Audio recording of a lecture given by Michael Davis on October 3, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: "Those living in the various versions of the best city described in Plato's Republic are to feel perfectly at home, but none of those present for the description is at home. The education of the philosophers who are to rule in the best of these versions of the city is to include solid geometry although we are told that it has yet to be discovered. We are to read the 'big letters' of justice in the city as a way to read the 'little letters' of justice in the individual. This proves to mean looking at something on the outside so as to see what is on the inside. But if we can see the inside, is it still the inside? Can we ever see the inside of a human being? These questions, at first not obviously connected, all point to the need to read the Republic as self-critical, with a surface revealing a depth that, despite the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy, becomes available to us poetically."

Audio recording of a lecture given by Qiu Lin on September 26, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: "In Mencius 7A35, Tao Ying poses a dilemma to Mencius: Suppose Shun's father had committed murder—what would Shun have done? Mencius famously answers that Shun would have 'cast aside the world (tian-xia) as if discarding a worn shoe. He would have secretly carried the old man on his back and fled to the edge of the Sea, living there happily thereafter and forgetting about the world'. This answer has sparked intense debate among Confucian scholars throughout history. Despite the wide range of views on this issue, however, scholars generally construe this case as a classic conflict of values, where the Mencian Shun would have chosen filial piety over justice. In this talk I offer a different reading of this case, one that emphasizes Shun's transformation as a person—from a widely revered emperor to a fugitive who cut himself off from all but one significant relationship in his life—and asks this question: How is it possible that after undergoing such a change, Shun is still able to live 'happily thereafter'? By shifting our focus, I argue that what Shun would have done is far more morally demanding than simply letting his father face his due punishment. In my view, if Shun had chosen the latter, he would have been a just emperor, but fallen short of being a sage king by Mencius' standards."

Audio recording of a lecture given by Daryl Haggard on September 19, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “It’s been a fantastic decade for black hole studies, particularly for Sagittarius A (Sgr A*), the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Multiple Galactic Center research groups, the Event Horizon Telescope, and LIGO/Virgo continue to bring rapid-fire new observations to sharpen our understanding of these exotic objects, research highlighted by the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics and the 2017 and 2020 Nobel Prizes in Physics. In this talk, I will discuss the new Event Horizon Telescope image of Sgr A*. I’ll describe its unique variability and put it in the context of other time domain phenomena in the Galactic Center, traced out over more than 20 years of observations of M87*, the supergiant elliptical galaxy with several trillion stars in the constellation Virgo. I will also briefly explore how we can continue to push the frontiers of black hole research with existing and next-generation observatories.”

Audio recording of a lecture given by Tutor Emeritus John Cornell on September 12, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: Dante’s Comedy is widely assumed to champion the teachings of Thomas Aquinas. Surely the test case for this conventional view is the episode in Paradiso where Dante imagines meeting up with the great defender of the faith. There, to our surprise, Thomas offers an extravagant tribute to the wisdom of Solomon, wisdom that he says has never been surpassed. Really? Not even by Christ? Thomas had better explain his accidental heresy. Does his apologetic performance succeed? Or is it part of the comedy of the Comedy?

Audio recording of a lecture given by Tutor Emeritus Phil LeCuyer on September 5, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: In this lecture arrays are contrasted to sequences as paradigms of thought. Sequences are based on causation. What are arrays based on? Several examples of arrays will be considered, including the human face. When viewed and understood as an array, what can a face tell us about being human?

Audio recording of a lecture given by Dean Sarah Davis on August 29, 2025 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: St. John’s students often have the experience of coming to beautiful realizations and insights that seem to push past the ordinary—to touch that which is most important about life, about being human, about the world. But so too do we know what it feels like to plummet back to the ground, to confusion and questioning. The lives of two principal and beloved characters in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Pierre and Andrei, are marked by this kind of movement, being drawn in, or up, or beyond, only to find themselves seemingly back at the beginning, lost again. This lecture explores the pattern in these characters—a kind of blooming and wilting and re-blooming—and suggests that, rather than revealing an absurdity in the truth-seeking character of human beings, these rises and falls point to our most potent possibility.

Audio recording of a lecture given by Philip Ording on May 2, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “There is no shortage of evidence that professional mathematicians describe their work in aesthetic terms, but the terms they use, at least publicly, are limited. The oft-repeated ‘beauty’ and ‘elegance’ may be important components of mathematical taste, but they fail to convey its range or subtlety or how it relates to literary and aesthetic experiences beyond mathematics. This talk will highlight the material differences in logic, diction, imagery, and even typesetting that give tone and flavor to mathematics.”

