2
20
387
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/84e10952e59c743d095053a4993f94db.mp3
e5d756894e1da446f95faea7a72addaf
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
wav
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
01:01:44
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
An Introduction to Maimonides
Description
An account of the resource
Audio recording of a lecture delivered on January 30, 2004, by Ralph Lerner as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Lerner, Ralph
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2004-01-30
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
A signed permission form has been received giving St. John's College permission to make this lecture available online.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
sound
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
mp3
Subject
The topic of the resource
Maimonides, Moses, 1135-1204
Jewish philosophers--Egypt--Biography
Rabbis--Egypt--Biography
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LEC_Lerner_Ralph_2004-01-30_ac
Friday night lecture
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/e79af766cdd82a6d7709ff3c0d246c93.mp3
e9239197af015effeb00f17de29f7310
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
wav
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
00:51:59
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
What Might We Learn from Alfarabi about Plato and Aristotle?
Description
An account of the resource
Audio recording of a lecture delivered on September 24, 1999, by Charles E. Butterworth as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Butterworth, Charles E.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1999-09-24
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
A signed permission form has been received giving St. John's College permission to make this lecture available online.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
sound
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
mp3
Subject
The topic of the resource
Fārābī
Plato
Aristotle
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LEC_Butterworth_Charles_1999-09-24_ac
Friday night lecture
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/4a2bf93dc57f97df1f3c76c85b7b5bbb.mp3
7767127b1f6796d4497b28c668a208c5
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
wav
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
01:13:15
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Socrates on Trial: Courtroom Procedures and Fictive Apologies in Athenian Literature
Description
An account of the resource
Audio recording of a lecture delivered on November 19, 1999, by Josiah Ober as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Ober, Josiah
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1999-11-19
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
A signed permission form has been received giving St. John's College permission to make this lecture available online.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
sound
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
mp3
Subject
The topic of the resource
Court proceedings
Socrates--Trials, litigation, etc.
Greek literature--History and criticism
Plato. Apology
Law, Greek
Athens (Greece)--Intellectual life--Political aspects
Rhetoric, Ancient
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LEC_Ober_Josiah_1999-11-19_ac
Friday night lecture
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/7ae995d93d305cc7846c502e45accea0.mp3
b402ea23b898f6b7a79e52d97d153882
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
wav
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
01:04:25
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
The Moment and the Drone
Description
An account of the resource
Audio recording of a lecture delivered on April 4, 2003, by Elliott Zuckerman as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Zuckerman, Elliott
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2003-04-04
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
A signed permission form has been received giving St. John's College blanket permission to make audiovisual recordings of Elliott Zuckerman's lectures, speeches, and addresses available online, and to make copies of typescripts of Elliott Zuckerman's lectures speeches, and addresses available online.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
sound
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
mp3
Subject
The topic of the resource
Music--Philosophy and aesthetics
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LEC_Zuckerman_Elliott_2003-04-04_ac
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/77abfdeb9758ed9a7d57128e897740b4.mp3
b393f396b3805c85894b602b54edfc86
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
wav
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
01:10:49
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
A Grecian Urn
Description
An account of the resource
Audio recording of a lecture delivered on April 6, 1984, by Howard J. Fisher as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Fisher, Howard J., 1942-
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984-04-06
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
A signed permission form has been received giving St. John's College blanket permission to make audiovisual recordings of Howard J. Fisher's lectures, speeches, and addresses available online, and to make copes of typescripts of Howard J. Fisher's lectures speeches, and addresses available online.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
sound
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
mp3
Subject
The topic of the resource
Symmetry
Art
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LEC_Fisher_Howard_1984-04-06_ac
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/bc599f39ffa2ebfa83a42f46708ab37e.mp3
3756e817e0d3581c0efe90c0d11468b7
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
wav
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
01:19:49
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Is Schrödinger’s <em>What is Life?</em> Still Worth Reading Today?
Description
An account of the resource
Audio recording of a lecture delivered on December 2, 2022, by Daniel Nicholson as part of the Formal Lecture Series. <br /><br />Dr. Nicholson describes his lecture: "Erwin Schrödinger’s <em>What is Life?</em> (1944) is one of the most celebrated scientific works of the twentieth century. However, like most classics, it is far more often cited than read. Efforts to seriously engage with Schrödinger’s arguments are rare. In this lecture, I will explore how well his ideas have stood the test of time. I will suggest that <em>What is Life?</em> should still be read today, though not for the reasons that may initially seem most apparent."
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Nicholson, Daniel J.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2022-12-02
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture available online. "
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
sound
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
mp3
Subject
The topic of the resource
Schrödinger, Erwin, 1887-1961
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LEC_Nicholson_Daniel_2022-12-02_ac
Friday night lecture
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/7a8a457c14dd4499ecc512c7e2b6ce56.mp3
6a1141476694499a2c873eeafe9601d9
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
audiocassette
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
01:07:05
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Race and Social Justice: On W.E.B. DuBois' <em>The Conservation of Races</em>
Description
An account of the resource
Audio recording of a lecture delivered on September 20, 1991, by Lucius T. Outlaw, Jr. as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Outlaw, Lucius T., 1944-
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1991-09-20
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a typescript of my lecture available online."
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
sound
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
mp3
Subject
The topic of the resource
Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963
Race
Social justice
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Tape 1173
Friday night lecture
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/f7d0c7b4022a275a8bce9f0bd3f6a3f6.mp3
a21ccb1ada42f633ddf4eb0633cae11c
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
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wav
Duration
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01:02:39
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Hegel's Reading of Antigone
Description
An account of the resource
Audio recording of a lecture delivered on September 30, 1988, by Patricia Locke as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Creator
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Locke, Patricia M.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
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1988-09-30
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A signed permission form has been received giving St. John's College blanket permission to make recordings of lectures and to make them available in the library and online.
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sound
Format
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mp3
Subject
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Hege, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831
Sophocles. Antigone
Language
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English
Identifier
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LEC_Locke_Patricia_1988-09-30_ac
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/3c3d0ae928a0a806429a1e666b32ead5.mp3
cdf40187adb39f3411c29c35ff75d911
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
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audio cassette
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
00:37:03
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
What Is a Philosophic Question?
Description
An account of the resource
Audio recording of a lecture delivered on April 28, 1989, by Samuel S. Kutler as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Creator
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Kutler, Samuel S.
Publisher
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St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
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1989-04-28
Rights
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A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a typescript of my lecture available online."
Type
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sound
Format
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mp3
Subject
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Aristotle. Metaphysics
Philosophy
Language
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English
Identifier
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LEC_Kutler_Samuel_1989-04-28_ac
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/9b39eba28ff0c6199688e423491a0082.mp3
1583b205ef2c2f1107758bedcc8fe3ee
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
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wav
Duration
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00:58:24
Dublin Core
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Title
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Paternity and Piety: Noah and His Sons
Description
An account of the resource
Audio recording of a lecture delivered on October 30, 1998, by Leon Kass as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Creator
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Kass, Leon
Publisher
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St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
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1998-10-30
Rights
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Leon Kass has given St. John's College blanket permission to: "Make recordings of my lectures, speeches, and addresses available online. Make typescript copies of my lectures, speeches, and addresses available online."
Type
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sound
Format
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mp3
Subject
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Noah (Biblical figure)
Bible. Genesis
Fathers and sons
Language
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English
Identifier
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LEC_Kass_Leon_1998-10-30_ac
Friday night lecture
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/45d5e47323e457edf3d29ef0a10d2d86.mp4
f5ae886d0560f9993b9a3e9023c7e051
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
Moving Image
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mp4
Duration
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00:57:05
Dublin Core
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Title
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How Deeply Does Democracy Shape Us?: Tocqueville on Our Ideas and Sentiments
Description
An account of the resource
Video recording of a lecture delivered on September 30, 2022, by Bryan Garsten as part of the Formal Lecture Series. <br /><br />Professor Garsten offers this description of his lecture: "The lecture will investigate how the Puritans are the point of departure for Tocqueville’s understanding of America, the role of associations generally, why democratic citizens are liable to underestimate the importance of 'forms,' the love of equality and the danger of industrial aristocracy." <br /><br />Professor Garsten is the author of <em>Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment</em> (Harvard University Press, 2006) and will soon complete a book called <em>The Heart of a Heartless World</em> that examines the ethical, political and religious core of early nineteenth century liberalism in the United States and France. He is the co-chair of the International Conference on the Study of Political Thought and serves on the editorial board of <em>Philosophy and Rhetoric</em>.
Creator
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Garsten, Bryan
Publisher
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St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
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2022-09-30
Rights
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A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: make a recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John’s College Greenfield Library; make a recording of my lecture available online; make typescript copies of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John’s College Greenfield Library; make a copy of my typescript available online."
Type
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moving image
Format
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mp4
Subject
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Democracy--United States--History
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1805-1859
Tocqueville, Alexis de, $d 1805-1859. De la démocratie en Amérique
Language
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English
Identifier
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LEC_Garsten_Bryan_2022-09-30_ac
Friday night lecture
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/eb1762018a6bc907ea8aa72e612047bb.mp3
51a562672c7712ea46a0a12a5bdac659
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
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wav
Duration
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00:50:37
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
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Agonizing Over a Decision: What Can Neuroscience Tell Us About the Relationship Between Thought and Emotion
Description
An account of the resource
Audio recording of a lecture delivered on September 6, 2007, by Julie Fiez as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Creator
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Fiez, Julie A.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2007-09-06
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: make a recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John’s College Greenfield Library; make a recording of my lecture available online; make typescript copies of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John’s College Greenfield Library; make a copy of my typescript available online."
Type
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sound
Format
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mp3
Subject
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Affective neuroscience
Emotions--Social aspects
Emotions (Philosophy)
Language
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English
Identifier
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LEC_Fiez_Julie_2007-09-07_ac
Friday night lecture
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/9c400c66a03563ce5e0085e6b1c4c7bd.mp3
30ac09e89a36f6a8836e94a956b0c461
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
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wav
Duration
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00:56:58
Dublin Core
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"Making New Gods?": Reflections on Plato's <em>Symposium</em>
Description
An account of the resource
Audio recording of a lecture delivered on March 21, 2008, by Mitchell Miller as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Creator
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Miller, Mitchell H.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
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2008-03-21
Rights
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A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: make a recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John’s College Greenfield Library; make a recording of my lecture available online."
Type
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sound
Format
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mp3
Subject
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Plato. Symposium
Language
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English
Identifier
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LEC_Miller_Mitchell_2008-03-21_ac
Friday night lecture
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/b9b0cab952e5288e9e6691b89c28abc5.pdf
30ae99d4d2b26b1bc80ae58611525323
PDF Text
Text
Philosophy and the Cave Wall
Plato and Kant on the form of the given
Would the mind’s escape from the body be a good thing? This question might arise for
anyone who sees a distinction in our human nature between thought and sense. Why might one
wish for such an escape? And what might warn one against such a wish? Compare these two
different ways of approaching the question, each formulated by Kant:
The inclinations themselves, as sources of need, are so far from having an absolute
worth, that to be altogether free of them must be the general wish of every rational
being.
(Kant, Groundwork, 428) 1
Here, sensible appetites and aversions are a regrettable encumbrance. Of course, the
annihilation of bodily needs is just a “wish”-- these impositions of nature are truly inescapable for
us as long as we live in this body. But who hasn’t felt this wish, in moments of frustration,
struggle, or frailty? Just as the addict can see his own addiction as something to regret, as
something worth being free from, we may all sometimes see the demands our own bodies seem
to make on us as regrettable, and as unfortunate. Socrates spoke of this kind of wish in the
Phaedo, when he explained to his friends that a philosopher looks forward to death– the soul
leaving the body– as the greatest of blessings.
But here is another take on the question:
The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine
that its flight would be still easier in empty space. 2 It was thus that Plato left the world of
the senses, as setting too narrow limits to the understanding, and ventured out beyond it
on the wings of the ideas, in the empty zone of pure understanding. He did not observe
that with all his efforts he made no advance– meeting no resistance that might, as it
were, serve as a support upon which he could take a stand, to which he could apply his
powers, and so set his understanding in motion.
Kant is more subtle in other works. “The inclinations, in themselves, are good” (Religion within the Limits
of Reason Alone). Nevertheless, they do not enable our cognition of the Good itself.
2 Is there such a thing as empty space? The dove thinks so. Kant will argue that mind is absent from no
place in the world (“the sum of possible experience”): it is an ideal plenum, so to speak.
1
1
�(Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A5/B8)
Here sensibility could be thought of as a resource, a help that makes knowledge possible for the
mind. The wish of the thinker to be released from sense is mistaken, because it fails to see how,
if realized, this would mean the withdrawal of that resource, the abandonment of that crucial gift.
Notice how Kant relates his own thinking to Plato explicitly in the second passage, and implicitly
in the first.
Kant seems to be divided. In the practical sphere, where action is concerned, sense can
be an obstacle, or at least an encumbrance. But in the theoretical sphere, where knowledge is
concerned, Kant is in fact a champion of sensibility. Ultimately, according to Kant, it is only when
we understand the epistemic resource provided by sensibility that we can see how necessary,
universal knowledge of the world around us is possible. Kant aims to carry out a previously
unattempted task for philosophy: to unfold the principles of sensibility. Philosophy, Kant claims,
must not sprint ahead to the realm of pure reason, to what seems to it maximally intelligible.
Rather, it can and must make intelligible what is not intelligible on its own– the senses. When
explicated, this would be a kind of wisdom unavailable to the mere mathematician or scientist,
and unheard of by the metaphysician: a philosophical apology of sense, what Kant calls a
‘transcendental aesthetic.’
Getting to read Plato and Kant every few years in an alternating cycle, it has come to
seem to me that perhaps Plato, for one, did contemplate such an account. To see this thread in
Plato, I will consider tonight passages from two great dialogues: the Republic, and its sibling,
the Timaeus.
Kant himself turns our attention in this direction by identifying Plato as the beginning of
his own philosophical tradition, one that asks first and foremost: how is knowledge possible?
The example of mathematics, Kant claims, convinced Plato that we have access universal,
necessary truths not derived from sense experience—what Kant calls a priori knowledge.
Socrates is often occupied with this sort of knowledge, as in the slave-boy’s recollection of true
geometrical judgments he was never taught. To explain this sort of knowing, Socrates
sometimes invokes purely intellectual, so-called forms of what is known. The pure forms
somehow come to have sensible images of themselves, in our minds and in the world. That is,
they are somehow participated in, or received, and it is by means of their reception that the
world can be known for what it is. But how is this reception into the sensible realm possible?
The problem of human knowledge, of how the given can be known, is therefore always also the
problem of sensible receptivity.
2
�The lecture has four parts. We will trace a path of inquiry into receptivity through Book VI
of the Republic (section 1), and then into the Timaeus (section 2), where I hope to show how
Plato’s thinking reaches a kind of culmination in the account of the so-called ‘receptacle’. In the
third section of the lecture, we’ll compare the Platonic approach to the problem with Kant’s
account of space in the Transcendental Aesthetic of the Critique of Pure Reason. We might
then be in a position to judge whether Plato and Kant are really philosophical brothers-in-arms,
as Kant suggests (section 4). We will not discover that Plato and Kant held the same doctrines.
Plato’s dialogic writings protect us from ascribing “doctrines” to his writings at all. Nevertheless,
philosophers—even philosophers who disagree with each other-- might be colleagues in so far
as they are moved by the same questions, and the same problems. It is this comradery under a
question I hope to examine in Kant and Plato tonight.
The Path Upward is not the Path Downward
In Book VI of Plato’s Republic, Socrates asks his conversation partners to imagine a line
divided into two unequal sections, each of which is divided again into two subsections (509d7
ff). Then both faculties of the soul and the objects of these faculties are mapped onto the line:
the two main sections correspond to sense and understanding; the realm of sense, of what
seems to be, is divided into bodily things, and their images; while the realm of the
understanding, of what is, is divided into what Socrates calls the “mathematicals,” or the
learnable things, and what he calls the “ideas,” or the forms. The philosopher’s authentic activity
is knowing the forms, which he or she achieves by what Socrates calls “dialectic.” The category
of the mathematicals, by the way, might be much broader than what we would mean by
‘mathematics,’ embracing anything that can be universally known or demonstrated: not only
music and mechanics, but perhaps also several natural sciences, and even language arts like
grammar and general logic-- the mathematicals, taken together, sserve as the topics of our
tutorials and labs.
The realm of the sensible is known by experience. Enough familiarity with the solid
structures we use as houses lets a carpenter repair and construct. His or her colleague within
the sensible realm is the artist who expertly paints images of the same houses that the
carpenter constructs. But many aspects of housebuilding follow from geometry, which grasps
universal principles about figures. The knowledge of these belongs to the understanding. Here
we can see laid out three personages, three psychic activities, and three sorts of object: the
3
�painter, making images of houses by artistic imitation; the carpenter, putting his or her body into
motion to bring those same houses into being as solid structures; the geometrician,
demonstrating the necessary, universal figurative principles governing the house’s structure.
The painting is an image of the roof’s eaves, which in turn can be thought of as images of
angles. These angles can be seen “only by thought,” and raising ourselves to the level of the
mathematicals reveals that human beings can have contact with universal, necessary truths
beyond convention and passing opinion. They give us purchase on the truth beyond experience.
But Socrates follows his construction of the divided line by posing two “reservations” to
his interlocutors about mathematical knowledge. The first is that its objects are taken as
“assumptions” by the thought that knows them. Geometry, for example, like all other particular
sciences, must simply assume that mathematical figures exist, and are therefore available for
study. It has no account of what sort of existence they have, and whether this existence has a
cause or source. Second, geometry will always be at least partially immersed in sensibility,
since it must always make use of sensible images in its demonstrations. In Socrates’ account,
philosophy will emerge as a possible kind of knowing that could transcend these two
“reservations.”
