Tonight I want to state, and even to overstate, what I believe to be a truth about the Program of St. John’s College. What makes the truth worth considering is that it goes against the plain appearances and against what people, quite understandably, say about us. I want to state this truth especially for the [...]
I am very much alive to the fact that this is Homecoming weekend—homecoming not only for the alumni but also for me. I’ve been gone from St. John’s far and long—as far as Delaware and as long as a year. So I look on the place where I’ve spent exactly half my life as an [...]
I am going to lecture on a work largely autobiographical, whose hero is a charlatan and whose author is therefore the same. This is not my own but the author’s opinion of himself. My lecture will therefore be an inquiry into the nature of the essential charlatan—an enterprise in the spirit and tradition of Plato’s Ion. [...]
Plato’s dialogue Gorgias ends with a long speech culminating in a rousing cry by an aroused Socrates. He is speaking to Gorgias’s student Callicles about his swaggering opinionatedness and their common uneducatedness. The words he uses are neanieusthai, ‟to act like a youth,” to behave like a kid, and apaideusia, ‟lack of teaching,” ignorance. And [...]
We should learn to cultivate the unwillingness to tolerate the unwitting, untold lie in the soul, and the wit and wisdom to transmute the unavoidable lying of any utterance into the telling lies that reveal truth. The first lecture of the school year is, by an old tradition, dedicated to the freshmen among us. Whether you [...]
Peter Kalkavage, The Logic of Desire: An Introduction to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Paul Dry books Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is an enthralling “picture gallery” (447)* of the successive incarnations in which human consciousness appears in the world; it is also a repellant trudge through the abstract dialectic by which its concept develops. I would claim [...]
1. On Seeing Homer Epic is that kind of poetry—as distinguished from lyric and epic poetry, the poetry of the lyre and of action—which is particularly named after the word, for epos means the word as uttered in speech or song. Hence in reading the Homeric epics we certainly should, in addition to attending to the [...]
Section I The Legacy of the Declaration When American schoolchildren first discover that they have a place in the world they sometimes give their addresses a wonderful form. Transformed for our case, it would be: “Proper Name, St. John’s College, Annapolis, Maryland, the United States of America, the North American continent, the Earth, the Solar System.” [...]
Before reviewing Peter Kalkavage’s Focus Press translation of the Timaeus, I must, in all fairness, confess my partiality. He, Eric Salem, and myself were the co-translators of Plato’s Phaedo and his Sophist for the same publisher. Together, over several years, we worked out some principles of translation which are discernible in this Timaeus version. In [...]
By an old tradition the first lecture of the year is dedicated to the new members of our college, to the freshman students and the freshman tutors. It is a chance to tell you something about the shape and the spirit of the Program that governs St. John’s College—and not only to tell you but [...]
The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Joe Sachs (Paul Dry Books: Philadelphia 2014) Joe Sachs’ brief introduction to his translation begins, memorably, like this: “I’ve never met a translation of the Odyssey I didn’t like.” He is paying fair tribute to this most imaginatively intricate and compositionally sophisticated of epic poems—whoever has had the hardihood to [...]
This is a splendid day for you, the students of Mesa Preparatory Academy—a day, a moment, of passage. In all the ways of life (“cultures” as they are called) that I’ve seen or read about, such a passage, such a transition, literally a “passing-over” from one stage of life to another, is taken seriously. At [...]
“We while away our time in desirous daydreaming and floating reveries; in remembering past scenes, envisioning future sights, and projecting mental images onto present perceptions; in disciplined fictionalizing; and above all in that nocturnal dreaming in which our daily places undergo a sea—change from the indifferently familiar to the intimately strange.” […]
Milton’s Paradise Lost is a poem of such panoramic grandeur and such human acuteness as may wean one—and has even weaned me—from a lifelong exclusive Homerophilia. Partly its attraction is that it is insinuatingly suspect. I keep having the sense that something is going on that runs right counter to the overt text. There seems [...]