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Kit Slover on April 25, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “In the final act of Shakespeare’s Hamlet the northern prince stumbles upon the grave of Ophelia, leaps in, and declares himself to the funeral goers: ‘This is I, Hamlet the Dane’ (V.1, 279). By calling himself the Dane, Hamlet seems to identify himself as the rightful king of Denmark—as though the grave, in particular, is his sovereign territory. The grave itself was dug by a sexton who took up his profession ‘on the very day that young Hamlet was born’ (V.1, 152), which also happens to be the day ‘our last king Hamlet overcame Fortinbras’ (V.1, 148), seizing the Norwegian lands of the latter. This acquisition is familiar to us from the beginning of the play because the ghost of the former king has appeared ‘in the very armor he had on/When he the ambitious Norway combated’ (I.1, 71-71). And the appearance of this ghost has set off a chain of events resulting in the death of the women into whose grave Hamlet leaps. In this lecture, I will attempt to understand this strange scene. Why is it here, in a grave with such uncanny ties to his own birth, the ghost of his father, and the ultimate fate of Denmark that Hamlet asserts his sovereign rights? Hamlet cries, ‘This is I, Hamlet the Dane,’ but what, in short, does he mean by the word this?”

Audio recording of a lecture given by David Hayes and Jeremy Schwartz on April 18, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series.  The Dean’s Office has providedthis description of the event: “The ‘Love Test’ in King Lear is widely understood to be the central puzzle in one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays.  As part of a political succession plan, it seems unnecessary.  As part of aloving relationship between parents and children, it seems grotesque.  It doesn’t even seem to be a real test, sincethe result is supposed to be pre-ordained.  While it is clear that the disastrous results of the test set the wholetragedy in motion, neither we nor the characters within the play seem to grasp the ‘why’ of the test itself.  In thistalk, we will argue that the ‘Love Test’ is best understood by reflecting on the vexed question of the ends of the parent-child love relationship.  Surprisingly, Shakespeare challenges the view that the filial pious child solves this vexed question, opening the possibility that parent-child love is tragic.”

Audio recording of a lecture given by Tutor Emeritus Howard Fisher on April 9, 2025 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: “Galileo’s mathematical treatment of ‘speed’ perennially draws questions about both the validity and presuppositions of his argument. But perhaps we can make more sense of Galilean speed when we find in it traces of Homeric speed: the speed of ‘speedy Achilles.’ We may also find some Homeric grounding for an algebraic form of discourse exemplified by the Taylor Series—a form that moves uneasily between favoring being and favoring fact.”

Audio recording of a lecture given by Jacqueline Stone on April 4, 2025 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "Premodern Japanese believed that one's dying thoughts could determine one's postmortem fate. Even a sinful person, by dying with a mind calmly focused on the Buddha, could be reborn in a 'pure land,' where one's enlightenment would be assured. Conversely, a stray distracted thought at that final juncture could send even a devout practitioner tumbling down into the hells or other miserable rebirth realms. The ideal of mindful death generated both hope and anxiety and created a demand for ritual specialists to serve as religious guides at the deathbed, contributing to Buddhist preeminence in matters of death management."

Audio recording of a lecture given by Steven Berg on March 7, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra begins with Zarathustra descending from the heights of his overflowing wisdom to effect, in the wake of what he calls the “death of God,” the transformation of the historical destiny of mankind through the dissemination of his teaching of the “overman.” The overman, he proclaims, must now become the “meaning of the earth,” the supreme aim of the human will, and the ultimate object of all human thought and striving. The book ends, however, with Zarathustra, in the aftermath of the collapse of all his efforts to transmit this teaching, renouncing his doctrines of the overman and the will to power, and turning away from human beings and a concern with the historical progress of mankind, in order to retreat once again to his mountain solitude. This turn away from the will and history coincides with a turn toward the quest for truth of the soul and mind in their relations to eternity. The following question must arise for anyone attempting to understand the argument of Thus Spoke Zarathustra: What has happened to Zarathustra during the course of the drama of the book such as to cause this radical transformation of his thought. This lecture will make an attempt to begin to address this question.”