Let us consider the reservations in turn. Socrates complains that the mathematicals are
not truly “first principles” or beginnings, but “assumptions” But how does he know this? True,
geometry does not explain how its angle exists, but could this not be a consequence of the
figure’s ultimate priority? It can’t be explained by geometry, because it can't be explained at all:
it is a first principle. This is a tempting defense of mathematical supremacy. (when
mathematicians call themselves ‘platonists’,sometimes I think this is what they mean.) But
consider carefully the difference between self-evidence and assumption: an assumed premise is
not self-evident, because it leaves unsettled what sort of being on its own the object may have
apart from me, who assumes it. As long as it remains an assumption, a geometrical angle,
though it seemed to be real to us, might turn out to be a sort of illusion. Perhaps the reality of
things is that spaciousness is not real at all, that nothing is linearly extended, and no two lines
are spread out from each other in an angle. While this is perhaps disturbing to contemplate, it is
not a possibility the geometer can rule out. There is nothing about the angle that renders its
non-existence self-contradictory, and by hypothesis, geometry does not understand the figure’s
reality to be guaranteed by some higher source. Geometricians like Euclid and Lobachevski do
a great service for knowledge by identifying certain principles as unproved “postulates” or
“assumptions.” But even they leave unarticulated, and therefore unexamined, the whole host of
presuppositions that underlie their objects. The question, ‘how do angles exist?’ is not
4
�nonsensical, and remains. The geometer, while he or she might ask this question from time to
time, cannot answer it from within his or her own science.
The second reservation is, I think, more subtle. Just as geometry couldn’t “extricate”
itself from its own assuming, it also can’t pull itself out of the very sensibility it is so proud of
rising above. Socrates’ speech, with all its talk of higher and lower, here might sound like it is
assuming a kind of low-class uncleanliness about sensibility. Or maybe he is exploiting the
thumotic character of his interlocutor Glaucon, who will be pleased to look down on the uppity
mathematicians who are still enmeshed in the dingy senses. But if we are not so hastily
thumotic, we might wonder what is so damning about mathematics’ return to the senses. Is
Socrates’ second reservation not itself an unreasoning prejudice against embodiment?
In fact I think Socrates is onto something very important here. Mathematics begins by
seeking an object more knowable than what presents itself to the senses. But when it
demonstrates necessary truths about these objects, it finds it must turn back to sensibility to
construct images of what it wants to know. 3 We all know this from our study of Euclid and his
sucessors (even Lobachevski): no board or no paper, or no imaginary field in one’s mind, then
no demonstration of the proposition. We think the universal we desire to prove on our own, but
we turn to the board to manifest what we think about this universal, and the board helps us
along, making room for the instantiation of the figure, keeping things apart from each other,
letting them abide next to each other, sorting the different directions– left, right, back and forth. It
is as if the board, or rather, space itself, were a partner in the demonstration. This means that
geometry’s very scientific character is dependent upon sensible conditions. But these sensible
conditions are not understood by geometry, and indeed, are never brought into examination by
it. We might not find this situation humiliating, but we should find it intellectually unsatisfying.
The point is not so much that sensibility contaminates, but that for all its crucial contribution to
knowing, it remains unintelligible, a silent partner in the sciences.
Socrates proposes that philosophy can rise above mathematics’ limits. “Reason may
take hold” of mathematicals, he says, not as “assumptions”, but as “stepping stones,” examining
from what higher principles they might proceed, by means of “dialectic.” This philosophical kind
of knowing, as an extension of geometrical inquiry, would answer the question ‘how do angles
exist?’ by discovering genuinely self-evident truths upon which angles depend. In this sense, its
objects would not be assumptions, and it would escape the first reservation about
mathematicals. The second reservation would also be escaped, because the dialectical ascent
[It is not only geometry that turns back to sensibility, but arithmetic as well. Counting needs an extended
field in which successive moments can be distinguished. For Kant, this is time.]
3
5
�upon the grounds of mathematical knowing would move towards fully intelligible objects of
reason. Its accounts would move from reason to reason, with nothing but reason in between. In
other words, it would never descend back into sensibility’s manifestations to demonstrate, but
would [‘hypothetically’] infer the conditions it was after. Philosophy, like seminar, will not need to
use the board.
As wonderful as these philosophical successes might be if realized, Socrates’ proposal
raises some crucial questions not addressed explicitly in the Republic. Remember the concern
involved in the second reservation, that mathematics requires the use of sensible images. If this
“use” involves epistemic contributions from sensibility not understood by mathematics, these
contributions will not be any better recognized by a purely eidetic, dialectical philosophy. Rather,
they will be transcended, as the mere circumstances of a lower form of knowing, perhaps not
worth the attention of reason unencumbered. In this presentation of philosophy, we are
encouraged to assume that sensibility is not, in fact, an epistemic resource. If the contributions
to knowledge come wholly from ‘above’, so to speak, from reason alone, then this is perhaps a
safe assumption. But a lover of wisdom would rather not beg this question.
The image of the divided line is followed by the image of a cave, in which we are born
chained to our sensible experience, which plays before us like shadows cast by models of real
things outside of the cave. In this allegory, knowledge indeed comes ‘from above’: the naturally
true is imitated in the figures manipulated in the cave, and these are imitated in the shadows
they cast. But throughout the allegory is an unexplicated factor: each sort of knowable
generates an image in some receiver– the forms of the true objects are received into the
materials used to construct their likenesses, and the likenesses themselves on the cave wall
that receives their shadows. Without these receivers, no chain of imitation is possible. Following
the allegory, without the cave wall, no sensible experience is possible. But of what is the wall
itself a depiction? Whatever it is, is it of a nature to contribute to the kind of knowing we have in
our experience of the world? Socrates’ allegory might distract some readers from such a
question with its narrative of “turning-around.” By pointing the aspiring philosopher ‘upwards’
towards reason’s resources, rather than ‘downwards’ towards the nature of sensibility, he is
leaving at least one big question on the table.
If the path upwards were pursued, what would the Socratic philosopher discover about
the first principles of geometric “assumptions”? A first step still within mathematics might be the
discovery that figures can be taken as images of ratios– for examples, the pentagon as a spatial
flowering of the uncalculable mean and extreme ratio, and the circle, of the transcendent ratio
called ‘pi.’ But these so-called “irrational” or “mute” ratios themselves might turn out to be
6
�approximations of rational, speakable– that is, arithmetic– ratios. The very first mathematical
principles from which figures are derived would then be numbers, whose first still-mathematical
principle might be the unit, or that by which we call something one. Now, a dialectical inquiry
into the possibility of numbers-- and indeed the possibility of the unit-- might lead to purely
intelligible forms such as the Same itself, the Other itself, and the One itself. This ascent leaves
space behind as a sort of encumbrance. Of course, space itself is not accounted for in such a
philosophical ascent. The givenness of figures, that they are outside of us, and the receptivity of
both the world around us and our own imaginations to the spatial images of ultimately rational
principles, is not itself given an explanation. The silent partnership of the cave wall has been left
silent.
The Turn to Bastard Reasoning
Eric Salem once proposed in a lecture on Socrates’ allegory that the account of the cave
wall is not given in the Republic, but rather might be sought in part in the Timaeus’ account of
the receptacle. I want to follow his suggestion here, and so we now turn to the Timaeus.
In the dialogue’s introductory section, Socrates asks to hear about his idea of a beautiful
city, which had been elaborated in speech the day before, but this time set in motion, at war. His
request might already indicate an interest in just what was left unexplored above: in motion, in
the realm of becoming, the beautiful city will need to come down off its seat in intellectual
heaven, and show how it might be given in the world of change. But it will not be Socrates who
takes this path downward. Rather, the title character Timaeus speaks for the remainder of the
dialogue. Before the city in motion can be discussed, however, Socrates and his interlocutors
decide they want an account of the nature of the humans who will make up the city. Moreover,
they want an account of the whole, moving cosmos in which these humans emerge. The
remainder of the dialogue is accordingly cosmological, and then anthropological (the political
question is postponed). Timaeus’ very first step in pursuing his cosmology is to offer a
fundamental distinction familiar to Plato’s readers: the sensible world, he says, must be
distinguished from the purely intelligible model of which it is an image. The intelligible admits of
no motion, is eternal, and can never have come to be at all– it simply is. The sensible comes to
be, and Timaeus pictures this coming to be as the result of a divine constructive “craftsman” (ho
demiourgos) or “framer” (ho synistas). He narrates how this power might have constructed a
7
�harmonious image in imitation of the perfect model, making use of mathematical figures and
ratios familiar to the sciences of astronomy and music. 4
Timaeus’ cosmos, at this point, is like a mathematician’s diagram. Compare Ptolemy’s
mathematical astronomy. Its theories do not speak of where or in what the motions of the stars
occur, but rather only of the stars’ motions’ knowable ratios, demonstrable in diagrams. In this
way, the question of the nature of the space that receives the world-image might not arise for
the merely mathematical cosmologist. 5 But several steps into the narration, Timaeus points out
a problem. The divine maker constructed these mathematical models as somehow imitations of
what is best—that is, as imitations of the intelligible original. But it doesn’t seem that this
procedure—imitation of the best—is sufficient to account for the whole cosmos. On the contrary,
Timaeus claims that the world as it is comes to be not simply from the intellect’s grasp of the
good, as his story had been assuming, but also from what he now calls “necessity”: by what, if it
exists, has to be the way it is. Where does this necessity come from? Despite the fact that the
mathematical arts and sciences (like Ptolemy’s) are filled with insights into what is necessarily
and universally true about corporeal nature, none of them can give a deduction of this
necessity’s origin. For example, none of the cosmologists, Timaeus points out, have given an
account of how the medium of natural change—the elements of bodies-- have come to be in the
matter in which they are. 6 To theorize a changing cosmos, mathematical diagrams alone,
unhindered by necessity, will not be sufficient.
What is needed, Timaeus proposes, is a “new beginning,” a “retreat” to a new principle,
a “third kind” of being, making sense of the world’s receptivity as such for the knowable forms.
Timaeus calls this principle “the receptacle”, a co-eternal origin alongside the intellect’s model of
the cosmos. Not the model itself, nor its constructed image, it is precisely that into which the
model is received.
With the introduction of his “third” principle, Timaeus is in fact clarifying a fundamental
dualism about knowledge. The relation of original to image so dear to Socrates leaves out of
account a second origin for the image, in receptivity itself. The world as it appears is different
from its origin– this is the Socratic proposal. But that its origins are two is Timaeus’ thesis– by
Geometry and arithmetic provide a science of ratio in general; but astronomy and music turn to
appearances to discover which particular ratios and figures form a harmonious whole, either of heavenly
motions, or of musical scales. Timaeus borrows the particular ratios and figures of the latter two sciences.
5 At this stage, time is given as “a moving image of eternity.” It is the outcome of ratio-metric mathematical
principles, not a container in which they have being. This approach is unlike Timaeus’ conception of
space.
6 If successful, an account of necessity would perhaps stave off the allegation that corporeal becoming is
nothing but an unintelligible flux.
4
8
�adding his “third kind”, he uncovers that second origin, and reveals the apparent world as what
he calls a “syntasis”: a combination of heterogenous sources. The multifarious shifting from
stability to instability and back again that constitutes the mortal world will take place in the
receptacle; but the discovery of this principle reveals that it must have been there all along,
providing space even for the relatively unchanging motions of astronomy. 7 With the receptacle,
astronomy can be taken as no longer merely mathematical, for its objects are not merely
diagrammable ratios. Rather, they are now natural bodies with a place in the cosmos. Their
astronomy belongs to physics. 8
Timaeus warns his audience that an account of the receptacle will be “strange and
unusual,” because the object of study is “difficult and obscure.” His warnings indicate to us that
an entirely new sort of theorizing will be taking place: for unlike the eidetic model, the receptacle
is not itself intelligible. And unlike the visible world, it does not appear to the senses. If we have
only intellect and sense at our disposal, with what will we know that which is in itself unavailable
to either? In one of the strangest passages in Plato (the 4th passage on the handout), Timaeus
tells us that the receptacle not only “shares in the intelligible in a most perplexing and hard-to
capture manner”— but is “graspable by a bastard sort of reasoning, with the aid of insensibility”
(52a8).
The claim seems to be that the principle unavailable to our two faculties, sense and
thought, will be revealed through a perverse deployment of those very same faculties. Why
“bastard”? Wherefore base? This term suggests that in pursuing this account, reason will not be
occupied within reason’s own, high territory of the purely intelligible, but with the supposedly
baser realm of the sensible. The account to be developed takes the forms to have been mired in
the sensible realm, and attempts to understand precisely their adulterated existence. Reasoning
will be trying to make sense of what is not its own.
And why “insensibility”? How could that help? The idea here could be that the inquiring
subject has to somehow scrutinize the nature of his or her own sensible experience, while
shutting out the material influence of the sensible object. Insensibility here is a sort of deep
abstraction. Regard the curtains behind me, but become insensible to their color, their solidity,
their texture, perhaps even their particular magnitude [imagining FSK here]. What emerges for
us then is “seen dimly” as if in a “dream,” Timaeus says.
Timaeus implies that the heavenly motions of astronomy are not eternal, but rather only an “image” of
eternity. The demiurge remarks that “all that is bound together can be dissolved” (41b1).
8 The receptacle belongs to “the account of the whole” 48d5, and “is…before the birth of Heaven.” 52d4
7
9
�As he proceeds, Timaeus’ retreat reasons backwards towards the “nature” or “eidos” of
the receptacle. That is, he infers what it would have to be like, in order to fulfill its role as the
field in which the visible manifests. It can have no sensible qualities, since it must be able to
take any of them on. Similarly, it cannot be pictured or diagramed, since it is the ground of all
possible diagrams. It can’t be drawn on the board, since it is what makes the board available in
the first place. This is what it is not, but what can be said positively about it? Timaeus calls it the
“chora,” the space or room in which the world appears. He also calls it a neutral “molding stuff”
for the world, and even a “wet-nurse”, and “mother.” This sequence of metaphors draws out a
sense of the formal and causal power of the receptacle. The receptacle thus somehow
nourishes, or pours life into things, sustaining them. These metaphors indicate how far from
“empty” the receptacle is, even in itself. We might often think of space as sheer void, waiting
indifferently to be filled by perceptible items. 9 But Timaeus’ space is teeming with potential life,
waiting, not indifferently, but expectantly, to give birth. It is perhaps neither full, nor empty, but
according to its eternal priority, the source of either of these spatial dispositions. When it gets
filled by forms, it gives them the room to manifest themselves. When it gets filled by void, it
holds open the room in which no forms are. Compare the blackboard: where the diagram is not
drawn, indeed, in the crucial zones between the parts of the diagram, the board is not merely
empty of inscription, but spread out in its blankness.
The receptacle’s radical priority to experience further suggests that is matter only in a
metaphorical sense. 10 For it is not literally “stuff” in the sense we know from experience– after
all, it is “molded” both into our solid, present objects and into the absent spaces between them.
It is thus not a source of nourishment for the world in a material sense, but perhaps rather in a
formal sense. That is, it “nourishes”, so to speak, the sensible givenenness of things by
sustaining them as spatial.
Timaeus offers one more, especially puzzling metaphor: he calls the receptacle a
“winnowing basket.” Change in sensible things, he points out, comes to be through contact
between differences. The hot next to the cold, the dry next to the moist– we might add: negative
charge around positive charge, north magnetic poles across from south, or ‘masses’ in a
gravitational field. These different “powers”, whatever they may be, “jostle” each other, and
thereby produce change. Over time, these changes generate the apparently structured world
which we observe. These change-inducing juxtapositions, these jostlings, do not happen
through tools of arrangement, as if parts were separated and pushed together with a hoe and a
9
Lucretius’ void. Interesting that Lucretius is such an unmathematical thinker.
Aristotle and Plotinus both take the Receptacle to be “matter.”
10
10
�rake. Rather, the parts themselves act on each other, like grains in a winnowing basket. 11 The
basket merely provides the venue in which this jostling can transpire– it is a passive sort of tool
that does nothing more than make the reciprocal influences of the worked-upon matter possible,
by providing them the room for juxtaposition. The six directions of space– left, right, back,
forward, up and down– act like the grid of a basket, sorting the tendencies of material things into
different directions, giving them a stage on which they can come upon their brethren.
Does Timaeus’ story of the receptacle serve as the ’missing’ account of receptivity–
missing, that is, from the picture of Socratic philosophy in the Republic? Recall that part [of] the
vocation of philosophy described there, to ascend to the intellectual first principles of the
mathematical sciences’ own starting places, would leave unexamined the non-intellectual first
principles of sensibility, that is, of the receptivity in which the knowable images come to be. On
the other hand, Timaeus’ oddly named “receptacle”, which has resonances in Greek of
“reservoir” or “harbor,” represents receptivity as a cognitive resource. The name indicates the
epistemic purposiveness of the “third kind”: the receptacle provides a welcoming cosmic
hospitality for the forms, so that they may be known by us in their images. Timaeus follows his
account of the receptacle with an extended speculation about the solid geometry of the
elements. Certain propositions about the elements– how many there could be, how they would
act upon each other, and how they could change into each other– are derivable a priori, since
they arise from the demonstrably necessary geometrical character of the solids. These
speculations have hypothetical—perhaps fanciful—beginnings. But the necessity involved in the
geometry of his hypotheses generates an a priori, synthetic natural science. 12 Timaeus’
procedure suggests that any mathematical natural science of matter will ultimately rest upon a
story about the receptacle as an ultimate condition of the possibility of extended, sensible being.
Is this foundational story satisfactory as a philosophical account?
But doesn’t the “sieve” itself move? I can only make sense of this in an extremely analogical way. We
might be reminded here of a passage from Plato’s Parmenides, in which the elder philosopher
proposes that the One– the very highest principle of all being– is both at rest, and in motion
(146a). It is at rest, so to speak, Parmenides claims, because it doesn’t ever depart from being
fully in itself. But it also is in motion, so to speak, because it always is in other things, making
each of them one thing. The metaphysical participation of things in the One can be thought of as
a kind of flowing motion of it outwards, into them. Could this conception help us interpret
Timaeus’ winnowing basket? The receptacle’s motion is not a locomotion, but a “change” in
which it takes on a form it doesn’t have in itself. In so far as the spatialization of these forms has
consequences for how they evolve, it is as if the ‘change’ of the receptacle imparts further
changes to the things in it.
11
Cf thinkers like Kepler, Maxwell, Rutherford—anyone who imagines a model, derives necessary
conclusions from it, and compares these with the appearances.
