Events
Annapolis, Formal Lecture Series 2011-2012
Lectures are held most Fridays at 8:15 p.m. in Francis Scott Key Auditorium. They are free and open to the public. For more information on the lecture series, please call 410-626-2539.
| Date | Speaker | Title |
| August 26 | Ms. Pamela Kraus Dean St. John's College Annapolis |
Thoughts on Antony and Cleopatra |
| September 2 | Ms. Fawn Trigg Tutor St. John's College Annapolis |
Elizabeth Bishop's Visits to St. Elizabeths |
| September 9 | Professor Paolo Palmieri Department of History and Philosophy of Science University of Pittsburgh |
Galileo's Inclined Plane Experiment |
| September 16 | Mr. William Braithwaite Tutor St. John's College Annapolis |
The Supreme Court's "Judicial Power" Under Article III |
| September 23 |
Bill Charlap Jazz Trio | Concert |
| September 30 (Steiner Lecture) |
Mr. Barry Mazur Department of Mathematics Harvard University |
What Is the Surface Area of a Hedgehog? →Download Handout |
| October 7 | Long Weekend | No lecture |
| October 14 |
Professor Steven Nadler Department of Philosophy University of Wisconsin- Madison |
Why was Spinoza Excommunicated? |
| October 21 | Parker String Quartet | Concert |
| October 28 | All College Seminar | |
| November 4 | Ms. Eva Brann Tutor St. John's College Annapolis |
Talking, Reading, Writing, Listening: A Talk for Parents and Students |
| November 11 |
Professor Josh Greene Department of Psychology Harvard University |
Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality: Why Cognitive Science Matters for Ethics |
| November 18 | Mr. Jay Smith Tutor St. John's College Santa Fe |
Aeneas – A Man in Arms |
| November 25 | Thanksgiving Holiday | No lecture |
| December 2 | Mr. Gabriel Pihas Tutor St. John's College Annapolis |
Dante's Beatrice: Between Idolatry and Iconoclasm → Pre-lecture seminar |
| December 9 | King William Players | Performance |
| December 16 - January 8 | Winter Vacation | No lectures |
| January 13 | Mr. Matthew Davis Tutor St. John's College Santa Fe |
Is Man the Measure of All Things?: Plato’s Analysis of Relativism |
| January 20 | Ms. Mera Flaumenhaft Tutor St. John's College Annapolis |
The Story of Jonah |
| January 27 | Mr. Jonathan Wells | A Poetry Reading from Train Dance |
| February 3 | Long Weekend | No lecture |
| February 10 | Nordic Voices | Concert |
| February 17 | Mr. Jeffrey Smith Tutor St. John's College Annapolis |
Stendhal's Prophecy for Liberal Democracy: Thoughts on The Red and the Black |
| February 24 | Professor Colin Dickson Professor of French, Emeritus Washington College |
Michel de Montaigne’s Singular Essays: The Man, the Book, the Legacy |
| March 2 - March 18 | Spring Vacacation | No lectures |
| March 23 | Mr. Marcel Widzisz Tutor St. John's College Annapolis |
On the Dionysiac Element in Greek Tragedy |
| March 30 (Steiner Lecture) |
Professor Christoph Wolff Adams University Professor Department of Music Harvard University |
Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in Perspective: History, Text, Music, and Theology |
| April 6 | All College Seminar | |
| April 13 | Ms. Margaret Kirby Tutor St. John's College Annapolis |
(Lucretius) |
| April 20 | Mr. Louis Petrich Tutor St. John's College Annapolis |
To Meet With Macbeth |
| April 27 | King William Players | Performance |
| May 4 | Reality Weekend | No lecture |
| May 11 | Commencement Weekend | No lecture |
Lecture Summaries
Galileo's Inclined Plane Experiment
September 9 - Paolo Palmieri
Galileo had a life-long adventure with balls rolling down wooden beams. I call that adventure Galileo’s inclined plane experiment. The lecture is a concise history of Galileo’s inclined plane experiment, accompanied by philosophical reflections on its implications. It is a history in that it tells a story concerning events occurring in the past. It is also a philosophy in that it deploys an integrated historical-philosophical methodology, inspired by pragmatism, and reflects on what we can learn from those events and on their significance for our understanding of experimental practice in science.
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The Supreme Court's "Judicial Power" Under Article II
September 16 - William Braithwaite
The Constitution, by dividing the National Government into three branches (in Articles I, II, and III), recognizes some kind of distinction between the three species of political power—Legislative, Judicial, and Executive. What is this distinction? In particular, what is the difference between Congress’s power, under Article I, and the Supreme Court’s, under Article III?
