St. John’s College Graduate Institute Announces Summer Lecture Series
Lectures, offered in person in Annapolis and Santa Fe and livestreamed, are free and open to the public
Annapolis, MD/Santa Fe, NM [June 9, 2025] — The St. John’s College Graduate Institute has announced its summer lecture series. On Wednesdays throughout the summer, the college offers presentations by members of the St. John’s College faculty (known as “tutors”) and visiting scholars from notable universities across the country. Lectures will be held in person on the college’s campuses in Annapolis, Maryland, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. They are free and open to the public; seating is available on a first-come, first-served basis. Each lecture will also be posted on the college’s YouTube channel. Note: Annapolis lectures will premiere on YouTube on Wednesdays at 7:30 p.m. ET/9:30 p.m. MT and Santa Fe lectures will premiere on Fridays at 7 p.m. MT/5 p.m. ET.
The St. John’s College Graduate Institute offers Master of Arts degrees in the liberal arts and in Eastern Classics. Courses may be completed over the summer or during convenient evening hours in the fall and spring. Applications are currently being accepted for the fall term of 2025 and Spring 2026. For more details and to apply, visit sjc.edu/academic-programs/graduate.
The lectures on the Annapolis campus will be held at St. John’s College, McDowell Hall, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, Md., 21401., at 7:30 p.m. ET. The theme for the Annapolis summer lecture series is “Liberal Education in the Age of the LLM.” This series brings together a faculty group at St John’s College, joined by a colleague in the Computer Science Department at the United States Naval Academy, to examine foundational questions posed by artificial intelligence.
“Nearly every day brings news of ‘artificial intelligence’s’ latest triumph or latest threat. Lost amid the noisy celebrations and denunciations are the philosophical questions embedded in the very idea of an ‘artificial intelligence.’ Can there be an intelligence that is ‘artificial’? And if so, how is such intelligence related to human intelligence and human thinking?” asks Brendan Boyle, Associate Dean for Graduate Programs in Annapolis. “St. John’s is a particularly fine place to host such a series because its program of study is steeped in reflections about the nature of thinking itself, from authors like Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Hegel and many others. Indeed, St. John’s is uniquely positioned to contribute to and enrich the national conversation about artificial intelligence precisely because it offers an occasion for a reflection upon the foundational works–in philosophy, mathematics and computation—that contemporary ‘artificial intelligence’ has developed out of. The lecture series is, in that sense, an invitation to step back from news of the latest triumph or threat and to reflect more generally about human thinking and human writing and how it is—or is not—like that done by computers.”
The Annapolis lectures are:
June 18: Leah Lasell, St. John’s College tutor, “The Poet and the City”
July 16: David McDonald, St. John’s College tutor, “Attention and Being: Thinking About Electronic Media”
July 23: Halley Barnet, St. John’s College tutor, “Thinking Machines”
“The Graduate Institute is proud to offer this series of lectures free to our students, alumni and friends,” says David Carl, Associate Dean for the Graduate Programs in Santa Fe. “While classes at St. John’s generally proceed through discussion among students, the lectures provide an opportunity for participants to hear an extended account from someone with considerable learning.”
The lectures on the Santa Fe campus will be held at St. John’s College, Ault Evers Room, Meem Library, 1160 Camino de Cruz Blanca, Santa Fe, NM 87505, at 4:15 p.m. MT, unless otherwise noted. The Santa Fe lectures are:
June 18: Grant Franks, St. John’s College tutor, “Everything Aristotle Said Is Wrong”
- This lecture comes from the past. It was delivered first in 1998. I am revisiting and revising it now as I conclude my three-decade-plus career at St. John’s College and reflect on what the college has meant for me and what I hope it might mean for future generations of Johnnies. One of the events that interests us at the college especially is the advent of “modernity,” the moment when the focus of Western European thought turned very deliberately away from its own obsession with the past and embraced novelty.
