No One Wants Bad Things: Desire in Plato’s Meno
As Meno tries one last time to answer the question of what virtue is, Socrates guides him through an argument for the startling conclusion that no one desires bad things.
Lessons for Retiring Well: A Conversation with Christine Benz
What are the keys to a successful retirement? Watch our conversation with Christine Benz, director of personal finance and retirement planning for Morningstar as we discuss her new book, “How to Retire: 20 Lessons for a Happy, Successful, and Wealthy Retirement.” In this conversation we also examined the non-financial lessons outlined in her book, including…...
The Song of Roland Across Time
How does the way we read a text change across time? This lecture explores the many ways in which the canonical medieval poem The Song of Roland has been circulated, read, used, and understood in a variety of contexts across the centuries, up to the present day.
Goethe’s Hope
“What may I hope?” Immanuel Kant famously considered this question, alongside “What can I know?” and “What should I do?”, to be one of the three fundamental questions of philosophy. In this First Friday Lecture, Simon Friedland will consider how Germany’s greatest poet, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), reformulated and responded to the Kantian question…...
Introduction to the Rigveda and Upanishads
The new Alumni Sequence, Asian Classical Traditions, begins in Autumn Quarter. In this First Friday Lecture, Kendall Sharp will introduce some of the texts to be read in the new sequence, the Rigveda and the Upanishads, by addressing two fundamental questions about them. Who were the authors of the Rigveda and Upanishads, and what was…...
Writing from Occupied France
What was it like to live through the occupation of France in the early 1940s?
Music in American Lives
What role has music played in shaping and preserving U.S. history?
Competing Worldviews with Jennifer A. Lind
In the aftermath of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington and John Mearsheimer published seminal articles offering competing worldviews. Did the end of the 20th-century Cold War mean "The End of History," "The Clash of Civilizations" or "The Tragedy of Great Power Politics?"
Roaring into the Second Half of Life: A Conversation with Michael Clinton
How can we re-imagine life after 50 to realize the full potential of midlife and beyond? And how might such an approach to longevity shape our economy and society?
Funeral Games in the Iliad
In Book 23 of the Iliad, between the burning of Patroclus’ body and Priam’s dramatic meeting with Achilles, roughly 600 lines are devoted to athletic contests among the Greeks. This lecture will offer some thoughts about what this scene is doing here, what it means and what it can tell us about games in general.
“Seeking the land of the Greeks in my soul”: Ancient Greece in German Culture around 1800
This First Friday Lecture is supported by the Class Gift given by the 2023 graduates of the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults. In his 1787 drama Iphigenia in Tauris, based on Euripides’ tragedy of the same name, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe has the stranded Greek princess Iphigenia recount how she wandered the foreign shores…...
What Young Leaders Want from Older Allies
America today is one of the most age-diverse societies in history. Sadly, it is also one of the most age segregated, with older and younger people’s paths rarely crossing outside of families. But what would happen if older and younger people were more actively working together to solve the biggest problems of our day? Watch…...