I will explore this question using two Supreme Court opinions a century apart, in which the Court expresses different, perhaps opposing, ideas of its own power. My guiding question is whether these two contrary ideas are in some way related to the re-thinking of what Nature is, that came into the foreground of science and philosophy during the 16th and 17th centuries, with the work of Bacon, Galileo, Newton, and their contemporaries and followers.
I’ll start with my law practice experience, and conclude with some speculations on the relation between political speech and philosophic speech.
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What is the Surface Area of a Hedgehog?
September 30 - Barry Mazur
Well, I don’t know the answer to the question of the title and no hedgehog will be harmed, or even mentioned again in my lecture. The concept of area is one of the many things of interest in Euclid’s Elements, and is familiar to all who have been through the freshman program here at St. John’s. There are many ways to approach it. Archimedes, for example sometimes likes to convert the problem of computing area to computing something akin to weight. I’ll spend this hour considering these approaches and how they touch on broader issues in mathematical thought such as analogy, heuristic, paradox, and something I’ll call characterization (a version of axiomatization). As for prior reading, absolutely none (except what you may have already read in Euclid) is needed, but I will be turning again and again to Proposition 37 of Book I of the Elements:
Triangles which are on the same base and in the same parallels equal one another.
So if you want to read one page in preparation, take a look at the statement and proof of that marvelous proposition.
→Download Handout
Professor Mazur’s 2003 book, Imagining Numbers: (particularly the square root of minus fifteen) is currently available in the college bookstore.
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Why was Spinoza Excommunicated?
October 14 - Steven Nadler
In 1656, Baruch Spinoza (1632-1670), then only 23 years old, was "excommunicated" from the Amsterdam Portuguese Jewish community with the harshest ban ever issued by that community's rabbis and lay leaders. He would go on to become one of the most important and radical philosophers in modern history. His writings – including his philosophical masterpiece, the Ethics, and the incendiary Theological-Political Treatise, a work that one contemporary critic called "a book forged in hell by the devil himself" – were attacked with great vitriol by religious leaders, civil authorities, even fellow philosophers. In this lecture, we will examine the excommunication of Spinoza and several possible explanations for his permanent ostracism from Judaism, using this as an occasion also to consider his most important ideas about God, religion, and society.
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Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality: Why Cognitive Science Matters for Ethics
November 11 - Josh Greene
How does the moral brain work, and how can it work better?... In this talk I'll review evidence old and new for the dual-process theory of moral judgment, according to which moral judgments are driven by both automatic emotional responses and controlled reasoning processes. I'll argue that these distinctive cognitive processes map onto competing moral philosophies, respectively typified by philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill. I'll then consider the respective functions of automatic and controlled processes. Automatic processes are like the point-and-shoot settings on a camera, efficient but inflexible.
Controlled processes are like a camera's manual mode, inefficient but flexible. Putting these theses together, I'll argue that we often make poor use of our moral brains, using point-and-shoot morality to deal with problems it can't handle. I'll argue that when it comes to dealing with peculiarly modern moral problems, we should think more like Mill and less like Kant.
"In that part of the book of my memory before which little can be read, there is a heading, which says: ‘Incipit vita nova: Here begins the new life'. . . ."
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Dante's Beatrice: Between Idolatry and Iconoclasm
December 2 - Gabriel Pihas
The SCI and Mr. MacFarland invite you to a discussion of Dante's La Vita Nuova this Friday, December 2nd, from 7 - 8 in the Conversation Room. This will provide some great background discussion for Mr. Pihas' Friday night lecture, "Dante's Beatrice: Between Idolatry and Iconoclasm."
La Vita Nuova is Dante's account of his life in relation to Beatrice, the woman he fell in love with at the age of nine. Part poetry, part philosophy, and part autobiography, it is a book that provides some key insight into the Comedy, and in particular to Dante's view of Beatrice.
The pre-lecture seminar reading will cover the following chapters from La Vita Nuova: 1 - 3, 18 - 22, 26, 29, 31, and 35 - 42. (These chapters are quite short.) Copies of the reading will be made available in the coffee shop and library later in the week, but copies of La Vita Nuova are available both in the library and online if you want to get a head start.
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Is Man the Measure of All Things?: Plato’s Analysis of Relativism
January 13 - Matthew Davis
In our time relativism is a widely accepted view both outside and especially inside academia. In a difficult passage in his dialogue Theaetetus (151d7-154d3), Plato presents the argument for relativism of Protagoras, the sophist famous for his teaching that each human being is the measure of all things. In my lecture I will offer an interpretation of this passage that will make clear the core of Protagoras’ argument as well as its relevance for our situation.