St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures

Recording of a lecture delivered on September 2, 1988, by Annapolis tutors Wye Allanbrook and Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

This lecture was the first for the 1988-1989 academic year, at the time called the Dean's Lecture.

Note: The recording begins after the start of the lecture and the first sentence is cut off. A typescript of the complete lecture is available on the St. John's College Digital Archives.

Recording of a lecture delivered on May 19, 1978, by Howard Zeiderman as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Mr. Zeiderman is now a tutor emeritus at St. John's College.

Recording of a lecture delivered on May 2, 1986, by Dr. Stephen Salkever as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on January 17, 1986, by Annapolis tutor Stewart Umphrey as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on November 8, 2002, by Jacob Howland as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on January 11, 2002, by Ori Soltes as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on September 16, 1994, by James N. Jarvis as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on April 30, 1976, by Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Recording of a lecture delivered on April 4, 2025, by Dr. Jessy Jordan as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Dr. Jordan is Professor of Philosophy at Mount St. Mary’s University, specializing in neo-Aristotelian natural normativity. He is also the Director of the Mount’s common, integrated, and sequenced liberal arts core curriculum. He has published numerous articles on moral philosophy and is currently putting the finishing touches on an Introduction to the Metaethics of Virtue Ethics: On Transcendental Aristotelian Naturalism. 

He offers this introduction: "The way one thinks about and explains motion has surprising consequences for how one thinks about moral philosophy. Thus, the early modern rejection of Aristotelian physics and its replacement by the mechanical philosophy of some of the most renowned natural philosophers of the 17th century had profound consequences for what appeared to be a legitimate account of moral evaluations."

Recording of a lecture delivered on March 28, 2025, by Dr. Emily Austin as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Dr. Austin is an Associate Professor of Classics and the College at the University of Chicago, with research interests in Greek literature, especially Homer and depictions of solitude in ancient Greece. Her first book, Grief and the Hero: the Futility of Longing in the Iliad, explores the nexus of grief, longing and anger in the Iliad. She is currently working on a second book, Solitude and its Powers in Ancient Greece, which identifies surprising moments when ancient Greek poetry conceives of solitude as a good thing. 

Dr. Austin offers this introduction to her lecture: Sophocles’ Philoctetes presents its lonely hero as incomparably wretched. Yet this suffering figure also claims that his isolated survival is something uniquely heroic. This lecture explores the tension between debasement and nobility in Sophocles’ play, taking seriously Philoctetes’ claims to heroism, which are unparalleled in the poetic discourse of his time.