Audio recording of a lecture given by Charlotte Thomas on March 5, 2021 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "Thucydides gives a scathing account of Nicias’s failures in Sicily and then says, just before his awful death, that Nicias was least among the Hellenes to deserve such a fate because 'the whole of his life had been ordered toward virtue.' In this essay, I try to think through what this eulogy means and whether or not Thucydides presents it as a compliment.
Charlotte Thomas is the Executive Director of the Association for Core Texts and Courses, Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Great Books Program at Mercer University, and author of The Female Drama: The Philosophical Feminine in the Soul of Plato’s Republic (Mercer University Press, 2019)."

Audio recording of a lecture given by Dean J. Walter Sterling on August 26, 2022 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "Mr. Sterling will explore the contested idea of freedom that underlies any authentic liberal education, including the St. John’s Program of Instruction. He will argue that the difficulty of specifying the end of such an education reinforces, rather than undermines, the necessity of undertaking with courage the attempt to free one’s mind. He will briefly discuss the role of books in such an attempt."

Audio recording of a tutor panel given by tutors Chris Cohoon, Claudia Hauer, David McDonald and Sarah Stickney on September 2, 2022 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey stand at the beginning of the St. John’s Program as foundational accounts of the deepest human questions: loss, death, war, love, beauty, family, politics, and the divine. For millennia, Homer’s poems have been guides into these questions as they arise in the shared or solitary plight of lived experience. In this panel, four tutors will explore ways of reading Homer and of entering the world his poetry unfolds."

Audio recording of a tutor panel given by Judith Adam, Seth Appelbaum, Grant Franks, Eric Poppele and Ahmed Siddiqi on September 9, 2022 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "Because it attempts to engage directly with the natural world and the question of Nature, Freshman Laboratory is possibly the most radical of beginnings that we make in our studies at St. John’s. Tutors will discuss some of the first themes of Freshman Laboratory and its challenging readings (looking, classification, causes), how these themes help us to approach and come to know the natural world, and how such beginnings might relate to our extended study of Science throughout the laboratory program at St. John’s."

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Martha Franks on September 16, 2022 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "The United States Supreme Court has recently rendered several newsworthy, controversial rulings. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, for example, the Court overturned an earlier Supreme Court recognition of a Constitutional right to abortion. The sweeping social changes that this decision has caused come about because new members of the Court interpret the Constitution differently than earlier Courts had done. How can so tiny a group of unelected lawyers, by shifting their approach to the interpretation of the text of the Constitution, wield so much power to alter the laws by which the whole nation is governed? (We at St. John’s may be less surprised than others that differing interpretation of texts can lead to radically different opinions about their meanings.) This lecture will discuss the role of the Supreme Court in the Constitution and in American judicial history, as well as considering how the Supreme Court does its work of interpretation."

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Richard McCombs on September 23, 2022 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "Pascal’s almost unrelenting emphasis on the weakness, vanity, misery and sinfulness of humanity can be hard to take. This lecture focuses on what is arguably the most beautiful and widely appealing aspect of his Pensees, namely, his thoughts on universal human beings. The most obvious thing about these people is their intellectual breadth and versatility. There is something better about them than this, however. Pascal says that “no one guesses what they are.” This lecture attempts to divine their hard to guess secret, which lies not in intellectual excellence, but in moral or spiritual excellence that is or should be inspiring both to those of us who share Pascal’s religious views and to those of us who are appalled by the negativity of his Christianity."

Audio recording of a lecture given by Saiyad Nizamuddin Ahmad on September 28, 2022 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "An examination of the problem of time and eternity in the context of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing) and the problems and paradoxes raised by this in Islamic philosophy. This is a long-standing debate not only in Islam but in other religious traditions which cultivated philosophy as well, especially the Christian and the Jewish traditions. The classic example of this debate in Islam is the famous exchange between Ibn Rushd (d. 595 H/1198 CE) and al-Ghazālī (d. 505 H/1111 CE). The latter is well-known to Western students of philosophy, but developments since that time remain virtually unknown to the Western world. We will take the exchange between Ibn Rushd and al-Ghazālī as our point of departure and examine the roots of the question before Islam as well as examine its development after Ibn Rushd and al-Ghazālī in the profoundly original doctrine of “non-temporal origination” formulated by Mīr Dāmād. The question also continues among Muslim scholars in modern times and a few examples will be offered."

Audio recording of a lecture given by O. Carter Snead on October 7, 2022 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "The natural limits of the human body make us vulnerable and dependent on others. Yet law and policy concerning biomedical research and the practice of medicine frequently disregard these stubborn facts. O. Carter Snead makes the case for a new paradigm and framework for public bioethics, one rooted in a vision of human identity and flourishing that supports those who are profoundly vulnerable and dependent -- children, the disabled and the elderly. He addresses three complex issues: abortion, assisted reproductive technology and end-of-life decisions. Avoiding typical dichotomies of conservative-liberal and secular-religious, he recasts debates within his framework of embodiment and dependence, concluding that if the law is built on premises that reflect our lived experience, it will provide support for the vulnerable."

Audio recording of a lecture given by Elaine Scarry on October 21, 2022 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series.

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor John Cornell on October 28, 2022 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "Goethe’s character Faust – based on the medieval legend about a man who makes a pact with the Devil -- is an archetype of the Western soul. Dissatisfied with life, Faust pursues the most intense adventures while remaining blind to the destruction he leaves in his path. But Goethe understood Faustian striving not just as a human affair but as characteristic of all living things. The theme runs through his extensive scientific writings, in particular, his accounts of the metamorphosis of plants and of the evolution of animals, including man. This talk will consider some of the poet-naturalist’s essays and the light they throw upon modern methods in biology."