“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…...
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.
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…...
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…...
This First Friday Lecture explored the figure of Nature in Jean de Meun’s Romance of the Rose and Alain of Lille’s earlier work The Plaint of Nature, as well as the nature of allegory and the relationship between medieval, ancient, and modern views of nature.
This First Friday lecture explored the Herman Melville’s 1851 classic Moby Dick, a work regarded for its density and difficulty, as well as the context surrounding it. One salient feature of Melville’s 1851 masterpiece is its sheer magnitude. It isn’t that it’s the longest of 19th-century novels. Shorter than War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov,…...
In the Basic Program classroom, students pay close attention to the text, and not so much to the historical context. The First Friday Lectures were designed originally to provide this context. In the December lecture, Kendall Sharp outlines the historical context that explains the significance of the two ancient Greek genres that kick off the…...
This First Friday Lecture is supported by the Anastaplo Lecture Series Fund in memory of Basic Program Instructor George Anastaplo. The history of thought and action in many cultures involves a transition from mythos (stories of gods, goddesses, and heroes) to logos (philosophy and related fields of study). This lecture explored that transition, with special consideration given to ancient Greece.…...
The Romans called their polity SPQR – Senatus populusque romanus, the Roman Senate and people – but the acronym does not encompass the forms of leadership or domination under which they lived for much of their imaginary and recorded history. Because Latin writers lacked a natural term for what the king, Consul, or Caesar was…...
This First Friday Lecture is supported by gifts made in memory of Basic Program Instructor Claudia Traudt. What equips us – intellectually and emotionally – for open-mindedness? Is open-mindedness a virtue of the self’s core or of its periphery? How does open-mindedness affect our need for certainty, consistency, and safety? One facet of this big…...