12
11
�Timaeus warned his audience at the start that any cosmology of a becoming world
would not be knowledge, but only a “likely story,” in so far as what becomes is not what is, but
only its likeness. Philosophy seeks to rise to what is, and discover knowledge of the eternal
there. Accordingly, Timaeus’ mathematical chemistry of the elements is not wisdom about the
highest things. Socrates of the Republic would agree. Now, the receptacle, as the neutral field
of change, can itself neither change nor come to be. However, Timaeus seems to suggest that
as the eternal mother of becoming, the receptacle is itself approachable only under the guise of
[a] likely story. This in part justifies his copious use of metaphor in its account. Metaphor
becomes the handmaiden of ‘bastard reasoning’, with which we can articulate in speech what is
not in itself intelligible. The conjunction of several metaphors– space, mother, nurse, matter,
basket– raises the problem of thinking the thing coherently, since its metaphorical predicates
are not simultaneously compatible. But beneath this interpretive problem is a deeper paradox:
the account treats the receptacle as an eternal, self-subsistent thing, even though it is not, by
hypothesis, a being. This double-speak renders the account of that which underlies all
becoming even more mythic– “not less, but more likely” (48d3) -- than the playful speculations
about shapes and growths that make up the rest of Timaeus’ physics. This paradox, that the
receptacle is both beyond becoming and other than being, runs through Plato’s adventure along
the path downward. Accordingly, the hoped-for account of the cave wall turns out to be, in
Plato’s treatment, deeply enigmatic.
The Form of Outer Sense
Kant’s life’s work, it seems to me, was an attempt to demythologize philosophical
enigmas. Where receptivity is concerned, he’s on the case. He begins in the Critique of Pure
Reason with a distinction in kind between thought and sense. In the dialogues, thought was
understood as the faculty that grasps the universal, which is, while sense grasps the particular,
which merely seems or becomes. One of Kant’s innovations is to add to these correlations the
proposal that while thought in us is active, sense is receptive. Kant names the study of the
principles of knowledge belonging to thought a ‘Logic’ – the study of logos. He names the study
of the principles of knowledge belonging to sensibility an ‘Aesthetic’-- the study of aesthesis.
(Note that Kant’s ‘aesthetic’ has nothing directly to do with the beautiful.) An empirical aesthetic
would investigate the particular senses we happen to have, and what features of the world they
give us access to: color, odor and taste, sound, temperature, as well as shape, size, and
duration. Perhaps what we read in Book II of Aristotle’s De Anima could be considered an
12
�empirical aesthetic. A transcendental aesthetic, on the other hand, would investigate sensibility
as such, rising past or transcending the particularities our equipment for sensation.
This new science’s object comes into view in two stages (described in the 5th passage
on the handout): first, Kant claims that we must “isolate sensibility by taking away everything
from it which the understanding thinks through its concepts.” In the second step, we “separate
off from sensibility everything belonging to its impressions.” The first move resists the claim of
monist thinkers like Leibniz, for whom the distinction between sensibility and understanding is a
difference in degree– that is, sense is merely the obscure end of the spectrum of human
representation, whose clear and distinct end is called understanding. For Leibniz, there is
accordingly only one path for philosophy: towards the higher principles of the intellect, for there
is properly speaking no heterogenous epistemic contribution from sensibility itself. Taken as an
interpretation of the divided line, we can see that Leibniz’s Socratic conception must hold that
there is no philosophical theory of the cave wall.
Kant’s interest, on the other hand, is not unlike the dualist Timaeus’, for whom givenness
must be traced back to a second principle. Timaeus proposed his receptacle as the ultimate
ground of the givenness of things, as the reason why things can be given to the senses at all.
This question reappears in a new guise in Kant’s account of “sensibility,” defined as
receptivity— not, to begin with, the receptivity of the world for intelligible forms, but the
receptivity of our own mode of knowing; the openness, one could say, of our minds for things as
given.
In its second step, the transcendental aesthetic clears out from intuition what Kant calls
the “matter” of sense, leaving nothing but the “form.” Kant claims there are two sorts of sense
for us: space, the form of “outer sense”, and time, the form of “inner sense.” Kant’s space, in this
respect, like the receptacle, is invisible, inaudible, and impalpable. Taken together, these two
steps reveal an object not properly available to either the understanding or to sensation. Rather,
the philosopher must abstract from the matter of things sensed outside of us to the form of their
being “outer” at all. The underlying precondition for juxtaposition, extension, and orientation is
not any spatial thing, but space itself– or perhaps better, spatiality. This spatiality is not thought
up by us, and is not derived from experience. It is the form or ultimate pre-intuition of whatever
could be given as ‘outside.’ This form itself is a “pure manifold”– not merely many, like the
spatial stuff of outer sense, but the ordered, stuff-less multiplicity of orientations in which
sensations are always given, and to which they cannot themselves contribute. Recalling the
warnings of the difficulty of the inquiry voiced by Timaeus, Kant tells us in the introduction of his
13
�book that “it may be that we are not in a position to distinguish [the form of knowledge] from the
raw material, until with long practice of attention we have become skilled in separating it” (B1-2).
This ultimate priority of space ahead of all outer things means that, like the receptacle, it
cannot have come to be. And on precisely the grounds of this priority does space make
necessary knowledge of the outer world possible. Our geometrical demonstrations draw their
necessity from the way the pre-intuited field in which they are inscribed or imagined determines
those inscriptions and images. Thanks be to the board, where we may draw our figures. But
greater thanks be to space, which opens out to make room for the board, and opens out for our
imaginations to spread and discover what must follow from what among our figures. It is
essentially one, embracing all particular spaces. It is both given, in that we do not
spontaneously think it at all, and infinite, in that no bounds can be set for its magnitude. It is
empty, in that it is the container or receptacle for all sensible content, and unremovable, in that
we cannot imagine it away.
Timaeus introduced the receptacle, not as an aspect of particular material things, but as
a single underlying whole which pre-exists them, so that it may receive them. This seems to be
what Aristotle, for one, was most at pains to resist about Plato’s Timaean conception– for the
later thinker, the places of things, along with their shape and their magnitude, are accidents of
their individual existences: a thing is in a place as the contact boundary of what surrounds it.
There is no whole receiver, only a nested series of surrounding containers. Hume’s argument
reaches a similar conclusion: no impression comes to us without some spatial magnitude, he
claims, and so space itself is only a subsequent abstraction made possible by the accumulation
of spatial particulars. Kant, filling in argumentation absent from his ancient comrade Timaeus’
account, argues that the nature of spatiality requires independent singularity and wholeness.
For, each particular place is bounded only in so far as these boundaries are between spatial
regions. That is, bounded spaces are always “limitations” of the same one space. Just as what
recieves limitation must be priori to the result of its limitation, so divisions into particular places
presuppose the field which they limit. Accordingly, larger spaces cannot be assembled originally
out of smaller ones, and so space is not an aggregate; it is rather, Kant claims, a “totum”
(B466), preceding the particular parts we may carve out of it.
Recall also how Timaeus brought in the receptacle as an additional “kind” to ground his
mathematical science of material nature. Kant seems to have agreed that the nature of
geometrical knowledge of things required a heterogenous, spatial source of knowing; indeed, he
thought the necessity of mathematical sciences was the strongest evidence for his
sense/thought dualism. He points out that geometrical demonstration, for example, reveals that
14
�necessary predicates about figures cannot be derived out of their concepts by analysis, but
must rather be synthesized or constructed out of the intuited figures. That the third side of a
triangle is shorter than the sum of the other two does not fall out of the concept of what a
triangle is, but only from the determination of the sensible field in which we inscribe triangles.
The blackboard must play its role. Kant here is taking Socrates’ second reservation about
mathematics– that it could not extricate itself from sensible conditions– as decisive evidence
that sensibility is, after all, an epistemic resource, and that human knowledge is dual.
Idealism
Taking up the torch of ‘bastard reasoning,’ Kant finally explains the unacknowledged
source of scientific knowledge of sense objects, by reasoning back to the invisible, nonintellectual condition of sensibility. This condition, however, is– unlike Timaeus’ receptacle– not
a self-subsisting, eternal being, but a mere form of our own sensibility. It is in us, not in a
psychological sense, as if it were a figment of each thinker’s mind, but in a metaphysical sense,
as a feature of our knowledge of things, and not of the things as they are in themselves. Space
is not ‘in our heads’-- indeed, our heads are in space. But space is ‘in’ our own, human knowing
of things, such as our knowledge of the heads in this room.
The radically blank ‘non-thing’ that is space, therefore, does not exist in itself. Kant
writes (this is on the handout) that those who “maintain the absolute reality of space” as
“subsistent...(which is generally the view taken by the mathematical students of nature),... have
to admit [an] eternal and infinite self-subsistent non-entity, which is there, yet without being
anything real, only in order to contain in itself all that is real” (A39/B56). He was probably
thinking of Newton here, but the description fits the deep cosmology of the Timaeus, as well. 13
As we saw, Timaeus’ chora made knowledge possible, but only by way of an existence which is
neither being nor becoming. Like Timaeus, Kant infers that there is a determining source of
knowledge in receptivity. But to elude the paradox, Kant makes clear that this source, space, is
nothing but an epistemic condition. The receptivity, and thus the receptacle– the form of outer
sense–, is ours. This position of sensibility– both subjective and essentially sharable– may be
more familiar to us from the realm of thought. That is, when we think a concept together, each
The receptacle is eternal, but Timaeus never calls it infinite. This is perhaps because qua unformed, it
has no quanitity. What did Newton mean by calling space “empty” in the Principia? In the Optics, Newton
writes that space is “the sensorium of God.”
13
15
�one of us shares the same universal in our thought. The mind’s concept is not a psychological
event, but a form or standard. According to Kant’s account, mind is present in sensibility, as
well. The space of things is not a psychological feature of their images in our minds, but rather a
necessary feature of how they can known by beings like us. This is what Kant means by “the
transcendental ideality of space.”
Kant does declare his form of outer sense to be “empty,” which might make us think it is
pure, void extension. Where is the living, expectant energy of Timaeus’ receptacle? We might
say that its energy has been idealized. The expectancy, the power to hold the shape of what will
come to be in it-– that is, the maternal power of space– this is in Kant’s space as well. But we
can now see this power as life-like, precisely because it is a power of the mind. Space as the
form of intuition is not a null void, but a manifold field ready for knowledge to be generated in.
The pure manifold, the cave wall, is alive, because it is sensibility.
Kant’s journey down into sensibility has none of the metaphorical images of Timaeus’.
On the contrary, it strikes a scientific pose, where Timaeus’ story was only “likely.” Kant speaks
in his own voice as philosophical inquirer, rather than through a fictional character whose own
relation to philosophy is obscure. Kant’s account appears first in his book, as the starting place
for a looming system, where Timaeus’ appears as a “revision” or “retreat” part-way through a
narrative. The highly metaphorical, fictive frame of the receptacle might suggest that the
receptacle as described is a poetic manifestation of knowable principles, according to which
what is transcendentally ideal (space) is depicted as if it were real, in itself, but in a likeness, in
a mythos. This would certainly not be the only time Plato has characters speak in a
metaphorical mode, rendering as material what cannot properly speaking exist in that way. Such
a depiction generates paradox, as we have seen, and this paradox raises questions about
subjectivity and the knowability of the world that Plato was content to leave as questions. By
demythologizing the receptacle, showing that it is not an alien, quasi-divine being outside of us,
but rather a constitutive principle within us all, pulling the depiction out of the poetic sphere of
the ‘likely’, Kant gives himself the opportunity to answer these questions. Whether his answers
are satisfactory, is a question for us.
16
�
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Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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Philosophy and the Cave Wall: Plato and Kant on the Form of the Given
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on March 31, 2023, by Matthew Caswell as part of the Formal Lecture Series. <br /><br />Mr. Caswell describes his lecture: "<span>The lecture will compare inquiries into the nature of sensibility offered by Plato, and by Kant. That </span><i>space</i><span> might be the ultimate ground of a certain kind of sensible givenness is a possibility investigated by both thinkers. What can our love of wisdom gain from pointing itself downward, into the senses?</span>"
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Caswell, Matthew
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Annapolis, MD
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2023-03-31
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Kant, Immanuel, 1724-1804
Plato
Philosophy
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English
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LEC_Caswell_Matthew_2023-03-31
Friday night lecture
Tutors
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6cb1756cf96da69b72628c3fdd358fd9
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Description
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Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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01:06:53
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Sappho I: An Ontological Approach
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on January 13, 1995, by Joshua Kates as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Kates, Joshua
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Annapolis, MD
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1995-01-13
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sound
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Sappho. Works. Fragment 1
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English
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LEC_Kates_Joshua_1995-01-13_ac
Friday night lecture
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https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/2888e2840bda248a3f72fef4dcbde042.pdf
12e89faca4924292509e31d10438ffc3
PDF Text
Text
On a recent plane trip, I sat next to a young man who is currently a junior at a small college in
Pennsylvania. He was very friendly, eager to tell me about his troubles with a girl who offered
him a ride to a tattoo parlor, his coach’s tactics for defense, and how little he was learning in
college. When he found out I was a professor he decided to help me out by telling me how he
cheats on all his tests. I thanked him for the information, but told him that we don’t have tests at
St. John’s. He was very interested, paused for a moment, and then asked how the party scene
was. Excellent, every friday night there is a lecture.
Since he was so forthcoming, I decided to ask him what he knew about Galileo. He thought that
Galileo was the guy who dropped things off the leaning tower of Pisa (quite possibly true), and
that Galileo argued that the sun revolved around the earth (right topic, but he had his
heliocentrism and geocentrism mixed up).
These two facts about Galileo, that he showed that bodies do not fall with speeds proportional to
their weights and that he championed Copernicanism over Ptolemaic astronomy, are probably the
two most well known features of Galileo’s corpus. And yet I’m not sure that Juniors, after
studying Galileo for a week in Junior mathematics and a month in Junior Laboratory, would have
learned either of these things from their study. We don’t study why Galileo rejected Aristotle
and Ptolemy, we study a new science that Galileo built upon the apparent ruins of Aristotelian
natural philosophy and metaphysics: a science of the actualized infinite in the mathematics
tutorial, and the study of local motions described in the third and fourth days of Galileo’s last
published book, The Two New Sciences.
The Two New Sciences is a discourse between three friends, Simplicio, Sagredo, and Salviati that
lasts four days. On the first two days, the three friends discuss a new science concerning the
resistance of solid bodies to separation. While there are theorems sprinkled throughout these two
days, the banter between the friends leads us, for the most part, gently and slowly through the
mathematical and physical arguments. Along the way we are treated with numerous diagrams,
some of them purely geometric, but many more are intricately drawn sketches of ropes with
frayed edges, beams with knots and grain that look like olive not pine, and crumbling arches of
brick that support not only beams but plants with branching roots that are breaking through,
clumps of moss, and new sprigs with veined leaves.
On the third and fourth day, where we begin our study, readers begin with the unnamed
Academician’s Latin text rather than a friendly Italian conversation with our three interlocutors.
The Latin text describes the locomotion of disembodied moveables that are more like
mathematical points than the natural bodies in days one and two, the diagrams reminiscent of
book five of Euclid rather than the drawings of olive beams, braided ropes, and crumbling
arches. What we see is an academic mathematician, one who precisely defines equable motion,
naturally accelerated motion, and projectile motion, then applies Euclid’s theory of proportion
1
�and Apollonius’ study of conics. The third day, in particular, is remarkably spare. Only fifteen
of its more than seventy-five pages are Italian dialogue, the remainder, mathematical theorem
after mathematical theorem in Latin.
It is on the third and fourth day with this spare Latin text on the mathematics of motion that our
Junior Laboratory begins. If one ignores nuance, the use of proportion, geometrical corollaries,
and blurs one’s vision, then one could summarize our readings thus: in six theorems on equable
motion, Galileo shows that speed is distance divided by time; in the next six theorems on
naturally accelerated motion, he shows that the distance a body falls is one half its accumulated
speed times the time of its fall squared; in the final two theorems on projectile motion, Galileo
demonstrates that a body can simultaneously move with equable motion in one direction while
falling with naturally accelerated motion downward resulting in a parabolic path.
What we study in the third and fourth days is Galileo’s last published work, written at the sunset
of a life exhausted by a revolutionary study of motion, published as his body was bedridden by
disease, his eyesight failing, his person imprisoned, and his soul shattered from the death of his
beloved daughter; this monument risks seeming for us an unremarkable dawn, a new beginning
we could unconscionably sleep through, a dry academic Latin textbook in which two elementary
equations for moving bodies are derived.
But the new beginning that we study is the distillation of a lifelong argument between Aristotle
and Galileo. Galileo lets us hear echoes of this argument in his dialogues by including the
Aristotelian, Simplicio, among his characters. While Simplicio will argue for the Aristotelian
approach tenaciously and with spirit, his understanding is often second hand, rote, and
handicapped by a poor mathematical education consisting in nothing beyond book one of Euclid.
Salviati and Sagredo often team up and ridicule the Aristotelian account and tend to just ignore
Simplicio altogether whenever the discussion requires mathematical expertise. It often seems
that Galileo is not treating the Aristotelian worldview fairly, as Simplicio himself complains,
allowing Salviati to vaunt over an impoverished, dried up, rather rubbish version of
Aristotelianism. If Aristotelianism is so ridiculous, why include it at all? Why have Simplicio
partake in these dialogues?
Galileo’s new science of local motion is now old and familiar to us. Because of this we might
have a hard time seeing Galileo’s theory without first becoming strangers to it. One way to do
this is to immerse ourselves in another way of thinking about motion first. This is in fact what
we do in the program by studying Aristotle. By studying Aristotle we are able to not only see a
cohesive, beautiful, and philosophically rich way of understanding motion, we also are put in a
better position to see how our own understanding of nature is itself a theory that requires
attention and thought.
2
�I think that Galileo puts Simplicio into the dialogues so that we notice that Galileo’s steps were
not taken out of necessity, by habit, or from authority, but consciously taken to set himself upon a
new path to understand nature. Simplicio is there so that we notice that Galileo isn’t simply
doing mathematics, he is philosophizing. Simplicio is there to remind us that Aristotelian
philosophy, was more than any part that Galileo might contradict, it was a whole philosophy of
nature, and that this new “way of philosophizing tends to subvert all natural philosophy, and to
disorder and set in confusion heaven and earth and the whole universe.”1 Simplicio is in the
dialogues because Galileo is still trying to understand the significance of his disagreement with
Aristotle.
What is this Aristotelian natural philosophy that Galileo threatens to subvert, disorder, and set in
confusion? There are countless small derisive references to the peripatetic philosophy
throughout both the Two Chief World Systems and the Two New Sciences, Simplicio championing
it and defending it in turn, but tonight I thought it would be worthwhile to turn to an earlier text
in Galileo’s career, On Motion or in Latin De Motu.
