St. John's College (Santa Fe) Lectures

Meem Library

Recordings of lectures from St. John's College, Santa Fe. Includes lectures from the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series and the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.

  1. FEB 6

    A Moral Philosophy That Will Change Your Life: On Emmanuel Levinas's Totality and Infinity (Claudia Hauer)

    Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Claudia Hauer on January 30, 2026 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “Emmanuel Levinas is a moral philosopher of the highest order. A student of Martin Heidegger’s, Levinas absorbed the tools of the phenomenological method, yet was repulsed by his teacher’s (at best) moral neutrality and (at worst) moral depravity. Levinas puts his fluid method to work in the volume Totality and Infinity in order to distinguish between Totalities (which include political regimes) that can ideally administer a lukewarm morality in the form of justice and human rights, and Infinities, which give expression to the infinite individuality of each human being. Levinas grounds his ethics in his Talmudic conviction that morality originates in our duties to the poor, the widow and the orphan. His secular ethics in Totality and Infinity focuses on looking into the eyes of the stranger, the Other, and opening ourselves to an individual with a unique story to tell. Levinas cautions us against putting strangers into broad totalizing categories, such as the ‘abject poor and homeless,’ or the ‘suit-clad professional.’ Levinas reminds us that human moral sentiment originates in our ability to be surprised, moved, and touched by the infinity of the Other. Our St. John’s College community reflects Levinasian ethics in our willingness to meet one another in and out of the classroom, and engage in the play of free discourse with open-minded curiosity. In this talk, I will endeavor to outline the basics of Levinas’s ethics.”

    55 min

  2. FEB 5

    Theism and Atheism in Patañjali's Yoga: Three Perspectives (Andrew Nicholson)

    Audio recording of a lecture given by Andrew Nicholson on January 23, 2026 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali (c. 4th century CE) have been an inspiration for philosophers and yoga practitioners for over 1500 years. For just as long, the meaning of certain terms in Patañjali’s celebrated text have been in dispute. One such dispute is the question of what Patañjali meant when he encouraged ‘dedication to the Lord’ (īśvara-pranidhāna, YS 2.32). Worshippers of Śiva and Viṣnu in medieval India took this to be a clear reference to an omnipotent, omniscient God, the source of all creation. By contrast, some western scholars in the 20th century understood this ‘Lord’ not as a God who possesses any agency of His own, but rather as one who exists merely as a passive object of meditation. The historian of religions Mircea Eliade, for instance, called Him the ‘archetypical yogi.’ I will argue, based on evidence from other first millennium CE works in Sanskrit, that there is a third possibility. Patañjali’s Lord is neither an absolute creator God nor a purely passive ‘archetype,’ but rather a compassionate, eternally liberated being who repeatedly takes embodiment in the world to help yogis break free from the afflictions that bind them to suffering.”

    46 min

  3. 12/17/2025

    The Virtues of Technological Obsolescence: Day, Berry, Lo-fi (Erik Baker)

    Audio recording of a lecture given by Erik Baker on December12, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series.  The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “People who are concerned about technological change,or who resist the adoption of new technologies, are often depicted as motivated by either an irrational fear of novelty or a purely material concern for their livelihoods.  In this lecture, however, I show that many people in the modern U.S. who’ve sought to live and work with technical methods deemed obsolete have instead been animated by their desire to pursue aset of virtues they feel they could not achieve utilizingstate-of-the-art technologies.  I focuson three distinctive cultural milieus: the Catholic Worker movement led by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in the 1930s and 1940s; the back-to-the-land movement ofthe 1960s and 1970s, whose ideals were eloquently expressed by the poet and farmer Wendell Berry; and the ‘lo-fi’ music movement of the 1990s, exemplified by artists such as Pavement, Guided by Voices, and the Mountain Goats.  To a surprising extent, these movements all prized a common set of virtues, including humility, self-sufficiency, and creative expression, which they believed they could only cultivate by working with ‘outdated’ technology.  But theydiffered in their assessment of the extent to which it was possible for individuals to fully perform these virtues without broader changes to the political and economic structures of modern society.”

