Euclid, Elements (new)
Mondays, beginning January 5, 1:30-3:00 pm ET
Seminar Leaders: Esa Palosaari & Eric Stull
(Description forthcoming) Book I, sections of II-IV, focus on Book V.
Euclid’s Elements - All Thirteen Books in One Volume
Edited by Dana Densmore
Translation by T.L. Heath, sewn softcover, ISBN 978-1-888009-19-4, list price: $29.95
Vergil in Latin, Aeneid, Book II (beginner)
Mondays, 7:00-9:00 pm ET
Seminar Leader: Eric Stull
New participants welcome.
Homer, Iliad (continued from 2025)
Mondays, January 5-March 23, 8:00-9:30 pm ET
Seminar Leader: Christian Blood
Homer’s Iliad has many excellent successors, but nothing can take its place. The Iliad is not only the fountainhead of poetry; it is probably its greatest summit. It is not only like a great mountain river rushing on with irresistible strength and unbearable beauty, staying in the mountains for a long time before making its spectacular descent through a world almost too rugged to be lived in, yet impossible not to dwell with once visited, its water bearing all before it through the shining plain; it is also like the mountain itself and the sea toward which its waters tend.
The poem is thus a world, about a world. Is this world simply the world as such: elemental, profound, brutal, fecund, brilliant, terrible, filled with women and men, love and hate, gods, animals, plants, earth, sun, air, sky, sea? What else is there, really? One thing, perhaps: pteroenta, winged things--words. A reader keeping their ear to the poem’s ground may hear the words alighting within the range of their hearing. There is nothing else like it under the sun--this sun to the sea of song that has followed it. We will read the Iliad slowly: a book a week, an hour and a half at a time, for 24 meetings -- and then we will meet one final time to wonder at what we just did.
Recent generations of English-language Iliad readers have been well served by Richmond Lattimore and Robert Fitzgerald, and more recently Robert Fagles and Stanley Lombardo. Renderings by Herbert Jordan, Rodney Merrill, Michael Reck, Joe Sachs, Caroline Alexander, and Peter Green also all have their benefits. I will be reading Emily Wilson's 2023 translation, and I recommend it highly. Overall, our discussions will be more convenient if everyone in a group has the same translation; at the same time, it's illuminating when we can compare different renderings. Ultimately, the choice of translation is yours, so long as it is in verse and provides line numbers.
Nietzsche, On the Future of Our Educational Institutions (new 6 sessions)
Mondays, January 26-March 9, 8:30-9:50 pm ET
Seminar Leader: Jason Happel
Friedrich Nietzsche's five lectures on higher education, delivered in early 1872 in Basel, was one of his first public efforts. Through an imaginative setting and dialogue among students, a philosopher, and a dog, "the lectures move from a consideration of German educational institutions to a consideration of what is needed for true, or classical, education." (from a translator's introduction) Nietzsche writes: “Every so-called classical education has only one healthy and natural starting point, the artistic, serious, and rigorous habituation in the use of the mother tongue. . . . [Here] the wing... carries to the right and sole home of education, to Greek antiquity. Of course we would not come very far with the help of that wing all alone in the attempt to bring ourselves close to that castle of the Hellenic,... rather anew we need the same leaders, the same teachers, our German classics, in order ourselves to become swept away under the wingbeat of their ancient endeavors – to the land of longing, to Greece.” What it would mean to put education, culture, above all else, above religion, above economics, even above the state? Such educational reforms suggests that the state must not be “a border guard, regulator, or overseer for his culture; rather the robust, muscular comrade, ready for battle, and companion on the way, who gives the admired, nobler, and, as it were, unearthly friend safe conduct through the harsh realities and for that earns his thankfulness.” Underlying the lectures is the question of whether mass education is possible. We will read and discuss the introduction and preface (week 1) and one lecture per week for the following five weeks. A PDF will be provided.
There are two recent translations: one from an SJC tutor, Michael Grenke, published by St. Augustine Press (Grenke translation), and another from NYRB Classics, called "Anti-Education..." (Searls translation) -- the second may be a little easier to get, but either one will suffice.