Galileo wrote and rewrote De Motu while he had a chair in mathematics at the University of Pisa
at the outset of his career (1589-1592). Some hypothesize that De Motu was written as notes for
lectures on Aristotle, others that it was written for publication, perhaps it was both. As a young
professor, he is more conservative than when he is older; he works from a foundation established
by Aristotle’s natural philosophy. Galileo might remind us of Simplicio in these lectures,
adhering to an Aristotelian theory without fully recognizing its consequences. Here we
encounter Galileo wrestling with Aristotle rather than pumping his fist in triumph. Although he
eagerly points out inconsistencies with the same iconoclastic spirit we see in the later dialogues,
the apparent goal is not to refute but to improve upon Aristotle by supplementing his account
with mathematical reasoning inspired by Archimedes writings on the balance, making Aristotle’s
theory more consistent with our experiences of moving bodies. As Galileo develops the
consequences of these changes, we will see a description of nature emerge that is at odds with
the foundations: Aristotle’s definition of nature.
I.
Aristotle’s theory of natural motion
I’ll begin with a few basic ideas from Aristotle’s natural philosophy, before giving a more
detailed account of what we might call Aristotle’s science of the locomotion of bodies.
Aristotle defines nature in the beginning of the second book of the Physics: “nature is a principle
or cause of being moved and of being at rest in that to which it belongs primarily, in virtue of
1
Galileo, Two Chief World Systems (trans. Stillman Drake, University of California Press, 1953, second revised
edition 1967), Day I.
3
�itself and not accidentally”(192b21-22).2 Nature is not deer, trees, rivers, and soil, but the cause
of motion and rest in deer, trees, rivers, and soil; the cause that belongs to these things in virtue
of what they are and not accidentally. Nature is the reason something moves or something rests
when it moves or rests because of itself. Nature is an internal cause of motion or rest.
Nature is not the only cause of motion. Another cause that we are familiar with is force. If I lift
a stone, it does not move because of nature but because of a force which I apply to the stone. All
local motions will have a cause, either a natural cause which is internal and belongs to the body,
or a violent cause which is usually external and is the result of a force being imposed upon the
body. For Aristotle, natural motions are eminently more interesting than forced motions.
Now when we turn to study nature, the internal cause of motion and rest, we are faced with two
kinds of things. There are things that have life or soul and things without life or soul. In the
Physics, Aristotle says that having an internal source of motion and rest is “a characteristic of life
and peculiar to living things” (255a6-7)3. For Aristotle there is an intriguing puzzle about the
motion of non-living things, why and how do they move themselves without soul? His account
of nature needs to stretch to incorporate a kind of motion that originates in a thing without
originating in a thing’s soul. In this lecture, we will call the natural motion and rest of a
non-living thing, the natural motion and rest of a body.
Aristotle will say two things about a body’s motion, and there is some tension between these two
claims, which we will need to address. First, a body’s source of motion, a body’s nature, is ‘the
heavy’ and ‘the light’ in the body. In De Caelo, Aristotle will say that bodies have “in
themselves some spark (as it were) of movement”(308a2); this spark (τὁ ζωπὐρον) is ‘the heavy’
and ‘the light’.4 If we were to form an analogy we could say that soul is to an animal’s or a
plant’s natural motion as spark is to a body’s natural motion.
But the second claim that Aristotle makes is that the body does not move itself as an agent, the
motion is pure passivity. Here is Aristotle in the Physics, “in all these cases the thing does not
move itself, but it contains within itself the source of motion–not of moving something or of
causing motion, but of suffering it” (255b29-31)5. Here we have Aristotle pushing against the
idea that we should understand the heavy and the light as anything analogous to soul. The body’s
motion is pure passivity, the spark is not a soul, but a passive potential for a kind of activity,
being at rest in a particular place. The idea here is two-fold. First, while a stone resting on the
ground will never move itself, if I lift that stone up and release it the stone will move. The spark
2
Aristotle, Physics (The Complete Works of Aristotle, edited by Jonathan Barnes,
translated by R. P. Hardie, Princeton University Press, 1984), Book II, ch. 1.
3
Ibid., Book VIII, ch. 4.
4
Aristotle, De Caelo (also from The Complete Works of Aristotle, edited by Jonathan
Barnes, but translated by R. K. Gaye, Princeton University Press, 1984), Book IV, ch. 1.
5
Ibid., Book VIII, ch. 4.
4
�does not turn into a roaring fire by itself, but only when one uses bellows to fan the flame.
Second, the heavy and the light do not choose their place of rest and where they will move when
they do move; there is no internal account for why they move where they move. Aristotle says
that ultimately, “these things are moved by that which brought the thing into existence and made
it light and heavy”(256a1)6.
We can now turn from these few basic ideas underlying Aristotle’s natural philosophy, to some
more specific claims in his account of how ‘the heavy’ and ‘the light’ can be used to describe the
natural local motions of bodies.
First, and of primary interest tonight, is this: Aristotle believes that bodies fall with speeds in
proportion to their heaviness and lightness. In the De Caelo, Aristotle gives the following
example (which is illustrated in the handout, and labeled figure 1). If we have a body that falls
through line ce in a given time, and we divide both the body and the line in the same ratio, so
that ab is to the whole body as cd is to the whole line, then the part of the body will complete the
part of the line in the same time as the whole of the body would move through the whole line.7
This means that a stone half as big as another stone, that is with half its heaviness, will fall half
as far as the bigger stone in the same time. Aristotle will give similar examples for the light as
well as the heavy. A fire twice as large as another fire, will rise twice as far in the same time.
Paired with this claim is a claim about how bodies fall through different mediums. If one is
given a body, it will fall with a speed that is inversely proportional to the density of the medium.8
If water is twice the density of air, then a body will fall half as fast in water as it will in air.
Aristotle also gives an explanation for how and why bodies naturally accelerate. In De Caelo,
Aristotle says that when a body naturally falls downward or rises upward, it moves towards
fulfillment and “comes into that place, quantity, and quality” which belongs to its form
(310a20-35).9 The idea that something moving upwards would change not only in location but
in quantity and quality, might seem strange. But we can remind ourselves that for Aristotle
motion is not simply locomotion, motion is a general category, it is a becoming, an actualization
of a potentiality as such. ‘The heavy’ doesn’t just move downward, it has a place in the cosmos,
the center. When ‘the heavy’ is in its place it is fulfilling its purpose, it is at-work-being-itself, it
is actualized. Similarly with ‘the light’. When ‘the heavy’ moves downward it is not simply
changing its place, it is becoming more itself. It is, to return to the quote above, coming “into
that place, quantity, and quality” which belongs to its form. This means that as the heavy moves
downward it gets heavier, and because it is heavier, it moves faster. Galileo adds in the margins
Thomas Aquinas’ way of putting this, “Aristotle held that the speed of motion is increased
6
Physics, Book VIII, chapter 4.
On Motion, p. 263, ch. 8, and De Caelo 301a27-32.
8
Physics, Book IV, chapter 8, 215a24-215b11.
9
De Caelo, Book IV, chapter 3.
7
5
�because the weight of the body is more concentrated and strengthened as the body approaches its
proper place” (ch. 19, 316)10.
We now have the basic outlines of Aristotle’s account of nature and how he uses this to explain
the natural motions of bodies: where a body is at rest, where it moves when it is displaced, the
speed with which it moves, and why a body accelerates. But because the heavy and the light are
not soul, they are not active principles, but passive principles, we can still ask the question, why
does the light go up and the heavy down? To answer this question, Aristotle says that we have to
look outside the bodies to “that which brought the thing into existence and made it light and
heavy” (256a1).11
II. Galileo critique of Aristotle
Galileo thinks that Aristotle was wrong that speed is proportional to weight. Galileo prepares
many thought experiments which might not refute Aristotle, but work on the reader’s
imagination so that Aristotle’s claims become more problematic. Because Galileo writes these
thought experiments to persuade, I’ll focus on the one that I found most persuasive and try to
explain why I found it so.
Galileo instructs us to imagine two bodies of equal weight falling next to each other with equal
speeds. As these bodies fall, they are shoulder to shoulder and then, at some point, they become
attached. An Aristotlelian will be compelled to say that once they become attached, they will go
twice as fast. Galileo concludes that it is obvious that this is not the case for anyone who “looks
at the matter simply and naturally” (ch. 8, 266)12. As we reconsider the example, in an attempt to
look at the matter simply and naturally, we might notice that the sudden increase in speed is
coincidental with the cohesion of the two bodies. The cause of the increased speed doesn’t seem
to be more weight, but the fact that a given weight is in one body rather than two. But why
should this matter? How would this cohesion increase the speed? Surely the bodies will
continue going the speed that they had been going, whether the bodies are rubbing shoulders or
holding hands, as it were. Now, is a chunk of wood any different from two halves “holding
hands”? I don’t see why it would be, so it must be that the larger chunk of wood falls just as fast
as any of its parts would fall and it just so happens that all these parts are “holding hands”. Now,
perhaps this is not what Galileo meant by looking at the matter simply and naturally, but I am
sure that this is the sort of inner dialogue that he wanted his readers to have.
There is no indication in these lectures that Galileo rejected Aristotle claims based on a field trip
to the leaning bell tower in Pisa. If anything, the sorts of examples he gives indicate an approach
10
Galileo Galilei, On Motion and On Mechanics, The University of Wisconsin Press,
1960. On Motion was translated by I. E. Drabkin. Hereafter, “De Motu”.
11
Physics, Book VIII, chapter 4.
12
De Motu.
6
�that puts more weight on reason and imagination than any particular experience. The example we
have just given of two bodies being joined together mid-fall, is just such an instance. How could
bodies be made to do this? A few pages back, Galileo gives another counterexample to
Aristotle’s claim that speed is proportional to heaviness. Here he asks his students to imagine
two lead balls, one a hundred times as large as the other, both being dropped from the moon. In
both cases, the examples are not the sort of thing one can put to an actual test. Despite what one
will hear about Galileo being among the first experimentalists, it is clear in De Motu that his
theories were not based on results from experiments.13 Rather than torturing nature for answers,
he was more likely to interrogate his imagination and think through a problem theoretically.
Galileo says that he likes to “employ reasoning at all times rather than examples, for what we
seek are the causes of effects, and these causes are not given to us by experience”(263, ch. 8)14.
The ability to guide his own imagination and reason until he sees a clear relation of cause and
effect and then to convey this idea so clearly to others that they cannot possibly doubt the
relation, this is one of Galileo’s greatest points of pride. In both the Two New Sciences and the
Two Chief World Systems Sagredo will repeatedly complement Saviati on his ability to do just
this.15 This praise which Sagredo heaps on Salviati, is really Galileo heaping praise on himself
without shame. (Incidentally, Descartes in a letter finds fault with Galileo for putting
self-flattery into his books in this way.) As if the shameless self-praise weren’t enough, we
might recognize in it the praise that Plutarch gives to Archimedes, “god-like Archimedes” as
Galileo calls him.16 Plutarch points out that Archimedes is so clear in his explanations that once
you have learned something from him, you are sure you would have come to know it by
yourself. Both Galileo and Plutarch are building on the idea that mathematical knowledge, at
least, seems to be a kind of recollection. Galileo, putting himself in the position of Socrates or
Archimedes, brags that he is particularly adept at playing the part of the midwife to our
recollection of the true causes of physical phenomena.
III. Galileo’s theory of motion
13
In later works, Galileo appears to rely more heavily on experiment.
De Motu.
15
Here, for example, is Sagredo responding to Saviati in our readings from Junior Laboratory:
Sagredo: Too evident and too easy is this reasoning with which you make
hidden conclusions manifest. This great facility renders the conclusions less
prized than when they were under seeming contradiction. I think that people
generally will little esteem ideas gained with so little trouble, in comparison with
those over which long and unresolvable altercations are waged. Two New
Sciences, (Wall & Thompson, Toronto, 1989), p. 161.
16
“It is not possible to find in all geometry more difficult and intricate questions, or more simple and lucid
explanations…. No amount of investigation of yours would succeed in attaining the proof, and yet, once seen, you
immediately believe you would have discovered it; by so smooth and so rapid a path he leads to the conclusion
required.” (Plutarch, Lives, Life of Marcellus, (trans. John Dryden, Modern Library) p. 378)
14
7
�One goal for Galileo is to improve upon Aristotle’s account of the speeds of falling bodies.
Galileo is willing to reject the claim that speed is proportionate to weight, but he is not willing to
reject the claim that there is some relation between speed and weight. His stubbornness might
be difficult for us to understand. Doesn’t he see that the speed of falling bodies has nothing at all
to do with the quantity of matter? Absolutely not. And this fact, this amazing fact, is what
makes me love Galileo in De Motu. At this moment he is Simplicio. At this moment, he is a
dyed in the wool Aristotelian. He believes that nature is a cause of rest and motion in a body.
He believes that for bodies without soul, the nature of the body is its weight. He believes that
weight must be the cause of rest and motion.
But, Galileo recognizes that there are some areas of weakness in Aristotle’s account. In
particular, Galileo will need to finesse the relationship between speed and weight. Galileo has a
way to do this. At the age of 22, in 1586, he wrote a small little essay. A lab report, if you will.
The topic of his essay, how Archimedes discovered the theft of Hiero’s crown. He thinks that the
method ascribed to Archimedes by others is a “crude thing, far from scientific precision” and not
befitting the divine Archimedes. In the remainder of the essay, he argues that Archimedes does
not find out the fraud by immersing equal weights of gold and silver in water and measuring the
different quantities of spilled water. Archimedes discovers the fraud by measuring the weight of
the crown when it is immersed in water. The key is that Archimedes recognized that “solid
bodies that sink in water weigh in water so much less than in air as is the weight in air of a
volume of water equal to that of the body”. The body will weigh less in water by exactly the
weight of the water that the body displaces. This difference in weight then serves as an accurate
measure of the volume of the body, allowing one to precisely measure the differences in the
quality or density of two submerged metals that are of equal weight in air.
What Galileo takes away from Archimedes and wishes to apply to Aristotle is this idea: it isn’t
weight but essential weight, or density, that distinguishes bodies from one another. Just as
Archimedes is able to distinguish gold and silver by their essential weights, Galileo is not able to
distinguish all kinds of natures from one another by considering their essential weights. And
this, a body’s essential weight, this must determine its speed of fall.
What a thrill for Galileo! He has figured out what nature is! He has found the key to
determining the speed of any given body! The peripatetics, if they aren’t too stubborn, too tied
to every last exact word of Aristotle, are going to love this! He might even get promoted! After
all, and this is a common saying of the time, “ignorance of motion is ignorance of nature”, and
he has found the key to motion, the real nature, essential weight.
But to get this theory off the ground, he has to revisit Aristotle’s natural philosophy. Can
Aristotle’s, ‘heavy’ and ‘light’ be replaced with essential weight? Can motion be explained by
the outcome of a balance?
8
�Galileo begins confidently, not only sure that he can replace Aristotle’s ‘heavy’ and ‘light’ with
essential weight in order to explain motion, but that doing so will improve Aristotle’s account of
nature in other ways.
As we saw above, Aristotle faced a puzzle in explaining the motion of non-living bodies. He
was committed to explaining their motion by finding an internal cause, but because these bodies
do not have soul or life, they couldn’t be agents of this motion. In one way, then, the heavy and
the light explained the rest and motion of bodies, but in another way, Aristotle ends up needing
to look for a principle outside the bodies to explain the principle of rest and motion. Galileo’s
way of describing the situation is that Aristotle finally didn’t have an explanation for why the
heavy goes down, or the light up, but instead was forced to make nature operate “according to
whim and chance”17.
Galileo says that he “anxiously sought from time to time to think of some cause, if not necessary,
at least reasonable and useful” to determine why the heavy goes down and the light up. Here too
the key was replacing the idea of heaviness and lightness with essential weight. In doing so, he
realizes that nature chose to put the densest at the center and the rarest at the perimeter with
“complete justice and with consummate wisdom”. In doing so, nature has distributed matter
equally around the center of the cosmos. The smallest sphere which is closest to the center has
equal matter but much less space than the larger spheres farther from the center. Therefore, the
smallest sphere must be the place of a substance whose form causes matter to be compressed in a
very narrow space, while those spheres farther from the center, must be the place for substances
whose form causes matter to expand in ample space (253, ch. 2)18. Galileo’s account has
supplied a formal cause for the cosmos that explains why the heavy, the dense, rests at the center,
and the light, the expansive, rests away from the center.
Once Galileo suggests that this principle of equality is at work in the organization or creation of
the cosmos, it is natural that he should think it is at work in the preservation and restoration of
the order in the cosmos. In other words, this same principle might be at work not only when
bodies are at rest in a perfectly ordered world, but after bodies are disturbed, and are working to
restore that order. For example, this principle is at work when, after I lift a rock and remove it
from its place, I release it and it rushes downwards.
For the restoration and preservation of order, nature needs more than a cosmos that was created
with matter equally distributed about the center. Nature will need a way to measure inequalities
and restore equality. Nature needs a balance. Here, Galileo, “it is therefore clear that the motion
of bodies moving naturally can be suitably reduced to the motion of weights in a balance”(259)19.
17
De Motu, p. 15.
De Motu
19
Ibid.
18
9
�Now in general, a balance measures the relative weights of two bodies. But when Archimedes’
submerged the scale in water, he was able to determine essential weights. So Galileo
hypothesizes that to get an accurate measure of the nature that determines speed, the balance will
need to determine essential weight. One arm of the balance might carry the body, but the other
needs to take into account the medium. Here Galileo: “the body moving naturally plays the role
of one weight in the balance, and a volume of the medium equal to the volume of the moving
body represents the other weight in the balance”(259)20. Just as the crown submerged in water
was lifted by the water to the extent that a weight equal to the weight of the water it displaced
would lift it, so too Galileo imagines that any medium will lift a body to the extent that a
weight–a weight equal to the weight of the volume of the medium it displaces–would lift it.
Bodies don’t fall with speeds proportional to their weights, but speeds proportional to this
adjusted weight, their own weight less the weight of an equal volume of the medium.
Now, as it turns out, Galileo’s theory is just as inaccurate as Aristotle’s. Galileo seems to
recognize this fairly quickly. Here he is working through an example:
…If there are two bodies equal in volume but unequal in weight, the weight of one of
them being 8, and of the other 6, and if the weight of a volume of the medium equal to
the volume of either body is 4, the speed of the first body will be 4 and of the second 2.
