The St. John’s College Formal Lecture Series in Annapolis and the Dean’s Lecture Series in Santa Fe are free and open to the public, unless specified otherwise.

Recordings and transcripts of lectures are available on the SJC Digital Archives site. Explore some lectures below.

Lecture Highlights

Math & Science

• Aristotle on Respiration: The Origins of Functional Anatomy Audio File
• Beyond Point-and-Shoot morality: Why Cognitive Science Matters for Ethics Audio File
• Evolution as a Cause Audio File
• Brightness at Night: An Old Astronomical Puzzle and its Modern Answers Audio File
• Einstein Between War and Fiction Audio File
• Leibniz’s Monadology and the Philosophical Foundations of Non-Locality in Quantum Mechanics PDF File
• Subjective Sensory Experience and the Fallacy of Neural Codes Audio File
• The Power of a Point: Euclid’s Elements and Steiner’s Geometrical Reflections Audio File
• What is a Q.E.F.? Reflections on the Nature of Geometrical Making Audio File
• What is the Surface Area of a Hedgehog? Audio File

Politics & Economics

Audio File Who Should Elect the President?

PDF File Tocqueville’s American Odyssey

Audio File Living Well: Aristotle, on Democracy, Equality, and the Politics of Life

Audio File Political Order and Political Decay: the American Political System in a Time of Global Upheaval

Audio File Krishna versus the British Empire: the Bhagavad Gita During the Indian Independence Struggle

Audio File Can Taxes be Fair? Should They Be?

Audio File Religion, Enlightenment, and the American Character

Audio File A Short Talk by Judge Michael Mukasey

Audio File Stabilizing Currency: Locke on Money, Morality, and Natural Law

Music

PDF File The Musical Universe and Mozart’s Magic Flute

PDF File Towards “A New Birth of Freedom” - Tragedy and Comedy, 1786 Schiller’s Don Carlos and Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro

PDF File Children of Orpheus: the Dialogue Between Ancient and Modern Music

PDF File Music and the Idea of a World: on Plato and Schopenhauer

Literature

PDF File The Anger of Achilles, and its Source: a Reading of Book One of the Iliad

Audio File To Meet with Macbeth

  Audio FileWhy Should I read James Joyce’s Ulysses if it’s Only Going to Make My Head Hurt?

Audio File On Homer’s Gods

PDF File Why Should I read James Joyce’s Ulysses if it’s Only Going to Make My Head Hurt?

Audio File Classics and History: Historical and Literary Contexts in the Reading of Sanskrit Texts

PDF File The Winnowing oar: Odysseus’ Final Journey

Audio File Nighttime Walks with Proust: “Le Pays Obscur” par le Clair de Lune

Audio File Poetry Reading from “Train Dance”

Philosophy & Religion

Audio File Is Man the Measure of All Things? Plato’s Analysis of Relativism

Audio File Teleology as Death Wish: a Nietzschean Critique of Aristotle

Audio File Against Time

PDF File The Soul’s Choice of Life

PDF File Why Read Books?

PDF File Everyone Sees How You Appear; Few Touch What You Are: Machiavelli on Human Nature

Audio File Does Beauty Have a Place in Liberal Education?

PDF File Going for Gold: Sergio Leone Reads Plato in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Audio File Learning to Read Moses Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed

Audio File Dante’s Beatrice: Between Idolatry and Iconoclasm

Audio File Exploring the History of the Qur’ān: From Canonisation to Textual Criticism

Audio File Robert E. Howard: Boxing and the Cult of Masculinity

Audio File A Commentary on Motherhood as Presented in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex