Continuing the Conversation: a Great Books podcast by St. John’s College
Enter a conversation where questions are more important than answers. Where curiosity and connection trump certainty and combat. Where history’s great thinkers provide a springboard for us to jump into big questions together. Enter Continuing the Conversation: our college’s antidote to the blustery world just beyond our library doors.
Episodes
Monday Apr 17, 2023
Science as a Liberal Art: Louis Petrich & Chester Burke
Monday Apr 17, 2023
Monday Apr 17, 2023
Annapolis tutor Chester Burke has spent many years teaching and shaping the laboratory program of St. John’s College, where mathematics and science are studied as liberal arts. This means that all students read the foundational texts of some of history’s greatest mathematical and scientific minds, in their historical order, while performing original observations, demonstrations, and experiments. These activities allow students to witness great scientific thinkers and experimenters provide the building blocks, old and new, for our theoretical knowledge of nature. In this episode, Burke joins host Louis Petrich for a conversation on the college’s unique approach to scientific and mathematical study.
As such, it includes a standard and beloved practice at St. John’s College—a mathematical chalkboard demonstration—to accompany a dive from classical physics into the startling world of quantum mechanics. Authors touched upon include Galileo, Leibniz, Maxwell, Thompson, Schrödinger, Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg, Faraday, and Descartes.
Tuesday Mar 14, 2023
Sophrosyne: In Search of Moderation
Tuesday Mar 14, 2023
Tuesday Mar 14, 2023
Sophrosyne is the ancient Greek word for moderation, which is one of the four classical virtues. But what does Socrates’ definition of moderation really mean and how is it connected to another classical virtue: courage? Santa Fe tutor Michael Golluber explores this question by juxtaposing Plato’s Charmides against his own passion for the good life, which he defines as consisting of good food, good wine, good company, and good conversation. Together with host Krishnan Venkatesh Golluber seeks to untangle the complexity of sophrosyne—a virtue that often masks a desire for order and control—revealing how difficult it is to both understand and attain.
Tuesday Mar 14, 2023
Home & Hunger: The Crossroads of Food and Thought
Tuesday Mar 14, 2023
Tuesday Mar 14, 2023
What is home? Santa Fe tutor Paola Villa, Italian by birth, begins this episode with the Elvis Presley cliché “Home is where the heart is,” and then clarifies to host Sarah Davis that the heart is the crossroads between the stomach and the brain. From there, Villa shares French poet Ponge’s poem “Snails,” which describes the way that snails devour the land they cross, defecate on that land, and are fed by that land—all while carrying their homes on their backs. For Villa, this metaphor describes her own journey and conception of home: devouring the food and ideas of a new place, which transform her in return, while remaining deeply Italian.
In Villa’s native tongue, “to know” and “to taste” have the same root, a reminder that food and mind are one, each mediated through the tongue. And the table, draped in a tablecloth, is what brings one’s family and community together—a metaphor that she also ascribes to the St. John’s seminar table, where hungry seekers come together in community to devour ideas, and to be devoured in return. This episode, rich in metaphor and poetry, connects gastronomy, language, thought, and community to a theme to which all humans can relate: wanting to know and be at home in the world.
Tuesday Mar 14, 2023
Can a Book be a Friend?
Tuesday Mar 14, 2023
Tuesday Mar 14, 2023
Is a book dead or alive? Can one be friends with a book or with the author behind the book? What are the promises and hazards of such friendships? Should we seek stability, loyalty, and reassurance of our deepest convictions and impulses? Or do real friends provide conflict, mystery, and depth, challenging and surprising us continually with new insights and contradictions? What if a friendship isn’t dyadic in nature but triadic, requiring a third element to complete it—such as fine wine or a shared spiritual yearning?
Are some friends more suited to lifelong friendship than others and, if so, why? In this episode, Annapolis tutor Mary Elizabeth Halper and host Zena Hitz explore the very personal relationships that humans have with books, and with the complex questions they bring up in all of us.
Tuesday Feb 14, 2023
What Is Freedom & How Do We Cultivate It?
Tuesday Feb 14, 2023
Tuesday Feb 14, 2023
Liberal education is education for freedom. What kind of freedom does it or should it cultivate? Freedom without discipline is anarchy, and life without freedom is tyranny—or so says Annapolis tutor David Townsend, who joins host Zena Hitz in this probing conversation into the nature of freedom, the ways in which individuals and communities can cultivate it, and the need for self-discipline in tempering our freedoms. The two also discuss how a liberal education can free minds from the prejudices connatural to all human communities, and how the St. John’s education strives to do just that.
