Reading Great Books Against Apocalypse
This lecture examines how reading Great Books can help us think clearly amid crisis.
Philosophy Before Socrates
This lecture introduces the thinkers who laid the groundwork for Socrates and Western philosophy itself.
Free Men and Natural Slaves in Homer’s ‘Iliad’ and Aristotle’s ‘Politics’
This lecture suggested that Achilles' choices in the Iliad can be better understood through the lens of Aristotle’s analysis of the polis in Politics.
A Christian Mystic Reads Homer: Simone Weil on ‘The Iliad’
This lecture examined Weil’s understanding of force as the epic’s true protagonist and the surprising connection she draws between The Iliad and the Gospels.
Nietzsche, Nihilism, and the Death of God
This lecture examined Nietzsche’s complex and captivating body of thought, and how it is seen by those who celebrate and those who lament the death of God.
“Herodotus Philobarbaros”
This lecture examined Herodotus’ depiction of the customs, folk tales, and religious practices of such cultures as Libya, Syria, Phoenicia, and Persia in order to see what ideas and values from these cultures Herodotus wanted to convey both to his immediate Greek audience and to us.
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.
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…...
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…...
Three Modes of Persuasion in Plato’s Phaedo
This First Friday Lecture is supported by gifts made in memory of Basic Program Instructor Claudia Traudt. Plato’s dialogue Phaedo tells the story of Socrates’ last day, with Socrates holding a conversation with his friends in his jail cell as he is preparing to have his death sentence carried out. Throughout the dialogue, Plato depicts Socrates attempts…...