Listener's Studio: J.S. Bach (12 sessions)
Tuesdays, January 6-March 24, 2026 12:00-1:15 pm ET
Seminar Leader: Jeff Johnston
Bach is regarded as one of the greatest composers in history. We have a wealth of great historical recordings we'll be listening to - and we'll take a good look at the score as we go. If you've never read music before, don't worry! - we'll explain how written works, and we'll visually scroll along the written music together as we listen. Together we will open up one of Bach's greatest works to see what it has to say to us today. You do not need to purchase any scores or music for this pathway; recorded music and a PDF score will be provided.
Borges, Short Stories
Tuesdays, January 6-April 14 3:00-4:30 pm ET
Seminar Leaders: Reynaldo Miranda & Miryam Bujanda
We plan to spend three quarters on the works of Borges, one quarter on some of his lectures and essays, a second quarter on his short stories, and a third quarter on some of his poems. Participants are more than welcome to join any one quarter or two or all quarters.
Borges, Jorge Luis (1899-1986) | Collected Fictions (1933-1983)
In 1998 Penguin Classics collected all of Borges' prose fiction in a single volume, translated by Andrew Hurley. We will read the entire book over fifteen weekly meetings, and discuss many of the stories therein, not all of them because they are too dense and rich. The stories were written in the fifty-year span between 1933 and 1983. An advantage for us is that English was among Borges’ first, native languages (he had an English grandmother who read the Authorized Version to him, an English library at home, and he began reading Shakespeare at 12 and never stopped). Umberto Eco wrote of Borges, "Though so different in style, two writers have offered us an image for the next millenium: Joyce and Borges. The first with words what the second designed with ideas: the original, the one and only World Wide Web, The Real Thing. The rest will remain simply virtual." John Updike wrote, "The economy of his prose, the tact of his imagery, the courage of his thought are there to be admired and emulated. In resounding the note of the marvelous last struck in English by Wells and Chesterton, in permitting infinity to enter and distort his imagination, he has lifted fiction away from the flat earth where most of our novels and short stories still take place." Nobel Mario Vargas Llosa wrote, "Borges is the most important Spanish-language writer since Cervantes. ... To have denied him the Nobel Prize is as bad as the case of Joyce, Proust, and Kafka." JM Coetzee said, “He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened a way to a remarkable generation of Spanish-American novelists.” David Foster Wallace wrote, “The truth, briefly stated, is that Borges is arguably the great bridge between modernism and post-modernism in world literature...his stories are inbent and hermitic, with the oblique terror of a game whose rules are unknown and its stakes everything.” Our translator writes in his Note, "The two volumes of stories that appeared in that annus mirabilis [1962]...caused an impact that was immediate and overwhelming. John Updike, John Barth, Anthony Burgess, and countless other writers and critics have eloquently and emphatically attested to the unsettling yet liberating effect that Jorge Luis Borges' work had on their vision of the way literature was thenceforth to be done. Reading those stories, writers and critics encountered a disturbingly other writer (Borges seemed, sometimes, to come from a place even more distant than Argentina, another literary planet),...who took the detective story and turned it into metaphysics, who took fantasy writing and made it, with its questioning and reinventing of everyday reality, central to the craft of fiction. Even as early as 1933, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, editor of the influential Nouvelle Revue Francaise, returning to France after visiting Argentina, is famously reported to have said, "Borges vaut le voyage".
