Santa Fe Events
Lectures
Spring 2010
Dean's Lecture and Concert Series
Please join us for the Spring 2010 Dean’s Lecture and Concert Series. Following are descriptions of the lectures slated for January and February. Lectures are free and open to the public; evening lectures are held in the Great Hall at 8 p.m., and afternoon lectures are held in the Junior Common Room, Peterson Stuent Center, starting at 3:15 p.m.
Evening Lectures
Same and Other, Image and Reality in Flannery O'Connor's Story with the Unspeakable Name
Friday, January 22, 8 p.m.
Worrell Lecture
Great Hall
Joan Silver, Tutor, St. John’s College, Annapolis
This lecture focuses on “The Artificial Nigger,” a short story by Flannery O’Connor from the collection A Good Man is Hard to Find. This story was both O’Connor’s favorite from among her own work and the one she considered to be her best. The lecture will explore the story’s themes of pride, shame, and fear; same and other; and, finally, hell, purgatory, and grace. Rather than viewing the story as a problem to be solved, this lecture will attempt to allow the story to “hang on and expand in the mind,” following O’Connor’s own advice on how to approach, and enjoy, her short stories.
The Weirdness and Beauty of Leibniz's Philosophy or Why You Are God
CANCELED
Friday, January 29, 8 p.m.
Great Hall
Christia Mercer, Gustave M. Berne Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University
Leibniz was one of the greatest philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists ever, and yet he makes some very weird claims. The lecture will take up these claims and show that you contain the world and that everything exists in a beautiful and perfectly arranged harmony. In the end, despite how un-divine you may feel, you are perfection itself.
The Two Lives of Compassion in Early India
Friday, February 19, 8 p.m.
Great Hall
Simona Sawhney,
Associate Professor, South Asian Literature, University of Minnesota
The concept of karuna (compassion) is significant in two different bodies of texts in early India. It finds a place in aesthetic theory, as one of the nine rasas (or tastes) of aesthetic enjoyment, and it is also a privileged concept in the Buddhist lexicon of ethics. Focusing on the work of the eighth century dramatist Bhavabhuti, this lecture attempts to gauge the political and aesthetic weight of karuna, its reach as well as its limits. How can we map today the space opened by karuna for intervening in discourses that valorized heroism and war?
Uncommon Sense: Thomas Aquinas and John Paul II on Law
Friday, February 26, 8 p.m.
Great Hall
Rev. Michael Sweeney, O.P., President, Dominican School of
Philosophy and Theology
This lecture concerns the treatment of law in Thomas Aquinas and its application in the work of John Paul II. Rev. Sweeney proposes that many, both Catholics and others, have appropriated the scholastic understanding of law through an enlightenment filter, with the consequence that key ideas in St. Thomas (the common good, natural law, conscience) have been poorly understood and improperly applied. John Paul II sought to retrieve and represent the insights of St. Thomas.
Afternoon Lectures
Rousseau and the First Critique of Reason
Wednesday, February 10, 3:15 p.m.
Junior Common Room
Michael Ehrmantraut, Tutor, St. John’s College, Santa Fe
In a note from the 1760s, Kant wrote that Rousseau “set me straight” and brought about profound change in how he understood the purpose of the theoretical life.
In this lecture, Michael Ehrmantraut wishes to suggest that both the central problem of reason in Kant’s thought and the outlines of the solution (presented by his critical philosophy as a whole) are first discovered and developed in Rousseau’s reflection upon the consequences of the cultivation of reason in all areas of modern life. With a view to the upcoming readings in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in Junior Seminar, Ehrmantraut will try to show that the questions in that work may be approached as a response to a problem that comes to light in Rousseau’s treatment of science and education in Emile (especially Bk. III), the work by Rousseau that Kant valued most highly.
Karna Within the Net of the Mahàbhàrata
Wednesday, February 24, 3:15 p.m.
Junior Common Room
Patricia Greer, Tutor, St. John’s College, Santa Fe
This lecture will focus on Karna, the Mahabharata's most fascinating and humanly complex character, who uniquely embodies many of the Mahabharata's central philosophical concerns. The Mahabharatatakes place at the twilight between two ages, when an age of partial truth is ending, and the kali age, the age of darkness, is beginning. While Karna's foil, and brother, Arjuna, is helped by the divine Krishna to bestride this transition, Karna is left to struggle in darkness. Alone, kept ignorant of his fate and of his true self, he is our contemporary, as it were -- for we, the Mahabharata's audience, are caught as well in that same age of kali. Karna is our representative within the vast net of the Mahabharata.
View an archive of past lectures here.