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 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.