These speeds will have a ratio of 4 to 2, not the same as the ratio between their weights,
which is 8 to 6. (272-273)21
In this particular example, the medium has an essential weight that is fairly comparable to the
essential weight of the two bodies. The ratio of the speeds in the medium is thus larger than the
ratio of the original essential weights. In fact we see that the ratio in speed could get really large
if we find a medium that has an essential weight close to 6. In this case, one body would drop
with some speed, while the other body would not move at all, or very slowly. This result looks
pretty good. Here Galileo’s theory seems to explain why the ratios of the speeds of bodies
falling in water seems to be larger than the ratio that the bodies have when falling in air. On the
other hand, as the medium gets thinner, as its essential weight becomes negligible compared to
the essential weights of the bodies, the ratios of the essential weights should be approximately
proportional to the ratios of the speeds. In very light mediums Aristotle’s claim, speeds are
proportional to weights, is analogous to Galileo’s, speeds would become close to proportional to
essential weight. In other words, take equal sized balls of wood and iron, drop both from a large
tower and they should fall with speeds proportional to their weights. Here Galileo:
But note that a great difficulty arises at this point, because those ratios will not be
observable by one who makes the experiment. For if one takes two different bodies,
which have such properties that the first should fall twice as fast as the second, and if one
then lets them fall from a tower, the first will not reach the ground appreciably faster or
twice as fast (273).22
20
Ibid.
Ibid.
22
Ibid.
21
10
�While it might not have been Gailleo’s first inclination to head to the tower, it seems like he was
not opposed to making a test of his theory once it was in hand. In doing so, he must have been
quite disappointed. But he is not yet able to give up the theory, he concludes in the same way
that Aristotle would have: “This is not the place to consider how these contradictory and, so to
speak, unnatural accidents come about (for they are accidental)”(273)23.
Let’s take a step back from the details of Galileo’s theory for a moment. What Aristotle and
Galileo seek to explain is how the body’s weight can explain its place of rest and its motion; they
are looking for an internal cause of rest and motion. Aristotle explains this by turning to the
‘spark’ inside the body which determines its place and makes it passively suffer the motion
determined for it. Galileo explains place by looking at density, and supposing a formal cause in
the organization of the comsos, ‘the equal’. Galileo explains motion by having us imagine how a
balance tips when bodies of unequal essential weights are placed on its arms. Galileo has asked
us to supplement the internal principle of motion and rest, the bodies essential weight, with two
additional principles, a principle of equality, and the principle of the balance.
But what is the principle of the balance? What is it that makes it move? Does the balance have a
nature? Certainly not (says Aristotle). But the balance does have some sort of law governing it.
This is not just a law of equality, it is not an equation merely telling us that two quantities are
equal. The balance is dynamic, it is telling us something about forces. Galileo puts it this way:
“a heavy body tends to move downward with as much force as it is necessary to lift it up”. On
each side of the balance a body pushes down, but on each side a body is also being pushed
upwards. The principle of the balance is that every downward force is transformed into an equal
and upward force. Balances work because they pair opposing forces. Galileo seems to think that
this principle of the balance is not just present in a balance, but is present everywhere and
always.
In addition to the internal principle of rest and motion, the body’s essential weight, Galileo has
introduced two additional principles: a principle of equality and a principle of equal and opposite
forces. Neither of these principles belongs inside a body. Both are principles about how one
body relates to another body. In fact, the principle of the balance, is best understood as a
principle about opposition between bodies, about the forces that bodies exert on one another,
about violence. This is a problem for an Aristotelian, a natural motion is being given an
unnatural explanation.
23
Ibid.
11
�Galileo acknowledges the difficulty himself: “It is therefore clear that this kind of motion may be
called ‘forced’, although commonly…called ‘natural’”(259, ch. 6).24 Galileo does not flinch. In
what follows there is no apology, and no explanation for this radical consequence.
By introducing a formal cause, ‘the equal’, by explaining motion and speed with the balance,
Galileo has not improved the Aristotelian account, he has undermined it. Natural motion has
gone from being internal to the body to being caused by a relation between one body and another
body. Motions which were once the actualization of the potentiality of a single body are now
understood to be violent outcomes of contests of forces between bodies. Galileo has shown
himself to be a wolf in sheep’s clothes. The principle of equality and the principle of the balance
are not compatible with Aristotle’s definition of nature. Archimedes might move the science of
motion forward, but the science won’t be compatible with Aristotle’s natural philosophy. Nature
is no longer the principle of motion or rest within a body. Nature has been replaced by a balance,
a contest between quantities of matter.
IV. Inclined Planes
Despite his failure to explain the speeds of falling bodies, Galileo charges onward. He now
wants to use the principles of equality and of the balance to solve a problem: how fast do bodies
fall along inclined planes.
Below, I will quote a larger passage, which is not particularly remarkable, apart from his
palpable excitement and, not unrelatedly, how many times he uses the word “problem”. Here’s
Galileo:
The problem we are now going to discuss has not been taken up by any philosophers, so
far as I know. Yet, since it has to do with motion, it seems to be a necessary subject for
examination… And it is a problem no less necessary than neat and elegant. The problem
is why the same heavy body, moving downward in natural motion over various planes
inclined to the plane of the horizon, moves more readily and swiftly on those planes that
make angles nearer a right angle with the horizon; and, in addition, the problem calls for
the ratio of the speeds of the motions that take place at the various inclinations. The
solution of this problem, when first I had tried to investigate it, seemed to require
explanations that were by no means simple. But while I was examining it more carefully,
and was trying to analyze its solution into its basic principles, I finally discovered that the
24
Ibid. In fact, I’m not sure that Aristotle could consistently maintain that the principle
or cause of motion of bodies is simply in each body because of what we will see in the
next section: he thinks the speed of fall of a body is inversely proportional to the density
of the medium. It seems like both he and Galileo think that some aspects of motion will
need to depend on something besides the body itself.
12
�solution for this problem, as of others which at first glance seem very difficult, depended
on known and obvious principles of nature. (296, Ch, 14)25
In past junior laboratory classes, I have sometimes wondered whether we are studying nature,
machines, nature as a machine, or machines as if they were nature. This passage led me to have
a new way of thinking about this question. With Galileo, maybe in this very passage, the subject
matter is shifting. The balance stands midway between nature and machines, it is not unnatural,
for Galileo it reveals nature, in fact it has become the principle of motion and rest. But the
balance, with intelligent use, very quickly becomes a lever, a machine. The balance brings
together nature and machines allowing us to create problems, problems that are no longer simply
mechanical problems for artisans in the shipyard, but problems that are now demonstrations of
how nature works. The instruments of the shipyard, are no longer for the artisans alone, they are
now the instruments the philosophers and the mathematicians will need to use in the laboratory
to reveal how nature works.
Galileo moves from understanding nature as an individual principle inside a body, to thinking
about nature as a beautiful, intricate, tapestry of problems, infinite interconnected balances each
in delicate equilibrium, systems of equations joined by the weights, speeds and forces of
individual bodies. Here we only see the introduction of a single problem, but the excitement,
the repetition, makes me think that Galileo is no longer seeing individual natural bodies, he is
seeing a web of bodies connected and revealed by the balance, an infinite and infinitely intricate
machine, giving rise to the promise of problems everywhere.
Right now, we have only a single problem, how fast will a body go down planes of different
inclinations. The known and obvious principle of nature which will play an essential role in his
solution: the balance. Galileo will show how he can weigh the body on different tracks and thus
predict how fast the body will go.
It takes a bit of geometry, a few diagrams, and maybe some gestures towards our laboratory
equipment to see how Galileo imagines the balance at work in his study of inclined planes. In
the handout, you will see an enlargement of Galileo’s diagram (figure 2). The circle represents
two things. First, it represents a circular track on which a body could fall on its concave surface
from d to b. Second, it is a balance, like the “Newton’s wheels” that we study in Freshman
Laboratory. The axle of the wheel, the fulcrum of the balance, is at a.
We are to imagine two things happening in tandem, a body is falling down the track from d to b,
and at each moment we can pause it and ask what is the weight of the body at c, that will balance
the falling body at that moment.
25
Ibid.
13
�The problem Galileo is investigating concerns the planes that are tangent to the circular track, the
planes that are inclined to the horizon. We only have three such planes drawn, but obviously
there are an infinite number of these planes that we could have drawn.
Galileo, as we saw above, is interested in this problem: to find the ratio of the speeds of the
motion that take place at the various inclinations of planes inclined to the horizon. For example,
he is interested in finding the ratio of the speeds of the body falling down the vertical plane ef to
the sharply inclined plane gh.
Galileo reiterates the principle of the balance: “a heavy body tends to move downward with as
much force as it is necessary to lift it up.” Weight, as measured by a balance, will allow us to see
how much force is necessary to lift a body up, and thus measures the force of a body’s tendency
downward, and its speed. The circular balance is there to determine how the weight of the body
varies with the different inclinations of the
planes so that we can determine the speeds
along any inclined plane. The balance will
give us the solution to our problem.
At point d, furthest away from the center of
the circle towards the right, the tangent to the
circle is vertical, and the track does not lighten
the weight of the body. The weight needed at
c to balance the body at d, is equal to d’s
weight. As we travel down the circumference,
we come to point s. At point s, Galileo suggests that the body is not as heavy as it was at point d,
the body has been lightened by the ramp. What weight at c is necessary to balance a weight at s?
Galileo believes that we can set aside circular ramps and the inclined planes, and simply consider
the balance. The body has moved from d to s on the wheel. As we know from freshman lab, we
need to draw a perpendicular from s up to cd, to determine the horizontal distance of the body
from the fulcrum. This distance is ap, which is less than the previous distance ad. Because the
body at s is now closer to the fulcrum, we will need a smaller weight to balance it at c. The ratio
of the new smaller weight to the previous weight, is ap to ad. Galileo concludes that the ratio of
these weights is the ratio of the downward tendencies of the body and so the ratio of the speed
along these various planes.
The inference that Galileo makes, that the weight the body has on the balance at a point is the
same weight that the body would have on the track with an incline tangent to that point remains
unexamined and unexplained. While the circular balance is very much present in this diagram,
the balance is not present when we have a simple inclined plane.
14
�And yet, Galileo seems to think that it is. Every time a body falls, we could explain the speed of
its fall by recognizing that a balance is at work. The weight that would be necessary to balance
this body, is the force with which the body tends downward, and therefore proportional to the
speed with which the body will fall. While the balance isn’t visible, the principle of the balance
is everywhere at work. The balance is woven into the relations that exist between bodies.
And yet, for me, the pattern still floats above the fabric of nature. It is clearly meant to be woven
in, but how and why the balance is attaching itself to the ramp, to the body, to the medium
remains murky. What we would like to know is why it is that the balance should succeed in
measuring how these ramps lighten the weight?
Perhaps there is some clue in what follows. Galileo continues his exposition with what appears
to be a superfluous explanation that directs our attention outside the circle towards a triangle that
is geometrically similar to the ones that are inside the circle (triangle aps, for example), but is not
at all associated with the balance, the similar triangle spq. About this, Galileo notes that “as da is
to pa, so is qs to sp, i.e., the length of the oblique descent to the length of the vertical drop”.
That is, the ratio da to pa which stood in for the ratio of the weights necessary to balance our
body on the vertical and oblique incline gh have the same ratio as qs to sp. But when we take
two inclined planes of the same height, or a drop and an inclined plane of the same height, it
turns out that we will get this ratio.
With his analysis of the exterior triangle, Galileo directs our attention away from the balance,
and towards the ratio of the paths which two bodies will take when they are released from the
same height but along different inclines. He says that the speed of fall is inversely as the lengths
of the planes. Here the ratio of speeds is not derived from the heaviness of the body, but has
something to do with the height from which the body falls and the lengths of the planes having
those equal heights.
Galileo has given us not one, but two ways to see how this same ratio emerges from the diagram.
Because of this he also seems to be suggesting two explanations, one based on the bodies’
weights, the other on the bodies’ heights and paths. Which account of the ratio would give us a
better explanation for the difference in the speed? Or, do these two explanations have some
relation to one another? Galileo started the essay believing that weight caused speed, but his
analysis here seems to hint at a new openness to explaining speed in other ways, perhaps
something having to do with the height from which a body falls and the path that it takes.
Perhaps he thinks there is a way in which something associated with speed is causing weight.
Galileo does not help us, he leaves these two expositions, these two similar triangles, these two
equal ratios, side-by-side.
15
�This juxtaposition of two mathematically equivalent ratios might remind us of the third chapter
of the third book of Ptolemy’s Almagest, where Ptolemy gives the reader two hypotheses that
will result in identical phenomena. Just as Ptolemy gives us mathematically equivalent eccentric
and epicyclic diagrams of the motion of the heavenly bodies, Galileo gives us mathematically
similar triangles one made from the distances to a fulcrum, the other by the paths of the moving
bodies. Galileo’s first triangle, suggests that the speed down more sharply inclined planes can be
explained by greater weight. The second triangle suggests that the speed down inclined planes
can be explained by considering the height from which the body falls, since taking a common
height between two planes will give us the correct ratio of speeds. Ptolemy’s circles and
Galileo’s triangles could be carving at the joints of nature, but they could also be mathematical
tools, seductive geometric figures that invite us to imagine physical structures.
After giving his account, Galileo is eager to share all manners of “problems” that can be solved
with his method. The one he culminates his discussion with is this: given two bodies of
different essential weights which fall at different speeds, how to construct a ramp so that the
faster body falling down the ramp will fall in the same time as the slower body in free fall (301,
ch. 14)26. For example, presuming that the steel ball will fall faster than the wooden ball,
Galileo would like to construct a ramp for the steel ball, so that it will roll down the inclined
plane in the same time that it would take the wooden ball to fall freely. Here, he seems eager to
use the inclination of ramps to “balance speeds” in the same way that a balance uses the distance
from a fulcrum to balance weights.
Ptolemy was incredibly successful in “saving the appearances”; he used the circle to effectively
predict where heavenly bodies would be and when they would arrive. Galileo finds that he is
much less successful in “saving the appearances”. But, he doesn’t acknowledge any doubt in his
theory, instead he uses the same excuse we saw above, “accidental factors”(302, Ch. 14)27.
The problems that Galileo solves are constructions, but merely mental constructions. When
these constructions are realized in the world he does not despair when the consequences he has
derived are not seen to be true. Unlike Ptolemy, Galileo is not yet able to save the appearances.
IV. Conclusion, looking forward to what Galileo will do and will discover.
Galileo might have been wrong that essential weight is the cause of motion and rest in bodies,
but in developing this idea he introduced two principles inspired by his study of Archimedes: the
principle of equality, and the principle of the balance. Both are enormously influential in the
subsequent study of physics. Neither of these principles reside in bodies, they are instead
principles that govern the relations between bodies. They are principles equally at home in
26
27
Ibid.
Ibid.
16
�political philosophy as natural philosophy. We can see this in Galileo’s language. He appeals to
equality, prudence, justice, and harmony in his explanation for the natural place and position of
rest for bodies. Galileo then appeals to the balance, a symbol we use for the weighing of
injustices, in his explanation of motion. These principles from Archimedes that Galileo
introduces to his study of nature are not internal principles of motion, they are not compatible
with an Aristotelian account of nature.
When Galileo turns to study astronomy, he will not begin by trying to improve upon Aristotle’s
account. Instead he starts all over from the beginning. The source of motion is not where you
think it is: this radical departure from Aristotle is the beginning point.
It is as if Galileo once fell for an enormous cosmic prank and is willing to risk imprisonment to
prove to the cosmos that he won’t fall for it again: he once thought the principle of motion is in
the things that appear to move, but now when he sees the sun rise and set and the stars revolve
around his head, he knows better than to think the principle of motion is in those bodies.
In Jacob Klein’s essay on modern rationalism he says the following: “mathematical physics is the
most important part of our entire civilization and actual life. …the principles of mathematical
physics are basic to our whole way of thinking and behavior”(57)28. At the conclusion of the
same essay he points to the vast machinery of our society and the indirectness of our contact with
the world, direct contact replaced by a symbolic unreality. Klein claims that “Our work, our
pleasures, even our love and our hatred are dominated by these all-pervading forces which are
beyond our control (64)29.
These are radical claims. After rereading Klein’s essays this Fall, I had the opportunity to talk
with Eva Brann, a longtime friend of Klein’s. I got up the courage to ask her, “was Klein
exaggerating?” Did he really think that “mathematical physics is the most important part of our
entire civilization and actual life”? That our work, pleasure, love and hatred are dominated by
these all pervading forces? Her answer, “Oh yes.”
After studying De Motu and watching Galileo struggle to reconcile Aristotle’s philosophy of
nature with Archimedes’ mathematics, I’m less incredulous of Klein’s claim. The movement
that I see in Galileo’s early study of the natural motion, the move away from thinking about
nature as a principle of rest and motion in individual bodies, towards thinking about nature as a
contest between bodies and eventually thinking of all motion as the consequence of forces that
originate entirely outside oneself, is quite familiar. The way we love and hate, the way we think
about happiness, the way we make choices, personal, professional, and political, the way we
participate in athletics, the way we understand economic life, in all these ways we repeatedly
28
Jacob Klein, Lectures and Essays, “Modern Rationalism”, eds. Robert Williamson and Elliott Zuckerman, St.
John’s College Press, 1985.
29
Ibid.
17
�appeal to equality, to the balance. Equality is a democratic value we all hold dear in some way;
the balance is a symbol of justice and rectitude, of progress and scientific learning, of a life lived
well, a symbol emblazoned on our school seal. But in studying Galileo’s use of the balance, we
see how it transformed his thinking about nature. Where Aristotle’s nature is the principle of
motion and rest in individual substances which are at work becoming more fully themselves,
more like their own forms, Galileo’s nature is a system of balances, at first glance embodying
principles of equality, prudence, justice and harmony, but on closer inspection these principles
merely adjudicate an underlying opposition between bodies. The move from Aristotle to
Galileo, is a move from nature as a cause inside an individual substance that is at work becoming
more fully itself, to nature as a system of laws governing the underlying violent opposition
between bodies.
Ptolemy can say the following about his study of astronomy, “with regard to virtuous conduct in
practical actions and character, this science, above all things, could make men see clearly; for the
constancy, order, symmetry and calm which are associated with the divine, it makes its followers
lovers of this divine beauty, accustoming them and reforming their natures, as it were, to a
similar spiritual state”(Almagest 1.1)30. I don’t think a physics based on Galileo’s De Motu could
say the same. Galileo sees earthly bodies moving according to principles of tension and
opposition, any rest, order, symmetry, or calm, supervenes on a tenuous equilibrium that masks
underlying tension and opposition. The equal and opposite forces that are inspired by his study
of Archimedes, are forces that lead to moments of apparent peace but these mask a perpetual war
between bodies. Perhaps this explains why he turns away from the discussion of causes in Two
New Sciences, contenting himself with studying what is orderly, symmetrical, and calm, the
measurement of motions. Here he finds the peace he was not able to find when he sought after
the causes of the motions of bodies.
