changed our senses?

3. Nov 6: Learning How to Think Anew
The Trivium: Grammar, Rhetoric and Dialectics
Technology and the Tetrad of Marshall McLuhan
Digital Great Books
Training the Inner Senses

4. Nov 13: Three Spheres: East, West and Digital
Three-body Problem
The East: Chinese Retrieval of the Classics
The West: Disarray and Confusion
The Digital Sphere and the Nature of the Human

Instructors: Mark Stahlman, Fred Beuttler and more

Trivium University is a project of the Center for the Study of Digital Life, Inc. – CSDL – a 501(c)3 not-for-profit research group. Please send inquiries to info@digitallife.center.