St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures

Recording of a lecture delivered on February 23, 2024, by Annapolis tutor Daniel Harrell as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Mr. Harrell describes his lecture: "When the so-called New Program was established at St. John’s College in 1937, conversation was to play no essential role—at least if you believe the first statement of the program, written by Scott Buchanan. Where you would expect the word 'conversation' you find 'instruction' instead, as in this brief description of the seminar:
Meetings of seminar groups will occur twice a week with any additional meetings that special circumstances or difficulties may indicate. There will be two instructors in charge, and the instruction will make use of a wide range of devices from explication de texte to analysis of intellectual content and the dialectical treatment of critical opinion.
When I read this description, I like to think that the importance of conversation to our endeavor emerged over time: a matter of discovery rather than dictate.
Has something similar happened with the importance of books to our endeavor? We have always stated this importance in terms of what makes certain books great; but what makes them books, I have come to think, is even more central to our experience of reading them, discussing them, and learning from them. Perhaps there is no way to dictate by 'great' how we come to find ourselves in these books, just as there was no way to dictate by 'instruction' how we came to find ourselves in a conversation about these books.
But what makes books books? What does it mean to be a book? This is the question of my lecture. And my hope—despite the St. John’s frame I use here—is that the lecture will be of interest to any reader of books, even if it fails, by my lights, to make full sense of a book."

Recording of a lecture delivered on February 11, 2022, by Ange Mlinko as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Ms. Mlinko offers this description of her lecture:  "Poetry is an enormous subject, but it can be distilled into a single figure. This figure is Echo, who manifests in three ways: as a prosodic device at the level of the line and stanza; as a poetic form; and as a nymph from Greek mythology, who may stand in for literature itself. We will look at the many ways in which Echo informs poetry and teaches us to read it.”

Ms. Mlinko is a professor at the University of Florida and a Guggenheim fellow. This lecture is also part of the Steiner Lecture Series, which is made possible by a gift from the Steiner family in memory of Andrew Steiner, an alumnus of the college from 1963. The lecture series was established to bring notable speakers to campus from a variety of disciplines and endeavors, in recognition of Steiner’s intellectual versatility, and for the sake of continued learning.

Recording of a lecture delivered on September 23, 2022, by Mary Townsend as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Ms. Townsend is an assistant professor of philosophy at St. John’s University in New York. She is the author of The Woman Question in Plato’s Republic (2017) and a graduate of Tulane University (PhD, 2015) and St. John’s College (BA, 2004).

Recording of a lecture delivered on November 2, 2012, by David Stephenson as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

A typescript of Mr. Stephenson's lecture is available in the College's Digital Archives: https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/58.

Recording of a lecture delivered on February 8, 2013, by Dylan Casey as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on April 1, 2011, by Douglas Casson as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on January 13, 2023, by Carl “Tripp” Young as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Dr. Young is an Assistant Professor of Classics at Hillsdale College.

He offers this description of his lecture: "In the Symposium, Plato staged a contest in which the philosopher, Socrates, competes with the poets, Aristophanes and Agathon, concerning their respective claims to wisdom. However, the medium through which they all compete is logoi (speeches), or more specifically, a kind of epideictic speech, the encomium. In other words, rhetoric is the medium through which philosophy and poetry compete for the prize of wisdom. This talk will focus on the contest between Agathon and Socrates because,  I will argue, Agathon represents the most significant danger to Athenian society and is the clearest threat to Socrates' claim to wisdom."

Recording of a lecture delivered on November 21, 1997, by Steven Crockett as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on September 9, 2005, by Thomas May as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on November 7, 1997, by Samuel S. Kutler as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Audio recording of a lecture delivered on September 6, 1996, by Patricia Locke as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on March 21, 2014, by Daniel Harrell as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Mr. Harrell describes his lecture: "What is time? It is tempting to look straightaway to some theory or philosophy of time for an answer to this question, even though we 'tell the time' by watches, clocks, and nowadays even phones. And I think that our telling of time indeed tells us something about the nature of time, as well as about the nature of number. In my lecture I hope to show why that is, and what it is."

Recording of a lecture delivered on August 31, 2001, by Adam Schulman as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on April 13, 2001, by Jonathan Tuck as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on December 1, 2023, by Enrique “Kiko” Galvez as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Professor Galvez describes his lecture: "Phenomena at the microscopic level or at low light levels challenge our understanding because they are unlike anything that we are used to in our macroscopic (classical) world. Quantum mechanics explains all of it, but not without leaving us with a sense of puzzlement or even skepticism at some of the concepts it predicts, such as superposition and entanglement. After many years of doubt and verification, these concepts have moved from being treated as curiosities to being embraced and further used in emerging technologies, with the current quest being the quantum computer. We use light to uncover these challenges, to get a grasp of the quantum rules, and to understand what motivates the second quantum revolution."

Professor Galvez has been instrumental in the setting up of St. John's College's quantum optics laboratory.  He designed the experiments that we currently use in the senior laboratory and trained Mr. Daly and a group of tutors during two summer immersion programs at Colgate University.  In addition, Professor Galvez has generously offered advice and assistance, not only in troubleshooting, but in improving the quality of our experiments.

Recording of a lecture delivered on November 17, 2023, by Rebecca Goldner as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Ms. Goldner describes her lecture: "In Search of Lost Time is, in a very general way, the story of a young boy growing up to become an author. This boy, the narrator of the book, is presented throughout in the first person, an 'I' who appears in different and interwoven ages and times. In this lecture, I will ask about the role of art and artists within In Search of Lost Time. In particular, I will explore what art means to the narrator by looking at music, reading, and writing in Volume I, Swann’s Way. Ultimately, I will make some suggestions about what it means to create a fictionalized 'I' as the subject of the novel and ask whether the role of art throughout the work might help us to understand some of the experiences and complexities of this subject, who ends up being both a work of art and an artist."

Ms. Goldner is a tutor in Annapolis.

Recording of a lecture delivered on September 9, 1994, by Stephen Scully as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on February 11, 2005, by Thomas May as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on October 15, 2004, by Henry Higuera as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on February 9, 1996, by Beate Ruhm von Oppen as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on April 10, 1998, by Santa Fe tutor David Bolotin as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on January 12, 2001, by Leon Kass as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on December 6, 1967, by Jacob Klein as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Happy New Year from the Greenfield Library staff! Thank you for listening to the podcast this year.

Recording of a lecture delivered on October 31, 2008, by Walter Nicgorski as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Dr. Nicgorski describes his lecture: "The tradition of criticism of Cicero as a thinker consists in charges that his rhetorical interests and oratorical excellence intrude on his philosophical work, that he is more the patriot than the philosopher, that a busy life of political activism led him to be philosophically eclectic and superficial, and that his character, especially his ambition and pride, make him unworthy to be a philosophical guide in a search for a life-directing wisdom. This lecture, by attending to certain topics and passages in the writings of Cicero, looks to him to provide his own defense. The body of the lecture explores his Socratic orientation reaching to his very skepticism, his regard for Plato including his remarkable way of reading The Republic, his apparent elevation of political action and statesmanship over the life of philosophy, and his teaching on the virtues and natural law. What emerges from this partial and selective examination of his philosophical writings is, at the least, a prima facie case for a further, more careful and fuller engagement with his thinking."

Recording of a lecture delivered on January 16, 2009, by Jonathan Tuck as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Mr. Tuck describes his lecture: "Gargantua and Pantagruel, by François Rabelais, is one of the great masterpieces of European literature. It was published serially, beginning in the 1530's. It is a wild, brawling, bewildering, crazily funny book, notorious in its own time for its alleged atheism and obscenity. Its influence on subsequent prose fiction has been enormous, and it was a crucial event in the formation of the modern French language. Rabelais was a hugely learned man, a humanist and a disciple of Erasmus, and his book is enthusiastically strewn with allusions to Plato, Homer, and other Greek authors that had been newly rediscovered in the early Renaissance. But few learned authors have worn their learning as lightly as Rabelais, and the book is also uncannily modern, edgy and subversive. Until recently it was a fixture on the reading list at St. John's. I hope to show that it is a book we cannot do without. The lecture will not presume any previous acquaintance with the book, and it will be R-rated (for language)."

Recording of a lecture delivered by Sarah Ruden, author, poet, and visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, on January 17, 2020, as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Dr. Ruden describes her lecture topic as: “talking about the great book as a means for both readers and writers to regain some sense of the individual self in a modern society--that is, one in which power has become distant, inexorable, and incomprehensible. Vergil and Augustine were creatures of early modernity, and their struggles for self-expression and communication have interesting and inspiring commonalities.”