30
Ptolemy, Almagest, translated by G. J. Toomer, Princeton University Press, 1998.
18
�
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On Motion
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on February 24, 2023, by Leah Lasell as part of the Formal Lecture Series. <br /><br />Ms. Lasell describes her lecture: "The new science of motion presented in the last two days of <i>The Two New Sciences</i> is Galileo's last word in a lifelong argument with Aristotle. Galileo lets us hear echoes of this argument by including the Aristotelian, Simplicio, among his characters. While Simplicio will argue for the Aristotelian approach tenaciously and with spirit, his understanding is often second hand, rote, and handicapped by his poor mathematical education which consists of nothing beyond book one of Euclid. Salviati and Sagredo often team up and ridicule the Aristotelian account and tend to just ignore Simplicio altogether whenever the discussion requires mathematical expertise. It often seems that Galileo is not treating the Aristotelian worldview fairly, as Simplicio himself complains, allowing Salviati to vaunt over an impoverished, dried up, rather rubbish version of Aristotelianism.
<p class="x_MsoNormal"><span></span></p>
<p class="x_MsoNormal"><span class="x_contentpasted0"><span>In order to better understand the argument between Galileo and Aristotle, we will look at one of Galileo's early unpublished works, <i>De Motu, </i>or <i>On Motion. </i>Here, Galileo works within the Aristotelian framework, his own outlook a bit like Simplicio's. His goal is not to refute but to improve upon Aristotle by supplementing his account with mathematical reasoning inspired by Archimedes writings on the balance, making Aristotle’s theory more consistent with his experiences of moving bodies. But as Galileo attempts to bring together Aristotle, Archimedes, and his own experiences of moving bodies, two different and conflicting understandings of nature emerge.<br /><br />The lecture should be of interest to the whole community: Galileo will lead us through a consideration of Aristotle's philosophy of nature, Archimedes' balance, and Galileo's inclined planes."</span></span></p>
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Annapolis, MD
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2023-02-24
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A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: make a recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John’s College Greenfield Library; make a recording of my lecture available online; make typescript copies of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John’s College Greenfield Library; make a copy of my typescript available online."
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Galilei, Galileo, 1564-1642. Di motu. English
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LEC_Lasell_Leah_2023-03-27
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/2f4c6970da0823d39796f012856ad085.pdf
6f4d08f7ce54c59217defad0bb95c00b
PDF Text
Text
Remarks on the Inauguration of President Nora Demleitner
Citizenship, Undergraduate Education, and Great Books
It is a distinct honor to be speaking at St. John’s on the occasion of the
inauguration of President Demleitner, the 25th president of St. John’s
Annapolis campus, the ninth since the inception of the current program of
study in 1937, and its first female president. She carries forward an
extraordinary tradition of exceptional educational distinction that dates back
to 1696. Her selection to lead the Annapolis campus is an illustration of how
academic excellence can adapt to new circumstances and yet simultaneously
maintain fidelity to a worthy tradition.
The theme I have chosen for my talk is the relationship between the
unique educational mission of St. John’s and the preservation of democracy
here in the United States. I acknowledge at the outset that it is not
immediately obvious how a very special curriculum that focuses with
intense concentration on the great works of the past can speak to the
contemporary dilemmas of self-government in 21st century America.
But I choose this theme because it is so pressing. Many of us, myself
included, have been taken aback by how fragile and endangered our
�democracy has become. We are apprehensive about its precarious state, and
we believe that it is of the utmost importance to take steps to protect it.
So the question I am putting on the table is how the essentially
political project of preserving our democracy might be connected to the
distinguished educational curriculum of St. John’s, which focuses on
understanding masterpieces of the past. How can a conversation with bygone
figures help us with today’s pressing problems?
I ask this with some urgency. Outside the serene and peaceful world
of St. John’s, the world is burning. There are of course literal flames in the
Amazon rainforest. But there is also a brutal war in Eastern Europe, and a
serious threat of war in the Pacific. Wanton violence sweeps the globe, from
Teheran to Mali to Lima. Democracies from Hungary to India teeter on the
verge of totalitarian excess. We suffer constantly from the fierce storms,
droughts and displacements of an overheating planet.
Each year, our world seems to grow more dangerous and more
threatening. And the United States is not exempt from these challenges.
When I grew up in the 1950s, America felt, somehow, beyond the rough and
2
�rapid whitewaters of history that seemed forever to engulf other countries.
But no longer. In my lifetime, I do not think I have ever witnessed a political
atmosphere more angry, more poisonous, or more baleful. There are no
doubt many causes of our political distemper, including two years of covid,
growing inequality, the loss of blue color manufacturing work, gaping
cultural divides between rural and urban communities, and an explosive
resurgence of bigotry and prejudice.
But this afternoon I want to focus on one particular dimension of our
political crisis, which is the rise of extreme partisanship. American political
life is now divided into camps so mutually antagonistic that ordinary
political life has become all but impossible. We no longer seem to be able to
wheel and deal, to compromise and construct.
We tear down, we troll, we attack, we bluster, we become outraged.
But we do not reach across the aisle. The storming of the Capitol seems
merely the physical symbol of the underlying disorder. Our politics has
become a scene of war, reminiscent of Carl Schmitt’s corrosive definition of
politics as an existential confrontation between friends and enemies.
3
�A 2014 study by two political scientists found that “hostile feelings
for the opposing party are ingrained or automatic in voters’ minds, and that
affective polarization based on party is just as strong as polarization based
on race.” In a frightening conclusion, the study notes that elites now have a
greater incentive “to engage in confrontation . . . than [in] cooperation.”
Just to give you some sense of how profoundly divisive our political
life has become, consider that in 1960 only about 5 percent of Americans
expressed a negative reaction to the prospect of their child marrying
someone from the opposite party. By 2010 this figure had risen eightfold to
40 percent, including both Republicans and Democrats.
It is plain, I think, that our politics has become personal; it has
become a matter of identity. It is experienced as a matter of survival. During
the 2016 presidential election Michael Anton of the Claremont Institute,
wrote a famous essay entitled The Flight 93 Election. The first sentence of
that essay read: “2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you
die.”
4
�What worries me is that such extreme identitarian division is
potentially fatal in a nation like ours. A heterogenous country like America
can be held together only by successful politics. But such politics is
impossible if we remain balkanized by narrow, tribal attitudes. The reason is
explained in a very old story told to us by Thucydides, the great Athenian
general and historian from the fifth century BC, whom you study here at St.
John’s.
Thucydides recounts the tale of the disastrous Peloponnesian War
between Athens and Sparta. All of Greece at the time was broken into two
political parties. One party advocated for an aristocratic oligarchy; the other
favored democracy. The struggle between these two parties was violent and
fanatic, and the result, Thucydides recounts, was that “society became
divided into two ideologically hostile camps, and each side viewed the other
with suspicion.”
This partisanship could not be ended, says Thucydides, because “no
guarantee could be given that would be trusted, no oath sworn that people
would fear to break; everyone had come to the conclusion that it was
hopeless to expect a permanent settlement and so, instead of being able to
5
�feel confident in others, they devoted their energies to providing against
being injured themselves.”
The upshot of this breakdown of trust among the Greeks was that
atrocity followed atrocity. Men became beasts. In words that should be
remembered forever, Thucydides lamented the loss of what he called “the
ordinary conventions of civilized life.” This was because Greeks had begun
“the process of repealing those general laws of humanity which are there to
give a hope of salvation to all who are in distress, instead of . . .
remembering that there may come a time when they, too, will be in danger
and will need their protection.”
Putting to one side the ever-present possibility of mass slaughter by a
deranged killer armed with an AR-47, we are not, I hope, in danger of actual
atrocities. But we are certainly in danger of losing trust in those general laws
of humanity that allow us to work together despite our disagreements,
however passionate those disagreements might become.
The loss of trust in our society is corrosive and every day it becomes
more and more widespread. Nearly fifty years ago, almost half of all
6
�Americans agreed that “most people can be trusted”; but today that number
has fallen to less than one in three. In 1964, 77 percent of Americans said
that they trusted the federal government to do what is right at least most of
the time; 1 but in 2019 that number had tumbled precipitously down to 17
percent. In 1974, 71 percent of Americans had a great deal or a fair amount
of trust in our Supreme Court. In 2022 that number has shrunk to 47 per
cent. When asked, Americans report a lower opinion of Congress than of
root canals, colonoscopies, Brussel sprouts or traffic jams. It is small
comfort that Congress did manage a higher approval rating than
telemarketers, North Korea, or the Ebola virus.2
This is tragic. Consider: we live in a representative democracy. Our
government represents us. The House of Representatives is the People’s
House. If we detest our own government, what does that say about us? Do
we loathe ourselves, or do we despise our neighbors? If we disavow our
own institutions of governance, we confess our own inadequacy and
vulnerability.
1
http://www.npr.org/2015/11/23/457063796/poll-only-1-in-5-americans-say-they-trustthe-government
2
http://www.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.aspx
http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2013/01/congress-somewhere-belowcockroaches-traffic-jams-and-nickleback-in-americans-esteem.html
7
�Without institutions of governance, we become vulnerable because we
cannot act together. We cannot build a common future or ensure our
common security. Institutions of governance, and the laws that establish and
guide them, are necessary if we are to enjoy the immense goods of
cooperation. Excessive partisanship undercuts the social trust required for
the political processes that underwrite both governance and law. Whatever
kind of society you wish to build, whether it is conservative or liberal, it
must be accomplished through political processes that depend upon trust.
Thucydides described the hell created by the erosion of that trust.
Thucydides said: “Human nature, always ready to offend even where laws
exist, show[s] itself proudly in its true colours, as something incapable of
controlling passion, insubordinate to the idea of justice, [and as] the enemy
to anything superior to itself.” Without trust, observed Thucydides, there
can be no law, no justice, no security. There is only self-preservation.
There is only a dreadful war of all against all.
The question is not whether we should trust the particular decisions of
government, which can be right or can be wrong. The question is rather
8
�whether we have any option but to trust the political processes by which we
engage, each to the other, to determine how we shall act together and how
we shall make our laws. I know that these very political processes can often
be perversely slow and slanted and unresponsive. They may even at times
be corrupt. But these political processes are all we have, and therefore we
must, paradoxically, use them to make these very processes better and fairer.
Politics in a democracy are necessarily open to all. This means that
one cannot enter politics without encountering those who disagree with us,
and who perhaps disagree radically. It is therefore essential that we find a
way to structure such encounters in a manner that does not involve excessive
partisanship. Thucydides gave us a clue about how this delicate balance
might be maintained. He put his thoughts into the mouth of Pericles, the
great Athenian leader.
In his famous funeral oration for the Athenian war dead, Thucydides
has Pericles praise Athens as “a democracy because power is in the hands
not of a minority but of the whole people.” In Athens, says Pericles, “we are
free and tolerant in our private lives; but in public affairs we keep to the law.
This is because it commands our deep respect.”
9
�Athenians respected the law because they were all involved in
fashioning the law. So Pericles pointedly observes:
Here each individual is interested not only in his own affairs but
in the affairs of the state as well: even those who are mostly occupied
with their own business are extremely well informed on general
politics—this is a peculiarity of ours: we do not say that a man who
takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we
say that he has no business here at all.
Politics in fifth century Athens was a deadly serious business, far
more so than in the United States today. Failed politicians could be exiled or
ostracized or worse. But Pericles nevertheless summoned Athenians to full
participation in the political process, arguing “that happiness depends on
being free, and freedom depends on being courageous.”
Being free means being self-governing; it means having the capacity
to fashion our own future according to our own ideals. It is a miraculous and
wonderful thing to enter democratic politics in order to realize our
10
�convictions. But to the extent that we loathe our political adversaries and
seek to exclude them from the common political space that the Greeks called
the agora, we abandon the possibility of a shared future. It is not possible to
sustain a democracy that includes “the whole people” if we refuse to deal
with our adversaries. Democracy fails if we seek advantage only for
ourselves, or only for our own tribe or only for our own party.
Of course it is possible that our adversaries may be so awful that we
come to believe that we cannot share a future with them. This happened
during the American Civil War. But such times must necessarily be very
rare, which is why Carl Schmitt was wrong to analogize politics to war.
Politics is the art of living together despite differences. In war we seek to
exterminate the other. But in politics we abjure violence, which is to say we
seek to win while remaining bound to the rules, to the law, that define
appropriate political engagement.
In war, our opponents are our enemies, whom we seek to destroy. In
politics, our opponents are our agonists, over whom we seek to triumph but
with whom we are bound to live and with whom we are bound obey a
common set of rules. Enemies become agonists only when both sides of a
11
�controversy acknowledge mutual allegiance to a shared polity. That means
that both sides acknowledge that they are bound to a common destiny, a
shared fate that defines the identity of a country. That is what holds together
a polis or a nation. Civil war looms when we rupture that shared fate and
decide to go our separate ways.
Pericles emphasizes that democracy requires courage. Democracy
requires the courage to persist in pursuing our ideals while at the same time
resisting the temptation to an excessive partisanship that excludes our
agonists from the agora, which is to say from the possibility of a shared
democratic politics. This is a rare kind of courage. It requires patience and
endurance. It must be maintained even as democratic politics seems
repeatedly to fail, and even as it seems to fall under the control of those who
oppose our deepest ideals.
The poet in the 20th century who most tellingly articulated what it
might mean to lose faith in a common political future was the Nobel
Laureate Czeslaw [Tchesluff] Milosz [Meewosh]. Milosz was a Lithuanian
who wrote in Polish. He tried to understand the havoc caused by World War
II. He believed that Eastern Europeans had lost trust in one another and
12
�hence that they had abandoned the possibility of shared political
engagement.
In his monumental poem Child of Europe, Milosz [Meewosh]
describes the cynical world created by the War in Eastern Europe:
We, from the fiery furnaces, from behind barbed wires
On which the winds of endless autumns howled,
We, who remember battles where the wounded air roared in
paroxysms of pain.
We, saved by our own cunning and knowledge. . . .
Having the choice of our own death and that of a friend
We chose his, coldly thinking: Let it be done quickly.
We sealed gas chamber doors, stole bread
Knowing the next day would be harder to bear than the day before. . .
Europeans, Milosz [Meewosh] writes, learned all the wrong lessons from
calamity of the war:
13
�Love no country: countries soon disappear
Love no city: cities are soon rubble. . . .
Do not love people: people soon perish.
Or they are wronged and call for your help. . . .
In these chilling lines, Milosz [Meewosh] evokes what it is like to
inhabit the bleak and cruel world long ago described by Thucydides. It is a
world in which persons are out for themselves alone. It is a world in which
cunning and calculation reign. It is a world without trust and therefore
without hope for a future. It is a world without politics, because no bargains
can be struck. It is a world in which all are at war with all. No one would
freely choose to live in such a world.
As he grew older, Milosz [Meewosh] began slowly to heal from the
mighty blows of the War. In his poem What I Learned from Jeanne Hersch,
he enumerated some of the lessons that he had painfully gleaned from his
formidable historical experience. The poem consists of 12 numbered
propositions, but I will read you only three:
14
�2.
That they have been wrong who undermined our confidence in
reason by enumerating the forces that want to usurp it: class struggle,
libido, will to power. . . .
5.
That the proper attitude toward being is respect . . . .
12.
That in our lives we should not succumb to despair . . . for the
past is never closed down and receives the meaning we give it by our
subsequent acts.
I pick these three propositions because they contain profound insights
that are worth pausing for a moment to consider. They are insights that offer
us a way out of the hell created by mistrust and polarization. And they are
insights that allow us to understand the importance of St. John’s College.
First, Milosz [Meewosh] tells us that that we must have confidence in
our reason. Think now, about St. John’s and your curriculum. Here at St.
John’s College you read great texts. Why do you do that? It is because these
texts reach out to us from the past. But how exactly do they do that?
15
�Without question an important connection between us and these texts
is our reason. You study texts from the finest thinkers that humanity has ever
produced. And, lo and behold, the ideas of these long-dead thinkers
challenge you. They speak to you in ways that inspire conversation and
dialogue. No one could be more distant from you in customs, traditions,
language, or life than Aristotle. And yet in your classrooms, through the
medium of your reason, you reach across the millennia and converse with an
ancient Greek. It is your reason that enables this miracle. The curriculum of
St. John’s is filled with texts that reward this kind of rational engagement.
Rational engagement is essential not merely for the truths that it
reveals, but also for the forms of connection that it requires. At St. John’s
you learn from texts not merely the lessons that they have to teach, but also,
more fundamentally, what it means to converse with a stranger, whose ideas
are radically different than yours. Reason is a remarkable thing, because it
can thrive only under conditions of respect. To reason with another is to take
in their ideas, and to counter in a way that evinces trust that reason will
matter to them as well as to you.
16
�This means that when we reason with one another, we model the trust
that is necessary for democracy. To reason with another is not to lose track
of your own commitments. It is instead to maintain these commitments
despite another’s disagreement, and yet, miraculously, to perform these
commitments within a relationship that acknowledges and trusts that reason
should matter to all involved, to both yourself and to the other.
Second, Milosz [Meewosh] reminds us that it is necessary to use our
reason to fashion ideals worth pursuing. Milosz [Meewosh] tells us that one
of the most important of these ideals is that we respect being, which means
that we respect the facticity of the world.
The world is as it is, regardless of what we might wish it to be. We
must have humility before the facts of the world. One of the most important
functions of our reason is to protect us from that most tempting of fantasies,
which is to believe that the world is merely what we wish it to be. A world at
the mercy of fantasies is a world at the mercy of power. Reason, respect for
the gritty, irreducible facticity of the world, is the antidote to our own
incessant will to power.
17
�Milosz [Meewosh] lived in Eastern Europe, which suffered
unspeakable horrors because, in the ideology of both the Nazis and the
Soviet Union, facts counted for nothing. The world could be reshaped at
will. In a poem called Faith, Milosz [Meewosh] rejects this perspective:
The word Faith means when someone sees
A dew-drop or a floating leaf, and knows
That they are, because they have to be.
And even if you dreamed, or closed your eyes
And wished, the world would still be what it was,
And the leaf would still be carried down the river.
Respect for being requires faith that there is a world outside of us and that
that world matters. The world is what it is and cannot be remade merely to
accord to our desires. No matter what your wishes, the leaf will still be
carried down the river.
This is a particularly important insight when it comes to other people.
Other people are also facts in the world, and they must be respected just as
all other facts are respected. One expression of this respect is to engage other
18
�people through politics, as distinct from simply obliterating them through
war, or simply excluding them from the agora in the hope that they will
vanish.