- People are often interested in physics due to its purported objectivity. It aims to truly be a study of nature in itself. On the other hand, physics is a human construct, a language we use to describe the world as we experience it. In our quest for absolute reality, then, it seems that we must rid our description of the world of all subjectivity. This lecture concerns part of a story of such an attempt: the quest for absolute measurement. We will consider physical and philosophical aspects of the attempts of Maxwell, Peirce and Planck to rid our language of physical measurement of undue subjectivity. This will shed some light on the possibility of absolute reality—and the possibility of communicating with aliens.
- Newton offered a mechanistic view of reality, in which the natural world unfolds from present to future in a deterministic fashion. Quantum mechanics does the same—but with a roll of the dice. This worldview has become nearly synonymous with science itself, influencing not only science but also the arts and humanities. Drawing on the work of a group of renegade biologists—as well as my own—I will argue that this paradigm is inadequate to describe life, cognition, society, and much of nature. I will focus on living systems as the pièce de résistance of the argument, incorporating mathematical and philosophical considerations where necessary. A key conclusion is that organisms are not merely special kinds of physical systems; rather, they are physical plus something else. This “something else” is not magic or vitalism, but what Erwin Schrödinger called a “new physics”—a science we are only beginning to sketch.
- Pedro Márquez-Zacarías is a Purépecha biologist from México, where he studied Biomedical Sciences at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. In 2022, he completed a PhD in Quantitative Biosciences at Georgia Tech and is now an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute.
- This presentation will consist of an introduction, screening, and commentary on Chris Marker’s landmark science fiction short film La Jetée (1962). The reading will be guided by questions concerning the nature of time and critiques of the classical model of time originated and exemplified by Aristotle and St. Augustine. Time emerges as a problem for us insofar as we lack a representation of time that adequately articulates our experience of time. A symptom of this is our tendency to spatialize time, which we see in the objective priority we customarily give to “clock time.” La Jetée responds to the inadequacy of our concepts of time by creating an experience of cinematic time which not only compels us to reconsider our notions of time but also allows us an experience of time we may not have known possible.
July 16: Anthony Eagan, St. John’s College visiting tutor, “Seeing Double: Rereading Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes”
- The psychological double is a common conceit in modern literature, from the more famous works of Poe, Dostoevsky and Oscar Wilde to the lesser-known works of writers like Michel Tournier, Tarjei Vesaas and Thomas Tryon. Yet seldom do readers note just how prominent a role the double plays in the novels and stories of Joseph Conrad. In this talk, I will explore some factors behind the explosion of doubling in 19th and 20th-century novels before focusing on how those factors are relevant to Conrad’s more subtle and special use of the psychological double in his violent political fiction. Ultimately, I will focus on how doubling takes on new proportions in his novel of assassination and intrigue, Under Western Eyes.
July 23: Phil LeCuyer, St. John’s tutor emeritus, “Arrays and Faces”
- In this lecture, arrays are contrasted to sequences as paradigms of thought. Sequences are based on causation. What are arrays based on? Several examples of arrays will be considered, including the human face. When viewed and understood as an array, what can a face tell us about being human?
July 30: Travis Mulroy, St. John’s College visiting tutor, “The structure of Plato’s Republic”
- In this lecture, Mulroy will present an original interpretation of the overall structure and underlying argument of Plato’s Republic.
ABOUT ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE
St. John’s College is the most distinctive liberal arts college in the country due to our interdisciplinary program, in which 200 of the most revolutionary great books from across 3,000 years of human thought are explored in student-driven, discussion-based classes for undergraduates, graduates and lifelong adult learners. By probing world-changing ideas in literature, philosophy, mathematics, science, music, history and more, students leave St. John’s with a foundation for success in such fields as law, government, research, STEM, media and education. Located on two campuses in two historic state capitals—Annapolis, Maryland, and Santa Fe, New Mexico—St. John’s is the third-oldest college in the United States and has been hailed as the “most forward-thinking, future-proof college in America” by Quartz and as a “high-achieving angel hovering over the landscape of American higher education” by the Los Angeles Times. Learn more at sjc.edu.
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