St. John's College (Santa Fe) Lectures

Audio recording of a lecture given by John Peters on March6, 2026 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series.  The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “As far as we know the most complex thing the universe has brought forth, besides itself, is the human mind.  Among many other things, minds know things.  But what should we make of the fundamental fact that knowledge is housed in such fragile, forgetful, and short-lived vessels as human beings?  Why do minds die—or do they?  Since the origin of writing, and likely long before that, humans found ways to externalize mind.  In complex societies, the library is the key symbol of mind embedded in matter.  At least since Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus, thinkers have been anxious about this externalization.  Was he right to criticize writing?  And how might we think about the would-be total library of the internet, and of its administration by AI-intoxicated techCaesars whose ambition often seems to be to by-pass death altogether?  This lecture pursues very basic questions,drawing on (at least) the Phaedrus and works by Jorge Luis Borges.”

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Ken Wolfe onFebruary 6, 2026 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series.  The Dean’s Office has provided this descriptionof the event: “In the Origin of Species, Darwin points to analogies between biological and linguistic evolution and classification.  How strong are those analogies?  Why do they exist?  What do they tell us about human evolution?  The first part of the lecture will discuss Darwin’s Origin of Species, focusing in particular on his diagram of the ‘tree of life,’ the definition of species, and the relation between species,varieties, and individuals.  We shall consider some issues raised in the Descent of Man in order to see how Darwinthought about human nature.  It will also include some considerations of more recent discoveries in genetics and how they bear on these questions.  The second partof the lecture will focus on linguistic evolution, on both what we know and don’t know about the development and beginnings of language(s).  It will discuss in particular the Indo-European family of languages, spoken by nearly half of the world’s population.  Are all the world’s languages related?  Do they have a single origin?  This lecture will end by returning to Aristotle and considering whether his definition of man as the animal with λόγος can still be defended."

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor emeritus Howard Fisher on February 18, 2026 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "Overland telegraph technology implicitly embodied a familiar image of electricity as being a mobile substance confined to conductors. But phenomena encountered in undersea telegraph cables presented a competing image, one far more suggestive of Faraday’s image of tension in a dielectric. Subsequent production of electromagnetic waves could be seen as the ultimate practical expression of Faraday’s 'tension' image. But if they were to serve as a communications medium, electromagnetic waves had not only to be produced but be detected; and although various detecting mechanisms were developed, their operation was mysterious: the received images of electric current appeared to provide little clarity."

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Claudia Hauer on January 30, 2026 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “Emmanuel Levinas is a moral philosopher of the highest order. A student of Martin Heidegger’s, Levinas absorbed the tools of the phenomenological method, yet was repulsed by his teacher’s (at best) moral neutrality and (at worst) moral depravity. Levinas puts his fluid method to work in the volume Totality and Infinity in order to distinguish between Totalities (which include political regimes) that can ideally administer a lukewarm morality in the form of justice and human rights, and Infinities, which give expression to the infinite individuality of each human being. Levinas grounds his ethics in his Talmudic conviction that morality originates in our duties to the poor, the widow and the orphan. His secular ethics in Totality and Infinity focuses on looking into the eyes of the stranger, the Other, and opening ourselves to an individual with a unique story to tell. Levinas cautions us against putting strangers into broad totalizing categories, such as the ‘abject poor and homeless,’ or the ‘suit-clad professional.’ Levinas reminds us that human moral sentiment originates in our ability to be surprised, moved, and touched by the infinity of the Other. Our St. John’s College community reflects Levinasian ethics in our willingness to meet one another in and out of the classroom, and engage in the play of free discourse with open-minded curiosity. In this talk, I will endeavor to outline the basics of Levinas’s ethics.”