Other people will not disappear even if we close our eyes and wish
them away. This is true even when other people have opinions that we
regard as obnoxious or wrong-headed or violently incorrect. Respect for
being means accepting the fundamental alterity of others, which is the
foundation of all politics. Politics, says the political theorist Hannah Arendt
presupposes men, not Man. Politics requires plurality.
Without politics, none of us can be free. We are thrown willy-nilly
into a common lifeboat. We flourish together or we do not flourish at all.
That is why political ideology counts for much, but not for everything.
Excessive partisanship denies this basic truth. And, I remind you, this is also
why race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, and
all such categories, count for a great deal, but they do not count for
everything. If they did, our common lifeboat would break into fragments and
be swamped.
19
�You know this at St. John’s. Your curriculum is fabulously diverse.
You study figures as different as Lucretius and Dante; Kepler and
Maimonides; Machiavelli and Proust; Mozart and the Bhagavad Gita; Ralph
Ellison and Richard Feynman. If here at St. John’s, with a curriculum as
various and far-ranging as this, you cannot learn to honor the plurality of the
world, to respect its fabulous facticity, you cannot learn it anywhere.
The third and last proposition in What I Learned from Jeanne Hersch
to which I want to call your attention is that we should not despair of the
present. I know that the present may, at times—and especially in these
times—appear bleak. But we must nevertheless maintain hope for the future.
And hope, St. Augustine instructs us, “has two beautiful daughters. Their
names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to
see that they do not remain the way they are.”
Where there is hope, the present is never fixed. Paradoxically, we can
refashion the present by changing the future. Consider this beautiful poem
by the German poet Rilke, which is called “A Walk”. Rilke writes:
20
�My eyes already touch the sunny hill,
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has its inner light, even from a distance--
and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on,
answering our own wave...
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.
To change our idea of the future--to hope, to aim, to aspire—is to
change the present. That is why respect for being is not a recipe for
passivity. It does not demand that injustices be endured. Milosz [Meewosh]
ends his own poem Faith with these remarkable lines:
Look, see the long shadow cast by the tree;
And flowers and people throw shadows on the earth:
What has no shadow has no strength to live.
21
�Our strength to live is a fact of our being. It must be respected. We
must cast our shadows upon the earth. We must love our country; love our
city; love one another. We must engage in politics to make our country and
our city, respectable and whole.
Whatever future we may hope to create, however, we have no choice
but to inhabit it together. We must live with those whom we might otherwise
oppose. And this means that we must stand firmly balanced in the tension
between our own ideals and our respect for the alterity of others. It is an
equilibrium as fragile, and as delicate, and yet as inevitable, as a shadow
falling on a leaf floating down a river.
How can we maintain this remarkable equilibrium? How can we stand
rooted in ourselves and yet retain a posture of respect for others whom we
believe to be quite wrong and fraught with danger for the country? What
model do we have for such a paradoxical form of connection?
Think of the educational miracle that is St. John’s. You study the great
texts of the past, and yet you prepare students to live in the present. How is it
22
�possible to stand in the shadows of the gigantic thinkers that you study, the
finest in the history of mankind, and yet to have your own thoughts?
Notice that across the ages, the thinkers that you study engage each
other. As they do so, they display both respect for the views of their
interlocutors and at the same time the determination to assert their own
ideas. Every day, in your study, you see exemplified exactly the miraculous
and difficult equilibrium that democracy demands of its citizens.
At St. John’s you model—you enact—at the very highest level, the
difficulties and contradictions of inhabiting a democratic polis. You study
great books of the past, but you know full well that the authors of these
books differ among themselves, and that, as you explain in your Statement
of the St. John’s College Program, these “great books” in the end serve as
prompts for students to struggle “together with fundamental questions,” so
that “students and their teachers” can “learn from their differences and
discover more deeply their shared humanity.” At St. John’s students learn to
assert their own ideas in the very teeth of the most challenging and
magnificent figures of the past. But they learn to do so using their reason,
23
�which means with respect and the acknowledgment of the possibility of
difference.
What are you trying to achieve here in this precious community of St.
John’s, if not that fragile, inexpressibly vulnerable but necessary
equilibrium, that balances using reason to achieve a self-respecting view of
one’s own, but that nevertheless maintains a genuine other-directed respect
for the views of interlocutors, however mistaken?
That is the paradoxical equilibrium of which Milosz [Meewosh]
writes. That is the equilibrium necessary for democracy. That is the
equilibrium that will restore our trust in our fellow citizens, so that together
we can walk forward in confidence, filled with an inner light that will
illuminate the possibility in the present of a common future that, in grasping
us, will transform our dismal present into a scene of hope for us and for our
nation.
In his recent wonderful book entitled College, Columbia literature
professor Andrew DelBanco asks “What is College for”? In answer, he
quotes from a manuscript diary composed in 1850 by a student at a small
24
�Methodist college, Emory and Henry, in southwest Virginia. The student
writes: “Oh that the Lord would show me how to think and how to choose.”
In learning how to think, you will put your trust in reason. In learning
how to choose, you will cast shadow on the world. And, most important of
all, at a college like St. John’s, you will learn these things together, in a
common conversation. That is to say, you will learn how to think and to
choose in the context of respect for those who think and choose differently.
You will learn, that is, how to be citizens of a great democracy. You
will become inoculated against the violent forms of polarization that threaten
now to tear us apart and to foreclose our future.
It is in this way that St. John’s, by maintaining faith in its past, also
maintains faith with our democratic destiny. As St. John’s adapts the great
ideas of the past to the terrible contingencies of the present, it creates hope
for the future. This is an occasion to celebrate the educational ideals of St.
John’s, and to express our own hope that they will extend long into the
future.
25
�
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Remarks on the Inauguration of President Nora Demleitner: Citizenship, Undergraduate Education, and Great Books
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on March 24, 2023, by Robert Post as part of the Formal Lecture Series. <br /><br />The lecture was the first President's Law and Society lecture and was part of the events celebrating the inauguration of Nora Demleitner.
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Post, Robert, 1947-
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Annapolis, MD
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2023-03-24
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Education, Humanistic--United States
Books and reading--United States
Citizenship--United States
Demleitner, Nora V., 1966-
St. John's College
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LEC_Post_Robert_2023-03-24
Friday night lecture
Inauguration
President's Law and Society lecture
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/b4ccaa67447dd146eaa040a8b1ada172.pdf
a7defdefa7114cd33acc482cfc216759
PDF Text
Text
Friday Night Lecture
St. John's College, Annapolis
September4, 1998
What, then, is Time?
Eva Brann
When our dean asked me to lecture this September it was because he had heard that I'd just
completed a book on time, and he thought I might like to talk about it. He was right, and here are
three possible kinds of profit that, on thinking it over, I figured might come to you and to me if I
gave what I guess one might call a book report.
First, even if the writing of books is a few decades off for most of you here tonight, it
turns out that writing papers and annual essays is not so different from writing books, and I
thought I might be able to tell you something useful. In fact I'll do it right now. \Vhen the time
comes to write, whether it's a small paper or a long annual essay, never think: "I've got to write
this thing! Help! I need a paper!" Instead search your soul for a question you have nursed for
quite a while, whether articulately or inarticulately, somethingj:hat bothered and puzzled you,
something that might be very intimate but is capable of public expression. Then flip mentally
through the books you've studied, or the music you've sung, or the theorems you've proved, or
the experiments you've re-enacted, and ask yourself which have a bearing, taken in the largest
sense, on your issue. What will happen next is the result of a mixture of concentration and luck:
some paradox or analogy or some other significant array will jump out at you. Seize that and
slowly pummel, stroke, and shape it into an articulate order. Of course, none of that can happen at
1
�the last minute. For looking into yourself, for calling on your studies, for finding a crystallizing
moment, for working all of it into a well-shaped' whole, time is of the essence.
My second thought was that time is one subject concerning which it does not matter
whether one is a freshman finishing the second week at the college or a senior beginning the fourth
year, or even a tutor who has taught most of the program. Stormy love is not a pressing issue to
all ages, nor is looming death, but there is, I think, no one, at any time of life, for whom time does
not become a problem in some way or other. I know this from experience. Of the things that have
urgently interested me from time to time, the mention of Being and Non-being, for example,
provokes mostly stupefied non-interest, the mention of the Imagination elicits an account of
people's favorite fantasy series, but the mention of Time gives rise to intelligently companionable
puzzlement. People have a different relation to the question concerning time than to other deep
matters, which they are either willing to bypass as too obscure for their taste or to treat with the
most unreflective but familiar particularity.
The title of this lecture -- and of my book -- is "What, then, is Time?" It is a quotation
from the most famous sentence ever written on time by the man who was most deeply immersed in
its elusive familiarity, Augustine. It comes from the eleventh book of his Confessions, which we
read in the sophomore year. Here is the \vhole sentence:
What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain
it to the questioner, I do not know.
My own concern with time started from two ends at once, intellectual puzzlement and deepfelt irritation, and it developed, as really good questions do, from annoyed fascination to serious
interest. The intellectual puzzlement was just that expressed by Augustine: What sort of a being, if
it was a being, could be so handily familiar in daily usage and so fugitive to the grasp of thought?
Here I did as all my fellow humans do: I make time, kill time, manage my time, waste time. To be
sure, I've never "done" time, though but for the grace of God I might have. I know that time heals
all wounds and ravages all the beauties of the world.
2
But if I ask myself what it is that does this, I
�see and touch nothing and think of less. That is at first just a puzzling and then an engaging state
of affairs.
The irritation I experienced had a superficially different source. In all the departments of
life people talk of time as a force or a power, not just in the sort of dead metaphor that makes up
the unconscious poetry of popular usage, as in all the phrases cited above. No, they mean it
literally, especially when they are talking of the so-called "phases" of time. "Phase" will be the
most important word in this lecture. It is my word -- different authors use different words -- for
the three parts of time, past, present, future. Perhaps I should have said the three parts of human
time, for I will argue that only human, or human-like, beings have pasts and presents and futures.
It is the future with which these people mostly play infuriating havoc. They say and they
inean that there is a future coming and our business is to form a reception committee for it. Some
see this Future with a capital Fas a doom, as in Yeats's great poem, "The Second Coming":
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Far more of our contemporaries see it cheerfully as a benefactor, though a totally manipulative one:
It is the Information Age or the Global Age or the Age of Megacorporations, you name it, and our
duty is to be ready or to be run over by time. They engage in what I call to myself proactive
passivity. This time-mode -- the adjective, incidentally, is "temporal," so I will say, this temporal
mode -- strikes me as paralyzing the human will, and that is one form of immorality.
So besides the intellectual desire to understand the nature of time and whether it is a being
or a nothing, I also began to think about time in its human effects. Almost everyone who has lived
for some time has neat observations about these effects. For example, I have been at this college
forty-one years or almost fifteen thousand days. Sometimes it seems like forever and sometimes it
seems like a day. What accounts for this mad elasticity of time? But besides these timernminations there is also that sense I have of the important moral consequences of not thinking
about the nature of time, about accepting what seem to be abuses of our phase-nature. In fact, a
new hero of mine, Octavio Paz (whom I did not in fact discover for myself but through one of our
3
�Mexican alumni, Juan Villasenor) put my thought much more expansively than I would have had
the courage to do. He says in his book on India:
I believe that the reformation of our civilization must begin with a
reflection on time.
Recall that I am still laying out the possible profit of telling you about my book, and here is
the last one, chiefly to myself. Imagine what a pleasure it will be to come on campus and to be
able to fall easily into a conversation about this magical subject with some proportion of the people
that live and learn here -- with the more virtuous part, I might add, those who come to Friday night
lectures.
Now let me tell you of two discoveries or devices -- it's always hard to tell whether it's one
or the other -- about which the book crystallized. One was the discovery -- and I became
persuaded that it was a discovery, was really there to be found-- that writers on time who lived
millennia apart in time and who were worlds apart in thought were at crucial moments driven into
the same understanding, or at least the same problem. Once I had discovered one such pair of
time-twins I came on three others. And finally I came to believe that amongst them they pretty well
established the perennial possibilities and the pertinent problems concerning time. In a moment I
will tell who these writers are and what deep notion each pair shares. But let me say here that it
'
was a blessing to find such a principle of selection. For it is hard for most of us to think about
these enigmas without help. The trouble is, there is too much help on offer. I own a bibliography
of time which tells of nearly two hundred thousand books and articles written between 1900 and
now. Of course, much of it is piffling, but much of it is, I am sure, though!1'ul. I chose four great
writers, and they paired quite naturally with four more, and by good luck these are the eight among
the ancient and modern writers generally agreed to have the deepest theories. The pairs, then, are
Plato and Einstein, Aristotle and Kant, Plotinus and Heidegger, Augustine and Husserl. Since
many of you will not have read them, though all but Husserl are on the Program (and he ought to
be), I'll present their time-theories as simply and as unencumbered by terminology as possible.
But I'll omit completely telling you about one pair, Plotinus and Heidegger, because it is too tricky
4
�to do, although their similarity on the point of time is most spectacular in view of their diametric
opposition on everything else that matters.
The other discovery was that a human effect which never ceases to enchant me, namely the
images that arise before the mind's eye in our imagination, had a certain remarkable similarity with
our sense of time, a formal sort of similarity. Images are absent presences or present absences;
they are not what they are, they are made of Being and Non-being. What I mean is that any image,
but particularly a mental image, presents someone or something not actually present. To imagine
an absent friend is to have him there, but not really. Time as well, it turns out, has this curious
character of being and not-being, of being there but not really, of being present only in its absence.
My all-time favorite time-saying is by the priceless Yogi Berra. When someone asked him: "What
time is it?" he replied: "You mean now?" It is the wisest of answers, because you can't tell time,
and yet we do. It is always and never Now.
So the book began to have two parts. One part was a study of these eight philosophers for
the purpose of seeing what kinds of answers could be given to the question "What is time?" and
what problems were inherent in the answers. But studying, while a help to thinking, and for most
of us an indispensable help, is not thinking, since to understand what others think is simply a
different activity from the thinking that goes directly, without intermediary, to the question. So in
a second part I tried to go directly to the question, having absorbed all the help I could.
Therefore in this lecture, too, after telling what some of the best writers I could find have
thought about time, I will try to tell what I think. I should say right now, lest you be disappointed,
that what I conclude first and last is that it is a true mystery. I mean a potent effect whose
characteristics are poignantly clear but whose nature is finally unfathomable. You can specify a
mystery but you can't resolve it.
If you have a huge field of apparently possible answers to a question, it clears the decks
somewhat to begin by removing the answers that are simply unacceptable. In thinking about the
ways time is spoken of, it seemed to me that whatever else is said, time is spoken of either as
5
�occurring in nature or as being within the human being. Time is either external or internal, or
perhaps both.
External time has attracted by far the greater interest. Time is written of in religion, where
it is a great question how an eternal God acts in created time. Time is treated in history, where it is
a great question whether the times make history or people do. But above all time is a great subject
in physics, where the best-grounded and most remarkable theories of time are developed.
Without question, the physicist who has done most to make other physicists and people in
general think about time is Einstein. The work I chose to examine is his 1905 paper on what came
to be known as the Special Theory of Relativity. \Vhat struck me first was that every mention of
time was in quotation marks. This habit conveyed to
me that I was dealing with the most careful
and thoughtful of writers, one who knew that time in physics is a most problematic notion.
Einstein says right away:
It might appear possible to overcome all the difficulties attending the
definition of "time" by substituting "the position of the small hand of
my watch" for "time." And in fact such a definition is satisfactory ....
At least it is satisfactory when we are talking only of time here and now. Before Einstein,
physicists had believed what everyone believes: that it is the same time throughout the world, that
every other Here simply has the same Now as my Here. This situation was called simultaneity and
was regarded as a chief feature of external, I mean natural, time. Einstein goes on to show that for
any stationary Here far away from my own, it takes some calculating to synchronize our watches.
And when we are moving relative to each other one of our most entrenched senses about time is
overthrown, namely that what time it is is independent of our state of rest or motion. Einstein's
theory turns out to have to do entirely with the measurement of time -- what my local clock and
your local clock tell under different physical conditions. That is why Einstein puts "time" in
quotations: He is warning us that not the nature of time but its measurement is at issue.
Now I'll jump back two and a half millennia and quote to you what is the most famous, .
most often cited definition of time. It comes from Plato's dialogue called Timaeus. Timaeus is a
6
�made-up character, a visiting physicist. He and some of Socrates' friends have planned an
amusement for him. On the day before Socrates had produced for them a picture in words of the
ideal political community -- some people think it is the one set out in the dialogue called The
Republic. Now Timaeus will reciprocate by painting for Socrates' entertainment the cosmos, the
ordered world within which such an ideal city might fit. In the course of giving a mathematical
account of such a cosmos, Timaeus says this about the way the maker of the world introduced time
into it:
He planned to make a movable image of eternity, and as he ordered
heaven into a cosmos, he made an image of that eternity which stays
one and the same, an eternal image moving according to number.
And that is what we call time.
What Timaeus is saying is that the heavens move like a great cosmic dial and that this motion
allows us to tell time.
So the mythical early physicist and the greatest of modem physicists are saying the same
thing: Time is what the clock tells, in one case the cosmic clock, in the other a local watch. And so
say all working physicists in between. It is a working, a so-called operational definition of time,
and it works just fine -- until you begin to think about it. That time is what the clock tells is what
one might call a dispositive definition. It disposes of time as an issue. But if you turn it around
and try to say that the clock tells time you're in trouble. Time never appears on the face of a clock.
Nor does it appear anywhere else in nature, ever. All other natural phenomena appear somehow to
sight or hearing or touch. Of time not a trace.
What does appear is motion. An analog clock is a standard cyclical motion. A digital clock
"
is a standard
progressive motion. Clocks are calibrated motions. There is no time actually used in
physics and none that actually appears in nature. There is much more to be said about this
shocking claim, and I'm sure you'll want to argue it out in the question period.
Among other points then to be made, the seniors, who have read Newton, might want to
point out that Newton, at least, does stipulate true natural time, an equable flux that comes before
motion. And I would answer that it is not only as physicist but also as theologian that Newton
7
�puts time into nature. For this so-called absolute time, which has no <:>bservable features, is
probably not so much in nature as in God's mind, in that part of God's mind, called his
"sensorium," with which he is receptive to all of nature, its infinite spaces, its primary forces, its
ultimate bodies. My point at the moment is, however, only to reinforce a conclusion I came to:
Wherever time is seriously considered, mind, soul, consciousness and sensibility come on the
scene. Time can only be internal, meaning within a mind, possibly God's mind.
