St. John's College (Santa Fe) Lectures

Audio recording of a lecture given by Fred Moten on November 3, 2023 as part of the Dean's Lectura & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has proviced this description of the event: "We will conduct a paraphilological thought experiment in which we look for traces of Gorgias’ lost work, On Nature or the Non-Existent, in the folds of Emily Dickinson’s envelopes. Perhaps our findings will provide s...

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Jacques Duvoisin on December 1, 2023 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "To understand Aristotle’s remark that there is no thinking without an image, it is necessary to consider the mode of his argument in De Anima and elsewhere. If we suppose that he is exploring a hypothesis...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Jeffrey Stout on December 8, 2023 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "What is the movie about? Does the title contain an allusion? When is the story set? What film genres are at work and why? Why are there two Charlies? How did Uncle Charlie and his sister become so close? Why are t...

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Patricia Locke on February 2, 2024 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "In the hothouse of courtly life in Heian Japan, people cultivated themselves and their relationships through deliberate attention to hair, clothes and the aesthetic realm dominated by arts of the brush: cal...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Ethan Linck on February 16, 2024 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "The elevational distributions of organisms have long fascinated scientists, an interest that has burgeoned with expectations of upslope movement of species in response to climate warming. Yet tests of this hypothes...

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Howard Fisher on February 23, 2024 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: “Faraday made use of numerous electrical measuring instruments; but what, exactly, did they measure? What properties of electricity are “measurable” at all? Faraday’s efforts to identify these properties rai...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Dave Shafer on March 27, 2024 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "The philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) was the founder of phenomenology, a field that led eventually to Sartre’s existentialism, among other offshoots. Phenomenology is a systematic way of investigating certain as...

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Frank Pagano on March 29, 2024 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: “In chapter 15 of The Prince Machiavelli famously recommends “going to the effectual truth of the thing rather than to the imagination of it.” If political writers wish to be effective, then they must act on the...

Audio recording of a tutor panel given by tutors Alison Chapman, Charlie Barrett, Krishnan Venkatesh, & Jay Smith as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: “In his preface to the First Folio (1623), Shakespeare’s friend and fellow author Ben Johnson described the bard as a “monument without a tomb,” attempting to capture S...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Pierre-Julien Harter on April 12, 2024 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: “Buddhist metaphysics, especially in the Madhyamika version which insists on the emptiness of all things, has often been interpreted as anti-metaphysical. Yet, it seems that Buddhist philosophers were still af...

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Llyd Wells on April 19, 2024 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "Climatic change demands of us climactic change. We have yet fully to admit it. Perhaps we never shall. Can we be serious about climate change? How? That's the core of this lecture, which will try to be serious sc...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Steven Crowell on April 26, 2024 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: “Of all the writings Heidegger published after Being and Time, “The Question Concerning Technology” (1950) is surely the most widely taught and discussed. It is not hard to understand why. Since 1950, our dependence...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Dean Sarah Davis on August 30, 2024 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "What do a Greek tragedy and a 20th-century work of philosophy have in common? At first glance, Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations seem worlds apart. However, this lecture...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Andy Davis on September 6, 2024 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "What can poetry teach us about the demands of writing and reading philosophy? In this talk I explore this question through the lens of a few paragraphs at the end of Hegel’s preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, w...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen on September 27, 2024 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "Renga is a hundred-verse sequence composed during a session by a group of 3 to 10 or more poets in the Japanese medieval period (12th-16th c.); it is the precursor of the kasen, the shorter 36-ve...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Nathan Shields on October 11, 2024 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "J.S. Bach's Funeral Cantata, Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit—'God's time is the very best time,' also known as the Actus Tragicus—is a stunning meditation on mortality, by turns hopeful and despairing, compos...

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor David McDonald on October 25, 2024 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "Aura, for critic Walter Benjamin, is the authenticity and uniqueness of the work of art, its situation in time and space. For natural beings, the equivalent is what Benjamin calls distance. The distance of...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Ron Duncan Hart on October 30, 2024 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "Christian nationalism began forming in White working-class evangelical neighborhoods in the early 1970s, and this talk will analyze the cultural matrix of religion, disenfranchisement, anti-feminism, and racism...

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Obed Lira on November 1, 2024 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "What is reading? Is it an art? Few books explore what it means to read as compellingly as Don Quixote. Guided by a character who writes and reads himself into the world, the novel's numerous characters also appe...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Jesse Wolfson on November 8, 2024 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "One hundred and seventy years ago, the German mathematician Bernhard Riemann submitted a short, 12 page note for his habilitation called 'On the hypotheses which lie at the bases of geometry.' Where Euclid began b...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Annapolis Dean Suzy Paalman on November 15, 2024 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "William Harvey and René Descartes famously disagreed in their accounts of what the heart is doing as it gives its characteristic beat. Both authors recognize that the heart alternates between squeez...