Audio recording of a lecture given by Larry George on February 28, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “Does Thucydides believe that empire and democracy are compatible? Do war, conquest, domination, and the exploitation of other polities actually safeguard and protect political space for imperial democratic regimes to flourish, or do they instead corrupt, sicken, and poison the democratic body politic? Does imperial wealth and power perhaps function like a powerful, addictive political drug—strengthening, invigorating and revitalizing the polis, while at the same time intoxicating its democratic way of life by rewarding injustice and inflaming internal factionalism and polarization, leading to the demonization and scapegoating of individuals and groups, tyranny, treason, civil war, and other forms of political derangement, including even plagues and epidemics, both biological and political? In this lecture, we will seek clues to the great historian’s own understandings and teachings regarding these matters, by casting a raking light on Thucydides’ use of the strange word ‘pharmakon’, whose various contradictory and complex meanings include both medicine and poison, as well as addictive drug, and which is etymologically related to the curing of political derangement through the apotrapaic expulsion of scapegoars. As Americans embark on a new political era, is it possible that Thucydides’ history (which he called a “possession for all times”) may offer insights into some of the unprecedented challenges facing our country’s foreign policy, and our fragile democracy, today?”

Audio recording of a lecture given by Amir Alexander on February 21, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “On August 10, 1632, the Revisors General of the Society of Jesus met in Rome to pronounce on a simple question: Whether a straight line is composed of an infinite number of distinct points. The proposition seemed trivial, but their decision proved momentous, launching a decades-long battle between two competing visions of mathematics, and of truth. On the one side were the champions of inviolable hierarchy and unchallengeable order; on the other, the advocates of increased pragmatism and tolerance. The battleground was the infinitely small. At stake was the face of modernity, then coming into being.”

Audio recording of a lecture given by Rory Hanlon on February 7, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “In Nicomachean Ethics (NE) I.13, Aristotle asserts that a politician should know the human soul as an eye-doctor knows the whole body. I will try to make sense of this odd claim, arguing that it illuminates crucial features of Aristotelian psychology and our understanding of ‘the human’. Given the size of his corpus, it might be not surprising to find some apparent inconsistencies in his employment of the notion ‘the soul’. Perhaps the most infamous concerns its divisibility: In De Anima (DA) III.9, Aristotle criticizes those, like Plato, who divide the soul in terms of rationality; yet in NE I.13, he asserts that the human soul divides into rational and irrational parts. I argue that we should see this apparent contradiction as evidence of his attentiveness to the different kinds of inquiries, and so the different ways in which we think about souls and persons—either in the theoretical mode of DA or the practical mode of NE. In practical inquiries, we are concerned with a claim’s contribution to some relevant practical goal. Hence, the politician seeks knowledge of the soul to the extent that it helps their practical aims (i.e. to improve souls)—much as an ophthalmologist seeks relevant ‘working knowledge’ of the whole body. Finally, I argue that ordinary life, filled with political and ethical deliberations, exhibits this approach to the human, and so is itself a practical inquiry.”

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor David Carl on January 24, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series.  The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “Tender Buttons is a kind of love story which leads us to ask, “What do we love when we love to read?”  Is it a certain meaning or truth that reading can help us achieve, or is it the experience itself—the act rather than the end of reading?  And if the latter, how important are meaning and truth to this activity of reading?  Tender Buttons is a work of radical literary experimentation, which in its relationship to signification, representation, truth, and meaning is unlike anything we encounter on the St. John’s program (or perhaps, closer to the works we encounter in the music tutorial than to the books we read together in Seminar).  This work provides us with an occasion, and a virtually unique perspective from which to investigate our relationship to reading, truth, meaning, beauty, and pleasure.  At the very gateway of our introduction to philosophic reflection (Plato’s Republic), Socrates refers to “the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry.”  What is this quarrel?  Is it a tension between truth and beauty, which poet Keats insisted were one and the same?  Must a book’s relationship to truth be