Sarah Davis, Dean of St. John’s College, will deliver the Dean’s Lecture entitled “Family Resemblance: On Knowing and Not Knowing” on August 30. Courtesy of SJC
SJC News:
SANTA FE — St. John’s College has announced its official fall lecture series on the Santa Fe campus. On Friday evenings, members of the St. John’s College community – alumni, friends, faculty, staff, students and neighbors – gather in the Great Hall to hear a lecture or concert by visiting scholars, artists, poets or faculty. These events range from a jazz trio to a lecture on Don Quixote and are free to the community.
The lecturers include members of the faculty of St. John’s College – so-called tutors – and professors from renowned universities across the country. Each lecture is followed by a question and answer session and an exciting discussion between the lecturer and the participants.
New Santa Fe Campus President J. Walter Sterling noted, “As we celebrate our campus’s 60th anniversary, it remains a source of pride that St. John’s welcomes the public to weekly lectures, concerts, and theater performances. This year’s offerings will be as rich and varied as ever, even during the exciting renovation of our Pritzker Student Center. Curiosity and a willingness to learn unite us all, and we hope that more and more members of our local community will participate in these events.”
The complete list of concerts and lectures can be found Here. Please check this page for updates. All lectures take place on Fridays at 7pm. In the Great Hall at St. John’s College, 1160 Camino de Cruz Blanca, Santa Fe, NM 87505, unless otherwise noted.
“The lecture series complements our discussion-based program by giving members of the community the opportunity to examine informed arguments from scholars with diverse backgrounds from a variety of disciplines,” said Dean of the College Sarah Davis. “Attendees are invited to engage directly with the speaker in the question and answer session that follows, which is an integral and dynamic part of the event.”
The lectures and performances in autumn 2024 are:
30 August: Sarah Davis, dean of St. John’s College in Santa Fe, will deliver the Dean’s Lecture on “Family Resemblance: On Knowing and Not Knowing.”
Note: This lecture will take place at the Meem Placita.
6 September: Andy Davis, professor in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at Belmont University, will deliver his lecture “Hegel’s Rhythm: Speculative Thought and the Relationship between Philosophy and Poetry.”
“What can poetry teach us about the demands of writing and reading philosophy? In this talk I explore this question using a few paragraphs at the end of Hegel’s preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, with some passing references to his account of poetry in the Aesthetics Lectures. Hegel’s enigmatic account of the “speculative sentence” (the speculative proposition/proposition) uses a comparison with poetic rhythm in paragraph 61. Just as poetry plays on formal meter with natural accents, speculative expressions of philosophical content are based on a productive conflict between the form of the proposition (subject is predicate) and the unity of the concept, in which such distinctions between subjects, objects, and qualities disappear. Poetry offers a model of unity in conflict that produces a “floating center” of meaning. What might it mean for philosophical thought to assume a “floating center” as well?”
13 September: Aaron Goldberg Jazz Trio
The New York Times described Goldberg as “a post-bop pianist of exemplary taste and range.” He has released five albums as a solo artist and has performed and collaborated with jazz greats.
20 September: Kenneth Haynes, professor of comparative literature and classics at Brown University, will give his lecture “The Literature of Rant.”
27 September: Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen, Associate Professor of Japanese Literature at the University of Michigan, will give her lecture on Japanese poetry.
October 4: Elizabeth Povinelli, Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University will give her lecture “Geontopower, The History of Thought as a Mode of Power.”
This talk introduces the concept of geontopower – a form of liberal settler power that operates by mobilising a long-standing Western division between living and non-living to examine the politics of ontology. The talk asks what is at stake when we begin an analysis of being with a claim about what the world is, and then move on to examine how these ontological conditions are socially distributed so that we can organise a counter-politics. What new insights about our world become visible when we begin within the multiple global sociopolitical entanglements that began when European ships crossed the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans in search of wealth, and that continue to provide a matrix within which different people are allowed to move, how and in which direction wealth moves, and how toxicities and harms are localised?
October 25: David McDonald, lecturer in Santa Fe, will give his talk on technology
October 30: Ron Duncan Hart, director of the Institute for Tolerance Studies and former University Vice President and Dean of Academic Affairs at Indiana University, will deliver his lecture, “Christian Nationalism: Through the Lens of Anthropology.” Note: This lecture will take place on Wednesday, October 30, at 3:15 p.m. in the Junior Common Room.
Christian nationalism began to form in working-class evangelical neighborhoods in the early 1970s. This talk analyzes the cultural matrix of religion, disenfranchisement, antifeminism, and racism that formed the roots of this movement. It developed as a backlash to Supreme Court decisions banning segregation, prayer, and Bible reading in schools, followed by civil rights legislation, the Equal Rights Amendment, and the Roe vs. Wade ruling on abortion. These historic changes and the growing pluralism of American society led the religious right to organize to defeat them. Evangelicals formed a coalition with Ronald Reagan with the promise of Making America Great Again, which was understood as code for making America white and Christian. We will look at this coalition and the continued use of the MAGA slogan up to the present day.
November 1: Obed Lira, lecturer in Santa Fe, will give his lecture “Don Quixote and the Art of Reading”.
What is reading? Is it an art? Few books explore what reading means as engagingly as Don Quixote. Guided by a character who writes and reads himself into the world, the novel’s numerous characters also seem to write and read themselves into dizzying stories over the course of the book. The world, it seems, wants to read itself into narratives. To live in the world is to read the world. And yet, as we read, the book warns us that while reading should be edifying and entertaining, it can easily prove harmful to the individual and dangerous to society. What is at the heart of this ambiguity in reading? For all its jokes and metafictional trickery, the relentless violence depicted in the novel suggests that Cervantes is deadly serious about a dilemma that arises when thinking about reading more broadly: how should we read the world, and what should we do with how the world reads us?
8 November: Jesse Wilson from UC Irvine will give his lecture on mathematics.
15 November: Susan Paalman, dean of St. John’s College Annapolis, will deliver her lecture “On Parts and Wholes in Living Things: Harvey, Descartes, and the Heartbeat.”
22 November: Matt Davis, Emeritus Tutor at St John’s College, will give his lecture on Theaetetus.
December 6: Chrysostomos, the theater club of St. John’s College-Santa Fe, presents “Prometheus Bound,”
December 13: Anne-Marie Schultz, professor of philosophy and director of the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core at Baylor University, will deliver her lecture “Socratic Philosophical Legacy: Creating Philosophers of the Future.”
ABOUT ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE
St. John’s College is the nation’s most distinctive liberal arts college thanks to our interdisciplinary program that explores 200 of the most revolutionary great books from 3,000 years of human thought in student-led, discussion-based courses for undergraduate, graduate and lifelong learners. By examining world-changing ideas in literature, philosophy, mathematics, science, music, history and more, students leave St. John’s with a foundation for success in fields such as law, government, research, STEM, media and education. Located on two campuses in two historic state capitals – Annapolis, Maryland and Santa Fe, New Mexico – St. John’s is the third oldest college in the United States. Quartz has called it the “most progressive, future-proof college in America” and the Los Angeles Times a “powerful angel hovering over the landscape of American higher education.” For more information, visitsjc.edu.