Audio recording of a lecture given by Larry George on February 28, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “Does Thucydides believe that empire and democracy are compatible? Do war, conquest, domination, and the exploitation of other polities actually safeguard and protect political space for imperial democratic regimes to flourish, or do they instead corrupt, sicken, and poison the democratic body politic? Does imperial wealth and power perhaps function like a powerful, addictive political drug—strengthening, invigorating and revitalizing the polis, while at the same time intoxicating its democratic way of life by rewarding injustice and inflaming internal factionalism and polarization, leading to the demonization and scapegoating of individuals and groups, tyranny, treason, civil war, and other forms of political derangement, including even plagues and epidemics, both biological and political? In this lecture, we will seek clues to the great historian’s own understandings and teachings regarding these matters, by casting a raking light on Thucydides’ use of the strange word ‘pharmakon’, whose various contradictory and complex meanings include both medicine and poison, as well as addictive drug, and which is etymologically related to the curing of political derangement through the apotrapaic expulsion of scapegoars. As Americans embark on a new political era, is it possible that Thucydides’ history (which he called a “possession for all times”) may offer insights into some of the unprecedented challenges facing our country’s foreign policy, and our fragile democracy, today?”

Audio recording of a lecture given by Amir Alexander on February 21, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “On August 10, 1632, the Revisors General of the Society of Jesus met in Rome to pronounce on a simple question: Whether a straight line is composed of an infinite number of distinct points. The proposition seemed trivial, but their decision proved momentous, launching a decades-long battle between two competing visions of mathematics, and of truth. On the one side were the champions of inviolable hierarchy and unchallengeable order; on the other, the advocates of increased pragmatism and tolerance. The battleground was the infinitely small. At stake was the face of modernity, then coming into being.”

Audio recording of a lecture given by Rory Hanlon on February 7, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “In Nicomachean Ethics (NE) I.13, Aristotle asserts that a politician should know the human soul as an eye-doctor knows the whole body. I will try to make sense of this odd claim, arguing that it illuminates crucial features of Aristotelian psychology and our understanding of ‘the human’. Given the size of his corpus, it might be not surprising to find some apparent inconsistencies in his employment of the notion ‘the soul’. Perhaps the most infamous concerns its divisibility: In De Anima (DA) III.9, Aristotle criticizes those, like Plato, who divide the soul in terms of rationality; yet in NE I.13, he asserts that the human soul divides into rational and irrational parts. I argue that we should see this apparent contradiction as evidence of his attentiveness to the different kinds of inquiries, and so the different ways in which we think about souls and persons—either in the theoretical mode of DA or the practical mode of NE. In practical inquiries, we are concerned with a claim’s contribution to some relevant practical goal. Hence, the politician seeks knowledge of the soul to the extent that it helps their practical aims (i.e. to improve souls)—much as an ophthalmologist seeks relevant ‘working knowledge’ of the whole body. Finally, I argue that ordinary life, filled with political and ethical deliberations, exhibits this approach to the human, and so is itself a practical inquiry.”

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor David Carl on January 24, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series.  The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “Tender Buttons is a kind of love story which leads us to ask, “What do we love when we love to read?”  Is it a certain meaning or truth that reading can help us achieve, or is it the experience itself—the act rather than the end of reading?  And if the latter, how important are meaning and truth to this activity of reading?  Tender Buttons is a work of radical literary experimentation, which in its relationship to signification, representation, truth, and meaning is unlike anything we encounter on the St. John’s program (or perhaps, closer to the works we encounter in the music tutorial than to the books we read together in Seminar).  This work provides us with an occasion, and a virtually unique perspective from which to investigate our relationship to reading, truth, meaning, beauty, and pleasure.  At the very gateway of our introduction to philosophic reflection (Plato’s Republic), Socrates refers to “the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry.”  What is this quarrel?  Is it a tension between truth and beauty, which poet Keats insisted were one and the same?  Must a book’s relationship to truth be mediated primarily through the category of meaning, or is it an experience beyond meaning (perhaps more closely related to a certain kind of (aesthetic) pleasure?)  How do we understand the difference between reading as a means to an end (such as truth and understanding) and reading as an end in itself (a certain kind of experience we desire for its own sake, as Aristotle says of happiness)?  Using Tender Buttons as an opportunity to reflect on these questions, we will consider the importance (if not the meaning) of a literary work that stands at the beginning of an era of avant-garde aesthetic practices that led to fiction without plot, music without notes (John Cage’s 4’33”), and paintings that consist entirely of black canvases (Ad Reinhardt).

Audio recording of a lecture given on April 22, 2016 by Lise van Boxel as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series.

Audio recording of a lecture given on March 4, 2016 by Alan Levine as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series.

Audio recording of a lecture given on February 26, 2016 by Richard H. Davis as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series.

Audio recording of a lecture given on February 5, 2016 by Natalie Elliot as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series.