Audio recording of a lecture given by Andrew Nicholson on January 23, 2026 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali (c. 4th century CE) have been an inspiration for philosophers and yoga practitioners for over 1500 years. For just as long, the meaning of certain terms in Patañjali’s celebrated text have been in dispute. One such dispute is the question of what Patañjali meant when he encouraged ‘dedication to the Lord’ (īśvara-pranidhāna, YS 2.32). Worshippers of Śiva and Viṣnu in medieval India took this to be a clear reference to an omnipotent, omniscient God, the source of all creation. By contrast, some western scholars in the 20th century understood this ‘Lord’ not as a God who possesses any agency of His own, but rather as one who exists merely as a passive object of meditation. The historian of religions Mircea Eliade, for instance, called Him the ‘archetypical yogi.’ I will argue, based on evidence from other first millennium CE works in Sanskrit, that there is a third possibility. Patañjali’s Lord is neither an absolute creator God nor a purely passive ‘archetype,’ but rather a compassionate, eternally liberated being who repeatedly takes embodiment in the world to help yogis break free from the afflictions that bind them to suffering.”

Audio recording of a lecture given by Erik Baker on December12, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series.  The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “People who are concerned about technological change,or who resist the adoption of new technologies, are often depicted as motivated by either an irrational fear of novelty or a purely material concern for their livelihoods.  In this lecture, however, I show that many people in the modern U.S. who’ve sought to live and work with technical methods deemed obsolete have instead been animated by their desire to pursue aset of virtues they feel they could not achieve utilizingstate-of-the-art technologies.  I focuson three distinctive cultural milieus: the Catholic Worker movement led by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in the 1930s and 1940s; the back-to-the-land movement ofthe 1960s and 1970s, whose ideals were eloquently expressed by the poet and farmer Wendell Berry; and the ‘lo-fi’ music movement of the 1990s, exemplified by artists such as Pavement, Guided by Voices, and the Mountain Goats.  To a surprising extent, these movements all prized a common set of virtues, including humility, self-sufficiency, and creative expression, which they believed they could only cultivate by working with ‘outdated’ technology.  But theydiffered in their assessment of the extent to which it was possible for individuals to fully perform these virtues without broader changes to the political and economic structures of modern society.”

Audio recording of a lecture given by Antoine Pageau-St-Hilaire on December 5, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “In both the Republic and the Laws, the leader of the philosophical conversation claims that the goodness of the πóλις and its citizens depend on the goodness or fineness of its civic play (παιδιά) (cf. Resp. 558b3-5, Leg. 803c2-e2). Why? Arguably, and following several hints from both dialogues, because good play and good education coincide. But even if this is true, we are then faced with a further question: why does good education coincide with good play? Why should good education be playful, or good play educative? At a crucial point in Book VII of Plato’s Republic, Socrates tells Glaucon that play is best suited to the education of a free person (έλεύθερος) (536e1-537a1). And it is quite clear from the context that he does not simply mean moral-political education, but also and chiefly philosophical education. In this lecture, I propose to examine the reasons that may lead Socrates to affirm such a thing, and for his interlocutor(s) to seemingly accept his affirmation (cf. 537a3). Why is liberal education playful? Or why is play especially suited to liberal education? How does this thought – although undeveloped in the context of its affirmation – relate to Socrates’ other famous comments on the nature of good education in the Republic, most notably that genuine education is a conversion of the soul and not a transmission of knowledge (521c6; cf. 518b6-d7)? Taking a close look at relevant passages from the text, I shall address these questions with the hope that they not only help us get a better grasp of Plato’s vision of good education, but also, and perhaps most importantly, that they help us understand better our own contemporary educational experiences.”

Audio recording of a lecture given by Erik Dempsey on November 14, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “This talk offers a close reading of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, focusing on the discussion of the economy of salvation in chapters 5-8. It looks especially at the relationship between the Mosaic Law and the New Covenant, what Paul means by ‘sin,’ and how his view of the sinful condition of human beings grounds his understanding of their relationship to God and Jesus Christ. The Epistle to the Romans is one of the most disputed texts ever written. There are full, line-by-line commentaries about it by at least four authors who often appear on the St. John’s program, St. Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin and (perhaps surprisingly) John Locke, and extended discussions by several others. While the subject of this talk is Romans, it looks to the readings and reflections of other program authors to try to make sense of Paul’s thoughts and to explain some key alternatives to it.”