This lecture is also part of the Steiner Lecture Series, which is made possible by a gift from the Steiner family in memory of Andrew Steiner, an alumnus of the college from 1963. The lecture series was established to bring notable speakers to campus from a variety of disciplines and endeavors, in recognition of Steiner’s intellectual versatility, and for the sake of continued learning.

Recording of a lecture delivered on September 22, 2023, by Khafiz Kerimov as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Mr. Kerimov describes his lecture: "The Almagest provides very little insight into how Ptolemy arrived at his concepts and models. Ptolemy’s “secrecy” is especially regrettable when it comes to the so-called “equant” (punctum aequans), the powerful (yet potentially heretical) mathematical tool that is arguably Ptolemy’s most important personal contribution to astronomy. Ptolemy’s equant divorces the center around which the planet describes a circular path from the center around which it moves with uniform angular speed. In this lecture I shall argue that, even though Ptolemy first introduces the equant in his account of the inferior planets (specifically Venus) in Bk. IX, he first developed the equant hypothesis in his encounter with the superior planets (Mars, in particular) that only make their appearance later in the Almagest, in Bk. X. So, in this lecture I shall attempt to defend the position that the equant’s origin is Martian rather than Venusian."

Mr. Kerimov is a tutor on the Annapolis campus of St. John's College.

Recording of a lecture delivered on November 3, 2023, by Kevin Kambo as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Professor Kambo describes his lecture: "In Plato's Republic, Socrates suggests that the best regime is doomed to fail.  This failure is often attributed to inevitable errors in the rulers' eugenic calculations.  I propose that the city's constitution must decline not because the eugenic calculations go wrong, but because the calculations have always been wrong, and this on account of congenital errors in the city's establishment.  In this dramatic arc, from noble founding to destined fall, the reversal perhaps reveals the city to be a tragic figure.  The Republic, then, would not be, as some read it, a prescription for authoritarianism or totalitarianism, but a reflection on political lies, human sacrifice, and the tragedy of politics."

Professor Kambo is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Dallas.

Recording of a lecture delivered on November 16, 2001, by Lael Gold as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on November 3, 2000, by Murray Dry as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on September 8, 2000, by Anthony Grafton as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on April 9, 1999, by Richard L. Velkley as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on October 27, 2023, by Ron Haflidson as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Mr. Haflidson describes his lecture: "In this lecture, I explore the largely neglected and perhaps totally wrong possibility that when Jesus spoke about 'hell,' he wasn’t talking about the afterlife. The inquiry proceeds by focusing on Jesus’ words in the Gospel of Matthew (the New Testament text with by far the most references to hell). I will pursue the case that for Matthew’s Jesus, hell was an impending event within history, not a place some people go after they die. The lecture is divided into two parts: in the first, we consider the various ways that lead to hell; in the second, we examine the nature of hell itself.

Mr. Haflidson is a tutor in Annapolis. 

Recording of a lecture delivered on October 13, 2000, by Keith Whitaker as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on September 22, 2000, by Samuel S. Kutler as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on February 23, 1973, by Jacob Klein as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on May 5, 1972, by Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on September 15, 2023, by Daniel Carranze as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

The lecture conducts a close reading of Goethe's poem on the "Metamorphosis of Plants" by situating it within Goethe's larger scientific endeavor to understand what it means for a being to be a specifically living being, in particular what the kind of wholeness exhibited by the organism, whether plant, animal, or human, looks like. Particular attention will be paid to the philosophical resources upon which Goethe draws in his scientific investigation of nature, in particular Aristotle's four causes, the fourth, formal one of which is decisive for Goethe's morphology or study of living forms, and Spinoza's conatus, which Goethe understood as the organism's own endeavor to persevere in and more fully realize its own being.

Professor Carranza is an assistant professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures at Harvard University.

Recording of a lecture delivered on January 30, 2004, by Ralph Lerner as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on October 22, 1999, by Brad Marston as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Audio recording of a lecture delivered on September 24, 1999, by Charles E. Butterworth as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on November 19, 1999 by Josiah Ober as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on March 24, 2000, by Peter Kalkavage as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on September 1, 2023, by Paul Vasile as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Mr. Vasile describes his lecture: "We'll explore practices of musicking rooted in the oral tradition and the ways they enrich and complexify how we interpret music from the page." 

Paul Vasile is a church musician, teacher, and composer who finds his greatest joy in collaborative and community-centered work. 

Audio recording of a lecture delivered on April 4, 2003, by Elliott Zuckerman as part of the Formal Lecture Series.