Audio recording of a lecture given by Ethan Linck on February 16, 2024 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "The elevational distributions of organisms have long fascinated scientists, an interest that has burgeoned with expectations of upslope movement of species in response to climate warming. Yet tests of this hypothesis have produced conflicting results, perhaps due to varied approaches and assumptions. In this lecture I will explore the historical roots of the concept of the elevational range in ecology and evolutionary biology, highlighting how it has been treated as both a byproduct of other phenomena and an object of study in its own right. I will then argue that this divide has created ontological and statistical issues for the field, and suggest areas for improvement."

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Howard Fisher on February 23, 2024 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: “Faraday made use of numerous electrical measuring instruments; but what, exactly, did they measure? What properties of electricity are “measurable” at all? Faraday’s efforts to identify these properties raised a question which Meno would have recognized: how can we know the properties of electricity unless we first know what electricity actually is?”

Audio recording of a lecture given by Dave Shafer on March 27, 2024 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "The philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) was the founder of phenomenology, a field that led eventually to Sartre’s existentialism, among other offshoots. Phenomenology is a systematic way of investigating certain aspects of human experience. Psychologist Clark Moustakas (1902-1987) refined some of these techniques and developed transcendental phenomenology, mainly for therapeutic use. The goal is to have everything perceived freshly, as if for the first time. That means approaching an experience while devoid of prejudices, and any prior assumptions. As Husserl put it – “to go back to the things themselves” without ourselves, our personalities, and our history getting in the way of us having direct unmediated experiences. A quite unintended use of this idea turns out to be a very powerful way to approach problem solving in any field and to be more inventive and creative. We will show some examples of this in my own field of hi-tech optical system designs, which has led me to have over 200 patents so far, but mostly some every-day non-technical use will be demonstrated. The key is always to identify and question assumptions you have made."

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Frank Pagano on March 29, 2024 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: “In chapter 15 of The Prince Machiavelli famously recommends “going to the effectual truth of the thing rather than to the imagination of it.” If political writers wish to be effective, then they must act on the truth that all the world is comprised of fools and knaves. This fact turns out to be a great good fortune because the fools and knaves can be tricked into Machiavellian orders. The premise of the lecture is that we moderns have been twice tricked into the contemporary order of things. Machiavelli’s comedy, Mandragola, displays the first trick. It portrays a young man who forms a conspiracy to convince a (beautiful) married woman to sleep with him. The conspiracy includes her husband, mother and confessor. The Machiavellian conspiracy is an enterprise to subdue the Christian conscience. It is wildly successful, and the comedy ends as the conspirators happily march to church together. The second trickster is Francis Bacon. He does not openly expose his trick, but Shakespeare does in the comedy (?) All’s Well That Ends Well. It presents a clever woman who conspires to trick a willful man into consummating unwillingly their marriage. He is tricked into destroying the virtue of filial piety. The marriage is consummated, but All’s Well does not end as the Mandragola. Who are the fools?”

Audio recording of a tutor panel given by tutors Alison Chapman, Charlie Barrett, Krishnan Venkatesh, & Jay Smith as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: “In his preface to the First Folio (1623), Shakespeare’s friend and fellow author Ben Johnson described the bard as a “monument without a tomb,” attempting to capture Shakespeare’s enduring vitality as both poet and playwright. St. John’s College students know deeply the truth of these words, as the bard lives in so many parts of our campus – in our seminars, in our tutorials, and on stage in the Great Hall. In honor of the 400th anniversary of the publication of the First Folio, the Dean’s Lecture Committee is pleased to present a Tutor Panel that will consider major scenes from Shakespeare’s plays. The talks given by the Tutors will be in conversation with the scenes performed by Chrysostomos earlier in the week. We hope that members of the community will attend both events and bring their thoughts and reflections for the question period.”

Audio recording of a lecture given by Pierre-Julien Harter on April 12, 2024 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: “Buddhist metaphysics, especially in the Madhyamika version which insists on the emptiness of all things, has often been interpreted as anti-metaphysical. Yet, it seems that Buddhist philosophers were still after the same question Aristotle wondered about – what is it for something to be? – even when they answered that all things are empty of essence or inherent nature. Taking a detour through Aristotelian and Medieval philosophies, this talk attempts to use a more historical definition of metaphysics to argue that a similar feature can be found in both Western metaphysics and in Buddhist Mādhyamika thought, a double approach displayed in the special and general metaphysics of the Medievals and of the two truths of Buddhist thinkers. This supports reading Buddhist Mādhyamika texts as offering metaphysical accounts of reality, but also, conversely, allows us to enrich both our conception of the content of metaphysics and of the kind of activity it claims to be.”

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Llyd Wells on April 19, 2024 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "Climatic change demands of us climactic change. We have yet fully to admit it. Perhaps we never shall. Can we be serious about climate change? How? That's the core of this lecture, which will try to be serious scientifically, philosophically and literarily."

Audio recording of a lecture given by Steven Crowell on April 26, 2024 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: “Of all the writings Heidegger published after Being and Time, “The Question Concerning Technology” (1950) is surely the most widely taught and discussed. It is not hard to understand why. Since 1950, our dependence on technical devices, and the environmental consequences of technological manipulation of nature, have only become more oppressive, and Heidegger’s essay provides an intuitively powerful expression of the uneasiness we feel. All the same, the text is one of Heidegger’s most obscure, and so it is not easy to assess what Heidegger says about technology and his stated hope of establishing a “free relation” to it through a “thinking” that is other than philosophy. How should we take the measure of a kind of thinking that seems to shun traditional measures like reason and logic for one that has been forgotten since the time of Parmenides? This is the challenge of Heidegger’s approach to technology.”

Audio recording of a lecture given by Dean Sarah Davis on August 30, 2024 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "What do a Greek tragedy and a 20th-century work of philosophy have in common? At first glance, Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations seem worlds apart. However, this lecture suggests that these authors are wrestling with a similar problem, though from different angles -- one we might characterize as tragic, the other, comic. Both texts ultimately call for a reorientation toward the pursuit of knowledge, challenging us to reconsider what it truly means to know anything, especially ourselves."

Audio recording of a lecture given by Andy Davis on September 6, 2024 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "What can poetry teach us about the demands of writing and reading philosophy? In this talk I explore this question through the lens of a few paragraphs at the end of Hegel’s preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, with some passing references to his account of poetry in the Aesthetics lectures. Hegel’s puzzling account of 'der spekulative Satz' [the speculative sentence/proposition] employs a comparison to poetic rhythm in paragraph sixty-one. Just as poetry plays formal meters off of natural accents, speculative expressions of philosophical content rely on a productive conflict between the form of the proposition (subject is predicate) and the unity of the Concept in which such differentiations between subjects, objects and qualities disappear. Poetry provides a model of unity in conflict that produces a 'floating center' of meaning. What might it mean for philosophical thinking to likewise embrace a 'floating center'?"