Audio recording of a lecture given by Annapolis Assistant Dean Ron Haflidson on November 7, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “In this lecture, I explore the largely neglected and perhaps totally wrong possibility that when Jesus spoke about “hell”, he wasn’t talking about the afterlife. The inquiry proceeds by focusing on Jesus’ words in the Gospel of Matthew, which is the New Testament text with by far the most references to hell.”

Audio recording of a lecture given by David Miller on October 24, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “In the summer of 1965, Austrian-American composer Ernst Krenek returned to his native country to deliver and address at the unveiling of a memorial plaque in honor of Anton Webern in Mittersill, the village in the Austrian Alps where Webern had been shot and killed by an American soldier twenty years earlier. In the summer of 1968, Krenek’s Instant Remembered for soprano, narrator, orchestra, and tape, a work inspired by his time in Mittersill three years earlier, was premiered at the Fourth International Webern Festival in Hanover, New Hampshire. This talk considers Krenek’s two elegies for Webern as a means of exploring his experiences as an émigré composer, the evolving relationship between Austrian music culture and musical modernism pre- and post-World War II, and the interplay between artistic expression and polemics. A broader theme connecting all of these topics is music’s power to reshape time and memory, reordering the past in order to imagine different futures, as well as the limits of that power.”

Audio recording of a lecture given by Michael Davis on October 3, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: "Those living in the various versions of the best city described in Plato's Republic are to feel perfectly at home, but none of those present for the description is at home. The education of the philosophers who are to rule in the best of these versions of the city is to include solid geometry although we are told that it has yet to be discovered. We are to read the 'big letters' of justice in the city as a way to read the 'little letters' of justice in the individual. This proves to mean looking at something on the outside so as to see what is on the inside. But if we can see the inside, is it still the inside? Can we ever see the inside of a human being? These questions, at first not obviously connected, all point to the need to read the Republic as self-critical, with a surface revealing a depth that, despite the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy, becomes available to us poetically."

Audio recording of a lecture given by Qiu Lin on September 26, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: "In Mencius 7A35, Tao Ying poses a dilemma to Mencius: Suppose Shun's father had committed murder—what would Shun have done? Mencius famously answers that Shun would have 'cast aside the world (tian-xia) as if discarding a worn shoe. He would have secretly carried the old man on his back and fled to the edge of the Sea, living there happily thereafter and forgetting about the world'. This answer has sparked intense debate among Confucian scholars throughout history. Despite the wide range of views on this issue, however, scholars generally construe this case as a classic conflict of values, where the Mencian Shun would have chosen filial piety over justice. In this talk I offer a different reading of this case, one that emphasizes Shun's transformation as a person—from a widely revered emperor to a fugitive who cut himself off from all but one significant relationship in his life—and asks this question: How is it possible that after undergoing such a change, Shun is still able to live 'happily thereafter'? By shifting our focus, I argue that what Shun would have done is far more morally demanding than simply letting his father face his due punishment. In my view, if Shun had chosen the latter, he would have been a just emperor, but fallen short of being a sage king by Mencius' standards."

Audio recording of a lecture given by Daryl Haggard on September 19, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “It’s been a fantastic decade for black hole studies, particularly for Sagittarius A (Sgr A*), the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Multiple Galactic Center research groups, the Event Horizon Telescope, and LIGO/Virgo continue to bring rapid-fire new observations to sharpen our understanding of these exotic objects, research highlighted by the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics and the 2017 and 2020 Nobel Prizes in Physics. In this talk, I will discuss the new Event Horizon Telescope image of Sgr A*. I’ll describe its unique variability and put it in the context of other time domain phenomena in the Galactic Center, traced out over more than 20 years of observations of M87*, the supergiant elliptical galaxy with several trillion stars in the constellation Virgo. I will also briefly explore how we can continue to push the frontiers of black hole research with existing and next-generation observatories.”

Audio recording of a lecture given by Tutor Emeritus John Cornell on September 12, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: "Dante’s Comedy is widely assumed to champion the teachings of Thomas Aquinas. Surely the test case for this conventional view is the episode in Paradiso where Dante imagines meeting up with the great defender of the faith. There, to our surprise, Thomas offers an extravagant tribute to the wisdom of Solomon, wisdom that he says has never been surpassed. Really? Not even by Christ? Thomas had better explain his accidental heresy. Does his apologetic performance succeed? Or is it part of the comedy of the Comedy?"