Tuesday Feb 14, 2023
Ceremony & Beauty: The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon
Tuesday Feb 14, 2023
Tuesday Feb 14, 2023
What is it to write? What roles do ceremony, beauty, and material play in the act of writing? Not only is The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon an early classic of Japanese literature, written in the 10th century by a lady of the Heian-era court, it is also—five hundred years before Montaigne— the world's first sustained portrayal of an individual self as she lives, thinks, and feels from day to day. A genre-bending mix of poems, lists, essays, and anecdotes, Shōnagon's original work was composed on Empress-provided fine paper and expresses as much delight in the materials and physical activity of writing as in the human dramas and exquisite moments of courtly life. In this episode, Santa Fe host Krishnan Venkatesh and tutor Ron Wilson explore the power of the material conditions of writing—the handmade ink, the rare pens, the costly paper, the social culture of the highly insular court—in energizing and focusing the creator’s mind. They explore the writer's love of writing as ceremonial beyond Shōnagon to Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, and poet Susan Howe, writers for whom the material conditions of writing are essential for their work. From this arises a pressing contemporary question: what has been lost in today’s digital world, where few material limitations exist?
Tuesday Feb 14, 2023
Pursuing the Eternal Present
Tuesday Feb 14, 2023
Tuesday Feb 14, 2023
Does a contemplative life bring us closer to the divine, as Aristotle believed? Is it the highest form of human life or is it self-centered and lived at the expense of others? Can one lead a contemplative life while living in the real world? Philosophers, artists, mystics, and students have long pursued lives of solitude, contemplation, and creative exploration, only to encounter a recurring set of practical obstacles and vexing moral questions. In this episode of Continuing the Conversation, Annapolis host Louis Petrich and tutor Jonathan Badger explore a conversation that honors the pursuit of “the eternal present” in Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence (based on the life of the painter, Gauguin), while exploring its attendant questions with equal concern and gravity. This episode also includes conversation on works by Goethe, Rousseau, Thoreau, and Aristotle.
Thursday Jan 19, 2023
The Ideal Community: The Adventure to Try
Thursday Jan 19, 2023
Thursday Jan 19, 2023
Can an ideal human community ever be achieved? Socrates believed such a community would only be possible if and when humans develop an “erotic zeal for philosophy.” Santa Fe tutor Patricia Greer was a founding pioneer of the intentional community and ecovillage of Auroville, India, where she witnessed first-hand the tension between philosophical ideals that exist in both Eastern and Western philosophy and the political realities that arise when humans attempt to realize them together. In this episode, Greer sits down with host tutor Sarah Davis, where lived experience leads us through a conversation on Plato’s Republic, Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk, and the conflict between the ideals that America was founded upon and the lived reality of life in America and beyond.
Thursday Jan 19, 2023
Family Drama: From Oedipus to Ozu
Thursday Jan 19, 2023
Thursday Jan 19, 2023
Family is an inexhaustible source of conflict for dramatists, novelists, and filmmakers—perhaps more inexhaustible than war. From Greek dramatists Aeschylus and Sophocles to Confucius, Vyasa, and Ozu, family is a problem, a question, and a source of both self-destruction and self-actualization. In this episode, Santa Fe host Krishnan Venkatesh is joined by tutor Aparna Ravilochan for a journey deep into the heart of Thebes—where King Laius has died at the hands of his own son Oedipus, and Oedipus has unwittingly married his mother Jocasta—and a subtler journey into the world of famed Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu, where a happily domiciled father and daughter, Somiya and Noriko, will be ripped apart by the norms and expectations of tradition.
This episode searches for insights into the nature of family, the tension between the safety and anxiety that family creates, and the rich and multiple ways that different artists, works, cultures, and mediums express these insights.
Thursday Jan 19, 2023
The Limitations & Possibilities of Sight: Euclid’s Optics
Thursday Jan 19, 2023
Thursday Jan 19, 2023
What are the limitations and possibilities of perception—and what do ancient mathematics and modern literature have to say about this question? Written in 300 BC, Euclid’s Optics is a foundational work of mathematics on the geometry of vision, while Swann’s Way, the first book in Proust’s multi-volume Remembrance of Things Past, published in 1913, states: “Even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole. Even the very simple act that we call ‘seeing the person we know is, in part, an intellectual one; we fill in the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part.” These works are the jumping off points for a conversation between Annapolis tutor Michael Grenke and host Louis Petrich on the limitations and possibilities of perception.
Pull Up a Chair
and Join Our Conversation
Do you long to discuss really big ideas, not the ones that grab headlines? Are you curious about the books and authors that have influenced civilizations for millennia? Do you love conversation that connects people, instead of dividing them?
In this web and podcast series, St. John’s College faculty invite us in on such conversations, offering a personal seat at a table open to all: a table around which the seemingly impenetrable mystery of who we are as humans, and why we see each other and the world as we do, is explored with openness, curiosity, and the guiding hand of great books and authors from 3000 years of recorded history spanning both West and East.
From the Ancients to the Moderns, from the West to the East, from the profound to the personal, this is Continuing the Conversation.
Subscribe to Continuing the Conversation here, or watch episodes at sjc.edu
Ref: T1LVgt9HWCNzSNYQgRA4