Historians Made Elsewhere Than at Rome: Polybius and Josephus on the Roman Empire
This lecture examines how historians from conquered societies wrote about the Roman Empire.
Some Ways Kant’s First Critique Sets Up His Ethics
This lecture examines how the Critique of Pure Reason helps explain Kant’s moral philosophy.
Great Books and Big Lies: “Theirs” and “Ours”
This lecture examines how liberal education can help people resist propaganda and think critically.
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…...