Michael Moynihan and Austin Hatch on our History of Western Thought Course
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Michael Moynihan and Austin Hatch on our History of Western Thought Course
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To help our seniors synthesize the many ideas, events, and texts they’ve surveyed across high school—and to help them better understand their own cultural moment—Heights teachers have developed a senior core class titled “History of Western Thought.” In this episode, Upper School Head Michael Moynihan and long-time teacher Austin Hatch discuss the course and its guide-text: Carl Trueman’s Strange New World (2022).
HOWT covers essential texts from Plato’s Republic to Pope Benedict XVI’s “Regensburg Address.”. Its goal is not only to prepare students for college work but to prepare them to meaningfully engage with the culture they will inherit, understanding its origins and its underlying assumptions.
Chapters:00:02:31 History of Western Thought course
00:08:10 The “HOWT” syllabus
00:11:31 Strange New World, a primary source guide
00:14:13 Teens and the intellectual tradition
00:16:39 Seeing ideologies in motion
00:18:48 Pairing philosophical threads
00:27:26 Understanding our cultural moment
00:29:25 Pushing back on ‘authenticity’
00:33:31 How students respond to the course
00:35:09 Thinking about friendship
00:41:04 Big ideas in a short class
00:44:32 Reading Trueman alongside your son
Strange New World by Carl Trueman
“Canada Is Killing Itself” by Elaina Plott Calabro, The Atlantic, September 2025
Texts from the HOWT course:
The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self by Carl Trueman
Republic by Plato
Phaedo by Plato
The Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle
De Officiis by Cicero
Moralia, vol. 1, featuring “How to Know a Flatterer from a Friend” by Plutarch
Confessions by Augustine
Summa theologiae by St. Thomas Aquinas
Utopia by Thomas More
Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy by René Descartes
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
The Idea of a University by St. John Henry Newman
Regensburg Address by Pope Benedict XVI
Also on the Forum:American Restlessness featuring Dr. Benjamin Storey
A Study for All Seasons: On the Western Tradition featuring Lionel Yaceczko
Is The Heights a Classical School? by Michael Moynihan
Featured Opportunities:Convivium for Teaching Men at The Heights School (November 13-15, 2025)