Recording of a lecture delivered on October 1, 1999, by Curtis Wilson as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on September 7, 2012, by Adam Schulman as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

 Recording of a lecture delivered on July 11, 2018, by Elliott Zuckerman as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on November 5, 2021, by Charlotte Thomas as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Dr. Thomas is Professor of Philosophy from Mercer University in Atlanta and Co-Director of the McDonald Center for America’s Founding Principles. She was named the Executive Director of Association for Core Texts and Courses in 2020.
Dr. Thomas describes her lecture: "At the beginning of Book V of the Republic, Adeimantus and Polemarchus interrupt Socrates to say that he has neglected to explain something he had earlier said in passing about the role of women and children in the city in speech. Socrates admits that although the 'male drama' is complete, that he has indeed neglected these matters in the hope that he could avoid them entirely in their conversation. But with fear and trembling, prostrating himself to Adresteia and asking forgiveness for the hubris he fears he is about to display, he agrees to present the 'female drama.' Thus begins the notoriously difficult and controversial middle part of the Republic. One of the things that makes the middle books so difficult is that Socrates leans precipitously into constructing political structures which until this point of the dialogue he has been careful to remind his interlocutors were meant to function as paradigms to help them understand individual justice. But, although Socrates is quieter and more subtle about the teachings of the female drama for moral psychology, he is not silent. In this paper I will attempt to illuminate some of the hints we are given about the implications of the middle books of the Republic (especially Book V) for its teachings on the soul and investigate their place in the Republic as a whole."

Recording of a lecture delivered on April 4, 1978, by Beate Ruhm von Oppen as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on November 11, 2011, by Joshua Greene as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Greene describes his lecture: "How does the moral brain work, and how can it work better?... In this talk I'll review evidence old and new for the dual-process theory of moral judgment, according to which moral judgments are driven by both automatic emotional responses and controlled reasoning processes. I'll argue that these distinctive cognitive processes map onto competing moral philosophies, respectively typified by philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill. I'll then consider the respective functions of automatic and controlled processes. Automatic processes are like the point-and-shoot settings on a camera, efficient but inflexible. Controlled processes are like a camera's manual mode, inefficient but flexible. Putting these theses together, I'll argue that we often make poor use of our moral brains, using point-and-shoot morality to deal with problems it can't handle. I'll argue that when it comes to dealing with peculiarly modern moral problems, we should think more like Mill and less like Kant."

Recording of a lecture delivered on February 26, 1982, by Gisela Berns as part of the Formal Lecture Series.