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Santa Fe Community Calendar Online
January/February 2012

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Lectures

Please join us for the Winter 2012 Dean’s Lecture and Concert Series. Lectures will be held in the Great Hall at 8 p.m. unless otherwise noted.

Thucydides, Corcyra, and the Meaning of Words
Friday, January 20, 8 p.m.
Worrell Lecture
Great Hall, Peterson Student Center
Caleb Thompson, tutor, St. John’s College, Santa Fe
There is no charge for admission

In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides describes the violent political conflict that swept through Greek cities in the years of the war, and he notes the effect of this conflict on the moral vocabulary.

He comments: Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them (emphasis added). Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal supporter; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question incapacity to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting a justifiable means of self-defense. (Landmark, 199-200)

This passage seems to shine a light on the philosophical concerns of Socrates and Plato who were Thucydides’ contemporaries. At the same time, it may remind us of the political abuses of language in our own troubled times, and that the distance between ourselves and the Greeks is not so great. But did Thucydides in fact say that words changed their meaning? Although this sort of translation goes back at least as far as Hobbes, more recently scholars have argued that Thucydides is saying only that people changed their evaluations of actions, not the meaning of their words. In this lecture, Mr. Thompson will consider in detail not only the difficulties of a translation like the one above, but also the reasons both textual and a priori for thinking that this translation, or something like it, might be correct.

Caleb Thompson has been a tutor with St. John’s College, Santa Fe, since 1996. He received a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Virginia in 1994 and was a postdoctoral fellow from 1994 to 1996 at SUNY Buffalo, where he was also a Hourani Lecturer.

Sir Isaac Newton's Encounter with Judaism
Wednesday, February 8, 3:15 p.m.
Lecture co-sponsored with Kol BeRamah Torah Learning Center of Santa Fe
Junior Common Room, Peterson Student Center
Matt Goldish, director, Melton Center for Jewish Studies at Ohio State University
There is no charge for admission

Sir Isaac Newton had very little interest in Jews, but a great deal of interest in Judaism and its history. He combed the works of Jewish authors and Christian Hebraists for information relevant to his own researches in history, Christian theology, calendrics, and other topics. As Mr. Goldish notes, this encounter with Judaism was very significant to Newton's thought, but a reader of his published works alone would know almost nothing about it.

Matt Goldish's interests have centered on the seventeenth century. His monograph, Judaism in the Theology of Sir Isaac Newton, deals with questions about the impact of Jewish ideas and literature on European intellectuals at the dawn of the Enlightenment. Much of his writing, however, concerns the Western Sepharadi Diaspora and the Portuguese Conversos of Amsterdam, London, and Hamburg. Professor Goldish’s book, The Sabbatean Prophets, deals with the role of prophecy in the great messianic movement of Shabbatai Zvi, which swept the Jewish world in 1665. His latest book is Jewish Questions: Responsa on Sephardic Life in the Early Modern Period (2008). Along with Professor Daniel Frank, he is the editor of Rabbinic Culture and Its Critics: Jewish Authority, Dissent, and Heresy in Medieval and Early Modern Times (2008).

Prophecy, Poetry, and Philosophy in Dante's Comedy
Friday, February 17, 8 p.m.
Worrell Lecture
Great Hall, Peterson Student Center
Steven Berg, associate professor of philosophy at Bellarmine University
There is no charge for admission

This lecture will provide an analysis of the central cantos of Dante’s Comedy, Purgatorio XIV-XX. In particular, it will offer an interpretation of the speech that Dante's Virgil offers there, a speech in which he identifies the core of man's nature with love and asserts that love is also “the seed...of every virtue and of every action deserving punishment.” Whereas Virgil’s account of man’s nature draws heavily on the tradition of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, his assumption that the truth of love and the requirements of justice can be rendered harmonious is rooted in the teachings of prophecy or biblical religion. His speech then appears to be a fusion of philosophy and revelation wherein the former is made subordinate to the latter. This first impression, however, will be shown to be undermined by the context in which Dante has embedded Virgil’s speech and the limitations and errors that he has built into that speech itself. Accordingly, it will be shown that in the argument of the Comedy, Dante has put revelation or prophecy in the service of poetry and above all philosophy, and not, as is most often assumed, philosophy in the service of prophecy or revelation.

Steven Berg is an associate professor of philosophy at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky. He received an M.A. in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College, Santa Fe, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from the Catholic University of America. He has published articles on Aristophanes, Plato, Maimonides, and Dante, and has recently published a book on Plato entitled Eros and the Intoxications of Enlightenment: On Plato’s Symposium.

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