    58 min

  4. 12/17/2025

    Considerations on Play (παιδιά) and Liberal Education in Plato's Republic (Antoine Pageau-St-Hilaire)

    Audio recording of a lecture given by Antoine Pageau-St-Hilaire on December 5, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “In both the Republic and the Laws, the leader of the philosophical conversation claims that the goodness of the πóλις and its citizens depend on the goodness or fineness of its civic play (παιδιά) (cf. Resp. 558b3-5, Leg. 803c2-e2). Why? Arguably, and following several hints from both dialogues, because good play and good education coincide. But even if this is true, we are then faced with a further question: why does good education coincide with good play? Why should good education be playful, or good play educative? At a crucial point in Book VII of Plato’s Republic, Socrates tells Glaucon that play is best suited to the education of a free person (έλεύθερος) (536e1-537a1). And it is quite clear from the context that he does not simply mean moral-political education, but also and chiefly philosophical education. In this lecture, I propose to examine the reasons that may lead Socrates to affirm such a thing, and for his interlocutor(s) to seemingly accept his affirmation (cf. 537a3). Why is liberal education playful? Or why is play especially suited to liberal education? How does this thought – although undeveloped in the context of its affirmation – relate to Socrates’ other famous comments on the nature of good education in the Republic, most notably that genuine education is a conversion of the soul and not a transmission of knowledge (521c6; cf. 518b6-d7)? Taking a close look at relevant passages from the text, I shall address these questions with the hope that they not only help us get a better grasp of Plato’s vision of good education, but also, and perhaps most importantly, that they help us understand better our own contemporary educational experiences.”

    1h 3m

  5. 11/21/2025

    St. Paul's Letter to the Romans and the Problem of Original Sin (Erik Dempsey)

    Audio recording of a lecture given by Erik Dempsey on November 14, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “This talk offers a close reading of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, focusing on the discussion of the economy of salvation in chapters 5-8. It looks especially at the relationship between the Mosaic Law and the New Covenant, what Paul means by ‘sin,’ and how his view of the sinful condition of human beings grounds his understanding of their relationship to God and Jesus Christ. The Epistle to the Romans is one of the most disputed texts ever written. There are full, line-by-line commentaries about it by at least four authors who often appear on the St. John’s program, St. Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin and (perhaps surprisingly) John Locke, and extended discussions by several others. While the subject of this talk is Romans, it looks to the readings and reflections of other program authors to try to make sense of Paul’s thoughts and to explain some key alternatives to it.”

    1h 5m

  6. 11/13/2025

    What the Heck is Hell? Divine Judgment in the Gospel of Matthew (Ron Haflidson)

    Audio recording of a lecture given by Annapolis Assistant Dean Ron Haflidson on November 7, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “In this lecture, I explore the largely neglected and perhaps totally wrong possibility that when Jesus spoke about “hell”, he wasn’t talking about the afterlife. The inquiry proceeds by focusing on Jesus’ words in the Gospel of Matthew, which is the New Testament text with by far the most references to hell.”

    57 min

  7. 11/04/2025

    Time, Memory, and a Sense of Home: Ernst Krenek's Elegies for Webern (David Miller)

    Audio recording of a lecture given by David Miller on October 24, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “In the summer of 1965, Austrian-American composer Ernst Krenek returned to his native country to deliver and address at the unveiling of a memorial plaque in honor of Anton Webern in Mittersill, the village in the Austrian Alps where Webern had been shot and killed by an American soldier twenty years earlier. In the summer of 1968, Krenek’s Instant Remembered for soprano, narrator, orchestra, and tape, a work inspired by his time in Mittersill three years earlier, was premiered at the Fourth International Webern Festival in Hanover, New Hampshire. This talk considers Krenek’s two elegies for Webern as a means of exploring his experiences as an émigré composer, the evolving relationship between Austrian music culture and musical modernism pre- and post-World War II, and the interplay between artistic expression and polemics. A broader theme connecting all of these topics is music’s power to reshape time and memory, reordering the past in order to imagine different futures, as well as the limits of that power.”

    49 min

  8. 10/09/2025

    There's No Place Like Home—in Plato's Republic (Michael Davis)

    Audio recording of a lecture given by Michael Davis on October 3, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: "Those living in the various versions of the best city described in Plato's Republic are to feel perfectly at home, but none of those present for the description is at home. The education of the philosophers who are to rule in the best of these versions of the city is to include solid geometry although we are told that it has yet to be discovered. We are to read the 'big letters' of justice in the city as a way to read the 'little letters' of justice in the individual. This proves to mean looking at something on the outside so as to see what is on the inside. But if we can see the inside, is it still the inside? Can we ever see the inside of a human being? These questions, at first not obviously connected, all point to the need to read the Republic as self-critical, with a surface revealing a depth that, despite the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy, becomes available to us poetically."

    1h 27m
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Recordings of lectures from St. John's College, Santa Fe. Includes lectures from the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series and the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.

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