So I disposed to my own satisfaction of the vast majority of theories of time. Intricate and
interesting as they are, they are really theories of motion, not of time, and they don't tell what time
is. But time is the sort of subject for which every settling of the mind in one respect is punished by
a complementary problem popping up in another. You can, and I think you have to, take time out
of nature, b·ut I am not so perverse as to claim that the outside world isn't full of variations:
locomotions, processes, alterations. The mystery that has now popped up is that we have no idea
what is really going on in this time-deprived world. Let me show you what I mean.
Human time, internal time, will be distinguished by its phases, past, present, future. But
nothing in nature, except perhaps the near-human mammals, apes and dolphins, has a past or a
present or a future. Edwin Muir says in a poem called "The Animals":
But these have never trod
Twice the familiar track,
Never turned back
Into the memoried day.
All is new and near
In the unchanging Here ....
Animals and sticks and stones do not have a past, though they might be scµd to be their past. But
I, for one, just cannot imagine what it is like to live in the unchanging Here and not the have
memory, how such a being gets itself into and out of existence, in short how anything can change
without having phases of time. But then again the effort is love's labor lost: Hmv could I have
empathy with, feel my way into, that which has no inside? So the outer world becomes in this
'fespect opaque, and this is the price to be paid for making a philosophical choice. In corning to
conclusions in philosophical inquiries, I want to say as an aside, it is always a matter of what we
8
�can best live with for the time being -- which is why all philosophy as carried on by human beings
is ultimately moral philosophy.
There is perhaps a solution to the timelessness of nature. It is a commonplace for writers
o.n time that there are two kinds of time. They might be called succession-time and phase-time.
Phase-time is dynamic in the sense that the human present, about which time breaks into past and
. future, continually shifts -- as Yogi Berra's counter-question, "You mean now?" makes clear in its
unavoidable absurdity. Succession-time, on the other hand, is static. It is merely the endless chain
of before-and-after, established once and for all. It' is time all by itself, no one's time, the time of
all events taken only with relation to their succession and to nothing and nobody else. Perhaps
nature does have its time, succession-time. But even the successions of nature tum out to be more
intelligible as causal than as temporal sequences.
This is the moment to introduce Aristotle, who produced the first extensive treatment of
time ever, in Book Four of his Physics. Here is what he says time is:
Time, then, is not motion but that by which motion has number.
Aristotle seems to be making spectacularly short shrift of that mysterious power, time. It is
nothing but an attribute of motion . Then he says what sort of attribute:
Time ... is the number of motion with resnect to before and after.
L
'What th~ deep meaning of all this is can't come out unless we follow up what Aristotle means by
motion, number, before-and-after. But we might guess at two problematic elements of this
understanding of time. .
The first, which is by far the less deep of the two but is endlessly dis~ussed, is this. If
time is the number of motion as a progression in which the parts come before and after, if it is in
fact the succession-time I just introduced, it must somehow share in a chief feature of motion,
namely continuity. Physical motion borrows this feature from the fact that it takes place over
distance. Distances are representable as mathematical lines, and these lines, as the freshmen have
just begun to see, must be continuous -- no elements can be missing. So time, as Aristotle himself
9
�emphasizes, is continuous, like a line. Wherever you cut the line you get a point that belongs to
both parts of the cut. This point is the Now. Time is in every way like a line of geometry: It lies
upon its points, each of which is a Now. The only difference is that the geometric points are static,
whereas the Now moves forward, ever the same in its features, ever different in temporal location.
But as you know by now, a point is that which has no parts, so the Now has no parts . .Therefore
it has no extent, no bulk, no force, no presence. Therefore the point-Now of the mathematical
model of time is as far removed as anything can be from the humanly experienced present, which
is vivid, full, and altogether the most impressive phase of time. Insofar as time is continuous it is
not very human.
But then Aristotle has also said that which will make time totally discontinuous. For time is
a number by which motion is counted, and a number is a collection of completely discontinuous
units -- there is no way one unit can be tangent to another. Motion, locomotion at least, is bound
to distance and borrows from that fact its continuity. But number is bound to something else
which reinforces its discontinuity. Many things in the world are collections of items. Aristotle
mentions herds of horses and flocks of sheep. Other things, such as distances of all sorts, can be
marked off into artificial units. All these things have a number that belongs to them. But nothing
in nature gets its number unless someone is counting. Aristotle says that it is the soul that counts.
So time, in order to be the number of motion, requires a wide-awake counting soul. Now I shall
say a sentence, or rather a question, which is underlined in my typescript: When the soul is
countin2. does it take time to do it? Does it get its numbering from some motion? What distance
does that psychic motion cover?
Aristotle is in big - and I must say unacknowledged - trouble. Time in nature is only the
number of motion, but what is the counting that announces that number? I don't think he knew,
but perhaps in the question period someone will make his case.
Now let me leap two thousand plus years ahead. For Aristotle time originates with the
counting soul. To my mind, Aristotle's true modem successor, the one who takes Aristotle's
10
�thought and turns it thoroughly and precisely upside down, is Kant. Here is an aside: This kind of
inversion of thought, so that it is the same in name but utterly different in significance, is the chief
moving force of the philosophical tradition we study at this college. By "force" I don't mean some
magical attribute of the passage of time, but the way of proceeding that is congenial to those
immersed in this tradition. At any rate, whatever time is, if it has power it has it only as an aspect
of human consciousness.
Back to Kant. You will be relieved to hear that I do not plan to tell you what is in the
Critique of Pure Reason, Kant's founding book, although everything in there. is sooner or later
related to time. In any case, the Juniors will be studying it in spring, and it is that which makes
February a month of delights. Instead I will focus on a few sentences which show what it is that
brings Kant so very close to Aristotle in the letter, though he is worlds apart in meaning.
Kant regards time as a constitutional part of our receptive capacity, our ability to take in
what is given to us. Such a capacity is called "sensibility," and we are so made that whatever
comes to us, the world of nature especially, comes in the form of temporal sensibility. The
Critique is a great work of philosophical art, and I omit the many factors that feed beautifully into
rounding this notion out, in order to concentrate on just one thing: When we ask what it means that
nature comes to us in the form of time, the answer is that whenever we think about nature we begin
by noticing quantities, and we do that first of all by numbering-- not top-of-the-head counting, but
a deeply interior kind of beating out of units that add up into a number. Here is Kant's word on
what is happening in this counting: "I generate time itself .... "
So Aristotle and Kant agree that time is a kind of psychic beating or counting. It does not
save Kant from the question I asked of Aristotle that he calls time a form of the sensibility. Is this
form, I now ask, itself static or is it fluid? If it is static, how does it produce the psychic flow of
pulses? If it is fluid, is there yet another time behind Kant's deep constitutional time? Let me say
right now that all the authors who put time within the soul run into this trouble. And those who
put the origin or ground of time outside of the soul run into other and worse troubles.
11
�Both Aristotle and Kant have been primarily interested in what I have called successiontime, the steady chain of before-and-afters found in nature, though apprehended by our counting.
Now is the time to speak of human time, phase-time.
To my mind, Augustine is the greatest writer on time -- and the most beautiful one. Here's
another aside: Very broadly speaking, philosophers come in two kinds, those who inquire serenely
and hopefully into a subject they long to know and believe they can approach and those who
question severely and disenchantedly a matter they think is ultimately hopeless. Augustine
certainly has travails of the soul, and I would not be unfair to call Husserl, who takes up two
millennia later exactly where Augustine had left off, a fusspot. But both are not so much driven as
led by faith in their subject, and I want to say that these are the philosophers I trust and prefer to be
with.
Augustine wants to know what time is because it is the human counterpart of God's
eternity, the eternity of the God he has just found and acknowledged. But there is nothing exalted
about his questioning -- it is very down-to-earth. He loves to sing hymns, and the question is:
How do I measure times, the long and short syllables, the lengths of the stanzas? Distances are
easy to measure. They stay put while you lay a measuring stick alongside them. But the moment
slips away, the past is no longer, the future not yet, and there is no way to lay a time-stick along an
elapsed time. Lengths measure lengths, motions measure motions -- what measures time? Here is
his answer, as I said, to my mind the most illuminating thing ever uttered about time, a new
discovery, as he himself says:
Time is nothing else but a stretching out, though of what I do not
know. Yet I marvel if it be not of the mind itself.
Our mind or soul is distended and that makes it capable of holding time, so to speak. How
distended, how stretched? Here is Augustine again:
This then is clear and plain, that neither things to come nor things
past are, nor should we properly say: "There are three times, past,
present, and future." But probably we should say: "There are three
times, a present of things past, a present of things present, and a
present of things future" .... The present of things past is memory,
12
�the present of things present is sight [or perception], the present of
things future is expectation.
So we can measure times gone by and times to come because they are now present to us. But the
solution of the measuring problem is the least of it. What Augustine has done is to tell what makes
a human being temporal, how time is in us.
To be human is to be present and to have things present before or within. Yet another
aside: Certain so-called postmodern writers, ta19ng their departure from Heidegger, think that this
is a very derivative way of approaching human Being and that to think of human beings as
containing presences within and confronting things present without demeans the originality of
existence. But Augustine does think that to exist is both to be in the present and to be in the
presence of things.
Augustine's book on time in the Confessions is preceded by a book on memory, and this
book is the indispensable preparation for his understanding of time. For there he shows how we
can also be in the presence of absent things: We have the whole spacious world, its fields and
palaces, within us, not, however, the things themselves but their images. Here you can see how
the imagination, as a power for making the absent present, is essential to our inner sense of time.
For with it we can have memory of past times and also expectation of future things, since
expectation is a forward-directed imagination. And since much of what has happened to us is now
present to us or is now recoverable, we can not only measure time somewhat as we do space,
which is all there simultaneously. We can also see how our mind is a temporal image of God's
mind, who holds all creation toget~er there at once, in the eternal Now.
a
To be human, then, is to have mind so stretched that it encompasses in its present both
memory and foresight. One way to depict that condition is in a diagram like a coordinate system.
The horizontal axis is the time of the world, of Creation; it is succession-time. God knows how it
works; we don't. Astride of this horizontal coordinate sits a vertical stretch of line, our mind.
·Where the two intersect is the moment of sight, of perception, our point of intake for the world.
The segment below 'represents remembered events, dropped out of sight but not out of mind. The
13
�part above represents the dreams and plans we now have for the future -- and that is all the future
that actually exists. As the world passes by, our memory line grows longer and our expectation
line shortens. Then one day it ends.
Husserl, who actually draws diagrams of this sort, in fact marks one of his lines as the "tug
towards death." It is not, however, one of the axes he is marking in this way, but one of the
oblique lines with which he connects the horizontal axis of succession-time and the vertical axis of
phase-time. These oblique lines show how each perception offered by the horizontal successionline sinks away into vertical memory in an orderly and continuous manner, without any scrambling
or dislocation. Husserl's time-diagrams are clever and complex, and I had a lot of fun -- fun
bordering on agony, that is -- working them out. But I didn't give you any handouts, because then
you'd be trying to figure them out now instead of listening; I should know.
Many of you will not have heard of Husserl, and I'll say just enough for my purpose. He
is the founder of a way of inquiry called Phenomenology. Its chief feature is that is excludes all
questions of existence and reality, such as whether time is real. Instead a Phenomenologist pays
attention to the appearances within consciousness, articulating and ordering them. Our sense of
time is a perfect subject for Phenomenology and Husserl's lecture-series known as The
Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness is the great first-fruit of his method.
Husserl makes hundreds of acute observations, but his main advance on Augustine is to
puzzle seriously over the extent of the present. Recall that the point-Now of mathematics is too
skimpy to live in, but consider also that an extended present is going to be part past, part future.
Husser! finds a way, fairly technical, to show that there is a discernible immediate past and an
immediate future that are so bound in with the present as to give room, so to speak, for perception,
so that there is time for a time-sequence, say a melody, to be taken in. He shows how the present
has time for the world to impress itself on us.
One last word about Husserl. The horizontal axis, which represented the world's time for
Augustine, represents an internal time-flux, a continuous sort of subjective succession-time, for
14
�Husserl. For he is withholding all claims about the reality of the world and its time, and attending
only to our inner experience, to our internal time-consciousness. In trying to understand this
internal flow Husserl is drawn into questions beyond Phenomenology. The question that finally
preoccupies him is the familiar one: How can this flux, which is one aspect of our sense of time
and for him the deepest, be spoken of? Are we fluid through and through, or is this flux grounded
in a stable form? But how can a fixed form be the source of a flow? Husserl, a man who is
willing to admit ultimate perplexity without losing faith in the worth of his problem, says:
For these things we have no names. ·
Now is the time for me to say what I think time is -- maybe it would be more sensible to
say "how time works."
I thiiik that phase-time is the fountain and origin of all time. Every phenomenon of time is
derivative from the fact that we have past, present and future. To me the most astounding
circumstance of our temporal life, surpassingly strange but apparently unavoidable, is the crux and
center of the three phases: the present. All that is ever real for us, all that is really there, really
present; occurs in these point-by-point moments of presence. This is the instant of perception
when we see and hear and touch the world. The rest, the long stretches behind and before, is
absence -- what has gone by and what is yet to come.
Human life would therefore be very pointillistic and poor if present existence were all we
had. Happily there are ways of being that are even more potent than present reality and momentary
existence. There is the actuality of imaginative memory and of imaginative expectation. The
present of perception is the point of intake for the novelties that the world offers to our senses, but
the past and the future are also present to us as images, as memories of things past and plans for
things to come. These are the present actualities, the powerfully present absences that give
coherence and resonance and significance to the moment They also make it possible for us to
measure time directly, not by observing external motions as of the hands of the clock which never
displays time at all, but by the thickness of the image-pictures we flip through or leap over to get to
15
�moment from which we want to estimate a stretch of time. Our memory is like a laminate of
transparencies or a carousel of slides, and my claim is that this accumulation we call the past and
this projection we call the future is what produces our inner sense of time. And this thickening of
the present by past and future is what Augustine calls "the stretching of the mind."
Now note that I have described the present as punctual, instantaneous, momentary. And
this description seems to be supported by the observations of all kinds of people, perhaps poets
above all. The Nows that matter are somewhat isolated - instants of recognition, moments of
meaning. In his book The Labyrinth of Solitude Octavio Paz calls the Now "explosive and
orgiastic" and wonders how it fits into ordinary historical passage.
But much of the time of our lives passes in seeming continuity, and this sort of time, the
time that seems like a continuous passage, usually called duration, has to be accounted for as well.
I think it works as follows.
Our present appears punctuated by the ever-varying world and our perception of it. Now
. we see our friends, now they've disappeared around the. corner; now we hear one note, now
another. But there is another time experience that we become conscious of when we are deprived
of most external sensation or when our inner images are pushed out of sight by fear and anxiety.
Or we can deliberately close off our senses and empty our minds to concentrate simply on our
inner duration. What then comes to the fore is a sort of inner pulsing, the very beat of our mere
consciousness, empty life itself. I am trying to describe the soul's aboriginal counting that both
Aristotle and Kant discovered. This inner beat then is the origin of that succession-time that is
mirrored in the before-and-after of physical motion and that plays so large a role in our practicaL
life.
Now most of the time we are not taking note of this pulse, or paying much attention to our
inner life at all. The beats recede and merge as in a long perspective; time's passage appears
continuous and acquires all the characteristics and problems of a line in space. Then,
16
�retrospedively, time is thought of -- not felt -- as a continuum that is continuously cut by a pointlike Now, the kind of Now in which nothing can happen.
So my description of time, which leaves time as what I call "a well-specified mystery,"
ends with the point-Now. And that is where a review of the various pathologies people attach to
the phases of time begins. I'll give the sketchiest summary of our time-troubles, partly because
time is short, partly because every one of us has a lot of personal experience with this aspect of
time, and it will make a good subject for the question period.
One way, then, to think of the way people wreak havoc with the perceptual present is that
they treat it as a mere, point-like Now, monotonously empty and featureless, while racing
unrestrainably forward. To try to live in this Now is to long to fill it with strong stimulation and
increasing novelty. Now-life is the pathological counterpart of present-life.
Similarly some people deprive themselves of the image-filled memory that gives the present
its anchor of significance by rushing to keep up with novelty and trashing not only their own past
but that past which their communities have in common, their external memories.
And finally, some people are so dominated by a future that is supposedly coming at them
that they give up what they really care about to make themselves into ready servants of this
oncoming power. But according to my understanding the future is nothing but the dreams and
plans we currently have, and as far as the humanly-made world is concerned, nothing is coming
but what we actively or passively agree to. It is that passivity which is, to my mind, the greatest
time-pathology.
Arid now time's up.
17
�
Dublin Core
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Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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paper
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17 pages
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What, Then, Is Time?
Description
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on September 4, 1998, by Eva Brann as part of the Formal Lecture Series. <br /><br />Brann's lecture is based on her book <a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780847692927/What-Then-Is-Time">What, Then, Is Time?</a>, published by Rowman and Littlefield in 1999. <br /><br />The typescript of the lecture was reprinted in <a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/553">The St. John's Review, volume XLV, number 3 (2000)</a>.
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Brann, Eva T. H.
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Annapolis, MD
Date
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1998-09-04
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St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online.
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text
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pdf
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Time
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English
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LEC_Brann_Eva_1998-09-04
Deans
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/fd3b37ccf37cda39acc2c51d4037265b.mp3
827475f3faf89363e548a9d65516a45c
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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wav
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00:55:11
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1001 Nights of Marcel Proust
Description
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on February 11, 2011, by Patricia Locke as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Creator
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Locke, Patricia M.
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Annapolis, MD
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2011-02-11
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sound
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mp3
Subject
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Proust, Marcel, 1871-1922. À la recherche du temps perdu
Arabian nights. Selections
Storytelling
Sleep. Stages
Sleep. Psychological aspects
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English
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LEC_Locke_Patricia_2011-02-11_ac
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/d47e09bbb0112de63adc5f0dbe66e805.mp3
925e7465e43f2d6e537f3b14082e8435
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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audiocassette
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00:59:09
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Another "Lollere in the Wynd"? Chaucer, His Miller, and Nicholas' Door
Description
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on March 30, 2007, by Christina von Nolcken as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Nolcken, Christina von
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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2007-03-30
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Permission received
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sound
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mp3
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Chaucer, Geoffrey, -1400. Miller's tale
Bible--Translating--History
Bible--Versions--History
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English
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LEC_Nolcken_Christina_Von_2007-03-30_ac
Friday night lecture
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