You asked me to speak about “Intellect and Intuition,” an enormous topic and yet an intimate one—enormous because the title encompasses the two most distinctively human activities, and intimate because I have, after all, no way to come to terms with it but to look into myself. But it is a congenial inquiry you’ve chosen [...]
Today, the same day on which you cease to be transient members of the College, is the day on which you join us as its permanent members. Our polity provides for it to be so, and our common studies confirm the communion. Therefore I would like to speak to you today as members-at-large of the [...]
Liberal education ought to be less a matter of becoming well read than a matter of learning to read well, of acquiring arts of awareness, the interpretative or “trivial” arts. Some works, written by men who are productive masters of these arts, are exemplary for their interpretative application. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is such a text, [...]
You have been reading and talking about virtue for quite a while now; therefore, that is what your teachers asked me to talk about to you. So I drew a hot bath (since the mind is freest when the body is floating) and thought what might be most to the point, most helpful to you. [...]
I want to steal four minutes of my talking time to speak of the role that the Santa Fe campus has played in my life. I remember vividly the atmosphere around its founding in the years before 1964, but only confusedly the arguments pro and con—though among the latter one worry was predominant: Were we [...]
It is notoriously difficult to prove a negative, to catch, as it were, non-being by the tail, but perhaps even harder just to get it in your sights: “Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” “The dog did nothing [...]
I. Principles and Parts of the Program Every plan of education, whether borne up by a passing trend or bound into a long tradition, is fraught with implicit philosophical principle. Since the program of St. John’s College is devoted to that peculiar kind of learning which of necessity includes a reflection on its own conditions, [...]
It is our tradition that the first lecture of the year should be dedicated to our freshmen.* They have newly joined a community whose program of learning centers on the scheduled reading of a preset list of books and on the twice-weekly discussion that takes place in the seminar. They have come to us chiefly [...]
The first thing one notices while strolling the beautiful grounds of St. John’s College is that there are no cell phones. At least, none are visible. Indeed, there are no tablets, no laptops, no electronics of any sort readily discernible. The absence of screens, faculty member Eva Brann proposes, precludes students from “dispersing themselves,” giving them [...]
When our dean asked me to lecture this September it was because I’ve just completed a book on time, and I’m happy to have the opportunity to talk about it. There seemed to be three possible kinds of profit that I figured might come to you and to me if I gave what one might [...]
Respect is (1) an alternative to tolerance and (2) the better one. It is an alternative because it concerns the same issue: how to live with fellow humans who appear to be identically constituted in their need to formulate opinions and to assert them in speech (not always in that order) but disparately developed in [...]
This June, I spent a week reading and listening to many conversations about Homer’s Iliad at St. John’s College, Annapolis. The rules of a Summer Classics seminar are simple, explained the legendary tutor Ms. Eva Brann (instructors are addressed formally at the school). To start with, one should have read the book being discussed. Then it’s important [...]
What is the world like, and how can we understand it? Heraclitus thinks that the answer to both questions is found in “the logos,” which is a Greek word with multiple meanings: it can be an explanation, a word or linguistic meaning, science, rationality (the Latin word is “ratio”), the principle of exchange between things…So [...]
Pine by Albrecht Durer I wish to dedicate this essay to a writer of books whose greatness is at once utterly at home in America and quite without spatio-temporal boundaries, Marilynne Robinson, who produces in reality the images I only analyze, and thereby not only saves but augments the tradition I love–the aboriginal [...]