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Santa Fe Community Calendar Online
July/August 2009
concerts | lectures | seminars
LECTURES
Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series
July 1, 2009
Junior Common Room
3:00 p.m.
Dan Harrell, tutor, St. John's College, Annapolis
Does Beauty Have a Place in Liberal Education?
Does beauty have a place in liberal education? I want to offer several reasons in this lecture for why we might say no, mainly to start a conversation about what stronger reasons there could be for saying yes. In giving these reasons I shall consider passages from several texts. These include a 1965 lecture on literature in the liberal arts by Robert Bart; the present-day St. John's College catalogue; a self-study of the college conducted on its Annapolis campus in 2003; and Aristotle's Metaphysics.
July 8, 2009
Junior Common Room
3:00 p.m.
Phil LeCuyer, tutor, St. John's College, Santa Fe
Intellectual Sin
Intellectual sin: three brief case studies. What is it? What are its consequences? How does it occur?
July 15, 2009
Junior Common Room
3:00 p.m.
Michael Wolfe, tutor, St. John's College, Santa Fe
Arjuna’s Dilemma and Shakuntala’s Solution
How does one translate from the language of the private and personal to the language of the public and collective? In pursuit of this question, Michael Wolfe will look closely at two episodes from India’s classic epic, the Mahabharata. The first episode depicts Shakuntala’s confrontation with King Duhsanta, the husband who abandoned her. The second episode (popularly known as the Bhagavad-Gita) relates Arjuna’s anguished conversation with Krishna as he confronts the prospect of going to war against his cousins. Both stories propose similar solutions to the conflict between the personal and the collective, but with strikingly different repercussions.
July 22, 2009
Junior Common Room
3:00 p.m.
Russell Winslow, tutor, St. John's College, Santa Fe
The Phenomenon of Style in Plato's Republic
In this lecture, Russell Winslow undertakes a reading of the censorship of style in Book III of Plato’s Republic. Style, he argues, might be said to be even more important philosophically than content. For, our souls are shaped by style in ways that are almost fully unnoticed by us. While we monitor and care for the content of our speeches, style slips in and structures the soul and the way we comport ourselves to the world in invisible ways. Like grammar, style organizes the relationship between beings in the world in advance, and content always comes to be known within the organization that style provides for it. As a consequence, Winslow offers a preliminary meditation on the primacy of ethos, of comportment, over content--perhaps even the primacy of ethos over being (if the latter is conceived as content).
July 29, 2009
Junior Common Room
3:00 p.m.
Caleb Thomspon, tutor, St. John's College, Santa Fe
Quietism from the Side of Happiness: Tolstoy, Schopenhauer, War and Peace
Tolstoy once wrote about the epilogue to his novel War and Peace that the philosopher Schopenhauer had said “the same thing,” only Schopenhauer had approached it “from the other side.” What is it that Tolstoy and Schopenhauer said that was the same? And what did Tolstoy mean in saying that they had approached it from opposite sides? Briefly put, Tolstoy was thinking of his argument that history is not governed by the actions of “great men” but by the infinitesimal actions of the multitude of people. He was thinking, too, of the attitude towards life that underlies this critique of history, an attitude of acceptance, which he hoped to communicate to his readers. Schopenhauer offers a very similar critique of history and likewise hopes to make available to his readers the abandonment of the will. But while Tolstoy aims to make people “love life in all its countless manifestations,” Schopenhauer aims to cure people of “the passion for enjoying and indeed for living.” Tolstoy’s critique of history starts from a glad embrace of all that life is, while Schopenhauer’s starts from a bitter confrontation with all that life is not.
August 5, 2009
Junior Common Room
3:00 p.m.
Mike Bybee, tutor, St. John's College, Santa Fe
Nishida Kitarō
Admittedly Japan’s greatest philosopher, arguably the greatest philosopher of the 20th Century, Nishida Kitarō (1870-1945) attended the University of Tokyo just when the Meiji Restoration and “the opening of Japan” allowed Japan’s academic elite to adopt and adapt Occidental ideas and disciplines. Nishida majored in a strange new discipline called “tetsugaku” (a word coined to translate “philosophy”), enabling him to blend newly imported Occidental concepts and methods with traditional Buddhist approaches and apply the results creatively to traditional issues in Asian thought.
While a professor at the University of Kyoto, Nishida developed the logic of basho 場所 (“place,” “situation,” or “topos”) as an alternative to or amplification of (1) Nagarjuna’s notion of sunya (emptiness, nothingness), (2) Dōgen’s notion of jisetsu (“circumstances,” “occasion,” “situation”), and (3) traditional Aristotelian, Kantian, and Hegelian logics and metaphysics. Nishida founded “the Kyoto School” of philosophy and remains Asia’s single most influential modern philosopher. The lecture will attempt informally to trace the historical development of one Buddhist enigma (how time and causality, paticcasamuppada, relate), explain briefly Nishida’s notion of basho, and show how Nishida applied basho to dissolve this problem.
Since it was established in 1920, the Bread Loaf School of English has been a keystone of Middlebury College’s outstanding reputation in the teaching of literature. Each summer, the Bread Loaf School of English offers a six-week course at one of four campuses, including St. John’s College in Santa Fe. The Bread Loaf School opens its doors to the public for these outstanding talks and readings.
Pueblo Places & Faces
Lee Marmon and Leslie Marmon Silko
Tuesday, July 7, 7 p.m.
Great Hall, Peterson Student Center
Acclaimed photographer Lee Marmon, internationally known for his portraits of elders of the Laguna and Acoma tribes, joins his daughter, the accomplished writer Leslie Marmon Silko for a wide-ranging talk involving photography and readings.
Marmon has been photographing the Southwest since 1947, upon returning to Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico from a stint in the Army. A shot entitled “White Man’s Moccasins,” widely reproduced on T-shirts, nightshirts, calendars, and posters, quickly became Marmon’s signature photograph.
Marmon’s images have appeared in various publications, including the London Times, the New York Times, and Time Magazine. The best of a vast portfolio of black-and-white shots are gathered in his award-winning book of photography, The Pueblo Imagination, which also includes the prose and poetry of his eldest daughter, Leslie Marmon Silko.
Poet, short-story writer, novelist, essayist, and scriptwriter, Leslie Marmon Silko is a leading force in the renaissance of Native American literature. Silko’s short story, “The Man to Send Rain Clouds,” earned her a National Endowment for the Humanities Discovery Grant. Soon thereafter, she published Laguna Woman (poetry) and the highly acclaimed Ceremony, which quickly found a place in the American literary canon. Silko has written more than thirteen books and collections. She also is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation (genius) Grant.
This event is free and open to the public.
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