Audio recording of a lecture given by Tutor Emeritus Phil LeCuyer on September 5, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: "In this lecture arrays are contrasted to sequences as paradigms of thought. Sequences are based on causation. What are arrays based on? Several examples of arrays will be considered, including the human face. When viewed and understood as an array, what can a face tell us about being human?"

Audio recording of a lecture given by Dean Sarah Davis on August 29, 2025 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "St. John’s students often have the experience of coming to beautiful realizations and insights that seem to push past the ordinary—to touch that which is most important about life, about being human, about the world. But so too do we know what it feels like to plummet back to the ground, to confusion and questioning. The lives of two principal and beloved characters in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Pierre and Andrei, are marked by this kind of movement, being drawn in, or up, or beyond, only to find themselves seemingly back at the beginning, lost again. This lecture explores the pattern in these characters—a kind of blooming and wilting and re-blooming—and suggests that, rather than revealing an absurdity in the truth-seeking character of human beings, these rises and falls point to our most potent possibility."

Audio recording of a lecture given by Philip Ording on May 2, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “There is no shortage of evidence that professional mathematicians describe their work in aesthetic terms, but the terms they use, at least publicly, are limited. The oft-repeated ‘beauty’ and ‘elegance’ may be important components of mathematical taste, but they fail to convey its range or subtlety or how it relates to literary and aesthetic experiences beyond mathematics. This talk will highlight the material differences in logic, diction, imagery, and even typesetting that give tone and flavor to mathematics.”

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Kit Slover on April 25, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “In the final act of Shakespeare’s Hamlet the northern prince stumbles upon the grave of Ophelia, leaps in, and declares himself to the funeral goers: ‘This is I, Hamlet the Dane’ (V.1, 279). By calling himself the Dane, Hamlet seems to identify himself as the rightful king of Denmark—as though the grave, in particular, is his sovereign territory. The grave itself was dug by a sexton who took up his profession ‘on the very day that young Hamlet was born’ (V.1, 152), which also happens to be the day ‘our last king Hamlet overcame Fortinbras’ (V.1, 148), seizing the Norwegian lands of the latter. This acquisition is familiar to us from the beginning of the play because the ghost of the former king has appeared ‘in the very armor he had on/When he the ambitious Norway combated’ (I.1, 71-71). And the appearance of this ghost has set off a chain of events resulting in the death of the women into whose grave Hamlet leaps. In this lecture, I will attempt to understand this strange scene. Why is it here, in a grave with such uncanny ties to his own birth, the ghost of his father, and the ultimate fate of Denmark that Hamlet asserts his sovereign rights? Hamlet cries, ‘This is I, Hamlet the Dane,’ but what, in short, does he mean by the word this?”

Audio recording of a lecture given by David Hayes and Jeremy Schwartz on April 18, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series.  The Dean’s Office has providedthis description of the event: “The ‘Love Test’ in King Lear is widely understood to be the central puzzle in one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays.  As part of a political succession plan, it seems unnecessary.  As part of aloving relationship between parents and children, it seems grotesque.  It doesn’t even seem to be a real test, sincethe result is supposed to be pre-ordained.  While it is clear that the disastrous results of the test set the wholetragedy in motion, neither we nor the characters within the play seem to grasp the ‘why’ of the test itself.  In thistalk, we will argue that the ‘Love Test’ is best understood by reflecting on the vexed question of the ends of the parent-child love relationship.  Surprisingly, Shakespeare challenges the view that the filial pious child solves this vexed question, opening the possibility that parent-child love is tragic.”

Audio recording of a lecture given by Tutor Emeritus Howard Fisher on April 9, 2025 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: “Galileo’s mathematical treatment of ‘speed’ perennially draws questions about both the validity and presuppositions of his argument. But perhaps we can make more sense of Galilean speed when we find in it traces of Homeric speed: the speed of ‘speedy Achilles.’ We may also find some Homeric grounding for an algebraic form of discourse exemplified by the Taylor Series—a form that moves uneasily between favoring being and favoring fact.”