Video recording of a lecture delivered on September 19, 2025, by Santa Fe Dean Sarah Davis.
Ms. Davis offers the following description: "I hate everything that merely instructs me without augmenting or directly invigorating my activity.” Nietzsche opens The Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life with this quote from Goethe. It appropriately frames Nietzsche’s own meditation, which does not just walk us through different ways to relate to the past, giving us a schema for making sense of history, but invigorates and leads to a quickening within us. But how? This lecture investigates Nietzsche's claim that the "excess of history" in modern times compromises the health and vitality of human life. It then considers The Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life itself as presenting an alternative way to relate to history. Finally, it asks how, if at all, this alternative informs a St. John's education."
Recording of a lecture delivered on September 12, 2025, by Annapolis tutor Nicholas Bellinson as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Mr. Bellinson offers the following description of his lecture: "What kind of relationship to time underlies the urge to attend the theater? Shakespeare points to this question in various plays through the metaphor of time's pregnancy. Over and over, his characters stage this very relationship to time, as we will see in four plays: Othello, Hamlet, As You Like It, and Love's Labour's Lost. We will then ask what philosophical attitudes arise when we consider time to have or not to have the metaphorical capacity for pregnancy."
Recording of a lecture delivered on September 5, 2025, by Professor Thomas Merrill as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Thomas Merrill is an associate professor for American University’s School of Public Affairs, and the associate director for the university’s Political Theory Institute, with research interests in political science and governance. He previously served on the President’s Council on Bioethics, and his most recent book, Hume and the Politics of Enlightenment, was the winner of the Delba Winthrop Award for Best Recent Work in Political Philosophy.
Professor Merrill offers the following introduction to his lecture: "Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments seems to offer a morality perfectly suited for bourgeois modernity: secular, sympathetic, and based on our transparency to each other. Yet upon examination, Smith’s moral world is shot through with deception and self-deception on several levels. This lecture uses Smith’s treatment of deception and self-deception to uncover the narrative structure of the Theory of Moral Sentiments and highlights the idea of generative errors—mistakes and deceptions that have unintended but positive consequences—as a key theme of Smith’s thought."
Recording of a lecture delivered on August 22, 2025, by Annapolis President Suzy Paalman as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Ms. Paalman offers the following description: 'We learn as young children that multiplication is taking a number a certain number of times, to form the times tables. As we learn more, the meaning of multiplication subtly changes, even as the methods of doing actual problems don't really change much. For instance, we learn early on to multiply length by width to find the area of a rectangle. How is finding the area of a shape related to taking numbers a certain number of times? This naive question will lead us to ask about the relation between number and magnitude, using Euclid and Descartes for help. In the end, our inquiry will come to mathematics as a discipline. The question, "What is multiplication?" will lead us, in the end, to the question, "What is mathematics?"'
Ms. Paalman's lecture is the first formal lecture of the academic year. Previously referred to as the Dean's Lecture, this lecture is now called the Christopher B. Nelson Lecture.
Recording of a lecture delivered on August 30, 2024, by Annapolis tutor Nicholas Bellinson as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Recording of a lecture delivered on September 2, 1988, by Annapolis tutors Wye Allanbrook and Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
This lecture was the first for the 1988-1989 academic year, at the time called the Dean's Lecture.
Note: The recording begins after the start of the lecture and the first sentence is cut off. A typescript of the complete lecture is available on the St. John's College Digital Archives.
Recording of a lecture delivered on May 19, 1978, by Howard Zeiderman as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Mr. Zeiderman is now a tutor emeritus at St. John's College.
Recording of a lecture delivered on May 2, 1986, by Dr. Stephen Salkever as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Recording of a lecture delivered on January 17, 1986, by Annapolis tutor Stewart Umphrey as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Recording of a lecture delivered on November 8, 2002, by Jacob Howland as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Recording of a lecture delivered on January 11, 2002, by Ori Soltes as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Recording of a lecture delivered on September 16, 1994, by James N. Jarvis as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Recording of a lecture delivered on April 30, 1976, by Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Recording of a lecture delivered on April 4, 2025, by Dr. Jessy Jordan as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Dr. Jordan is Professor of Philosophy at Mount St. Mary’s University, specializing in neo-Aristotelian natural normativity. He is also the Director of the Mount’s common, integrated, and sequenced liberal arts core curriculum. He has published numerous articles on moral philosophy and is currently putting the finishing touches on an Introduction to the Metaethics of Virtue Ethics: On Transcendental Aristotelian Naturalism.
He offers this introduction: "The way one thinks about and explains motion has surprising consequences for how one thinks about moral philosophy. Thus, the early modern rejection of Aristotelian physics and its replacement by the mechanical philosophy of some of the most renowned natural philosophers of the 17th century had profound consequences for what appeared to be a legitimate account of moral evaluations."
Recording of a lecture delivered on March 28, 2025, by Dr. Emily Austin as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Dr. Austin is an Associate Professor of Classics and the College at the University of Chicago, with research interests in Greek literature, especially Homer and depictions of solitude in ancient Greece. Her first book, Grief and the Hero: the Futility of Longing in the Iliad, explores the nexus of grief, longing and anger in the Iliad. She is currently working on a second book, Solitude and its Powers in Ancient Greece, which identifies surprising moments when ancient Greek poetry conceives of solitude as a good thing.
Dr. Austin offers this introduction to her lecture: Sophocles’ Philoctetes presents its lonely hero as incomparably wretched. Yet this suffering figure also claims that his isolated survival is something uniquely heroic. This lecture explores the tension between debasement and nobility in Sophocles’ play, taking seriously Philoctetes’ claims to heroism, which are unparalleled in the poetic discourse of his time.
Recording of a lecture delivered on October 3, 2003, by Annapolis tutor Jonathan Tuck as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Recording of a lecture delivered on April 9, 2014, by Francis J. "Bing" West as part of the LCDR Erik S. Kristensen Lecture Series.
The lecture is the second in a series of joint lectures series between St. John's College and the U.S. Naval Academy to honor the memory of Lieutenant Commander Erik S. Kristensen. An alumnus of the United States Naval Academy and the St. John's College Graduate Institute, Kristensen, a Navy SEAL, was killed in the line of duty in Afghanistan in 2005. This lecture series aims to create even greater ties between the two schools, as well as to educate the public about civil-military relations and the place of the liberal arts in education of naval and military professions.
Recording of a lecture delivered by Santa Fe tutor Grant H. Franks on February 6, 1998, as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Recording of a lecture delivered on February 7, 2025, by Annapolis tutor Mary Elizabeth Halper as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
She offers the following description of her lecture: "There are two kinds of speech: the speech we speak and the speech we read. This lecture is on the latter. By way of comparison with spoken speech, and with help from Plato'sTheaetetus, Phaedo,andPhaedrus, the lecture will reflect on written speech as such, what it offers us and what it asks from us."
Recording of a lecture delivered on March 18, 2005, by Dylan Casey as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