From 1914 to 1921 he lived with his family in Europe, and from 1914-1918 he studied at the famous Collège de Genève, presently the Collège Calvin after its founder Jean Calvin. There he also attained fluency in French and German, and later Italian, Old English and Old Norse. After his graduation in 1918 the family moved to Lugano, and after the end of the War lived in Barcelona, Palma Mallorca, Seville, and Madrid. He was a noted translator beginning with Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince at age 10, going on to translate into Spanish works by Snorri Sturluson, Melville, Carlyle, Swedenborg, Bierce, Faulkner, Gide, Hesse, Kafka, Kipling, Poe, Whitman, Woolf. By the age of 55 he was completely blind. This gave him mental registers with a range akin to a great organ. In 1961 he was appointed to the Tinker Chair in the University of Texas at Austin, and embarked on a US lecture tour that year. In 1967-8 he held the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship of Poetry in Harvard University, and also spent time at the University of Virginia. He also travelled widely in Europe, including Athens and Crete. He died and was buried in Geneva. He lived in Buenos Aires, a cosmopolitan, port city that was the intellectual center of the South American continent. He taught first as professor of English and American Literature at the Argentine Association of English Culture, and from 1956 to 1970 as professor of literature at the University of Buenos Aires. He advised the important publishing house Emecé Editores. He was the director of the National Library from 1955 to 1973, resigning when Peron was elected a second time. His close, longtime interlocutors and collaborators included his sister Norah, a noted painter and art critic; Macedonio Fernandez, erstwhile lawyer, writer, humorist, philosopher, family friend, and Socratic mentor; Maurice Abramowicz, Polish poet and lawyer; Simon Jichlinki; David Ben Gurion, Prime Minister of Israel; Victoria Ocampo, the founder of Argentina’s most important literary journal, Sur; the great Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares; the Italian-American translator Norman Thomas di Giovanni; Silvina Ocampo, short story writer, poet, painter, and younger sister of Victoria; Margarita Guerrero, dancer, writer, and dabbler in the occult; Estela Canto, a communist and his longtime lover and lifetime friend; Astor Piazzolla, the tango composer; Maria Kodama, an Argentine of Japanese and German of background, his longtime assistant, then lover, wife, widow and heiress. Authors who greatly influenced Borges include Spinoza, Berkeley, Swedenborg, Schopenhauer, Carlyle, Meyrink, George Bernard Shaw, Alfonso Reyes, Franz Mauthner. He distilled as it were this cosmopolitanism. And in turn Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut are two American writers greatly and directly influenced by Borges.
In 1961 he shared with Samuel Beckett the first Prix International, and the Italian government named him a commendatore. In 1964 he received an honorary British knighthood. In 1966 the Ingram Merrill Foundation awarded him its annual literary award for his "outstanding contribution to literature." In 1973 the Jerusalem International Book Fair awarded him its fifth biennial Jerusalem Prize; and the Mexican Instituto de Bellas Artes awarded him its inaugural Alfonso Reyes International Prize. In 1975 the World Fantasy Award. In 1976 the Mystery Writers of America awarded him the Edgar Allan Poe Award. In 1979 the Spanish Ministry of Culture awarded him its annual Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the greatest prize in the Hispanophone world. In 1980 the International Balzan Prize Foundation awarded him its prize for philology, linguistics, and literary criticism; and the French based Simon and Cino Del Duca Foundation awarded him its annual Prix mondial Cino Del Duca. In 1983 he was inducted into the French Legion of Honor. In 1984 the Konex Foundation of Argentina awarded him its Diamond Prize. In 1971 Columbia University awarded him the first of many Doctor of Letters degrees, honoris causa (the long list would soon include Oxford and Cambridge).
A PDF of the book will be provided, complete and identical to the paperback, but lacking page numeration. Collected Fictions: Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Andrew Hurley, London and New York: Penguin Random House LLC, 1998, paperback, 565 pp., ISBN 9780140286809.
Herodotus, Histories (continue from 2025)
Tuesdays, January 6-March 24/31 8:00-9:30 pm ET
Seminar Leaders: Eric Stull
The first historian was the greatest, because he was the greatest inquirer called by that name, which in fact means inquirer. Well, there was that second fellow, whom many, with strong reason, regard as the greatest, but he said he wasn’t interested in prizes, so maybe he won’t mind not bearing the palm. What is a history? How is it different from an epic poem or from a scientific inquiry? What would it mean to perform it? To read it in public is to make a written thing – in some sense, a speech – into a deed. But the written thing itself tells of deeds, and the deeds themselves are often speeches. And all people everywhere speak and do, and their doings speak and their speakings do things. Our historian gives us a universe of conflict, on the grandest of scales – barbarian and Greek, free and slave, kings and commoners, old and new, giants and underdogs, women and men, stupid and clever, people and gods, animals and people – in which human beings war with each other over things they’ve said and things they’ve done. Is it any wonder that a work so bursting with richness of character and action enchanted so great a novelist as George Eliot? His story is so filled with plot and incident, with love of the great human theater that is the world and with wonder at human beings and how they do and what they speak, that memory can’t keep up with all the memorable things he sets down so that “time may not draw the color from what man has brought into being.”
Text: either David Grene’s translation (U. Chicago Press; ISBN: 9780226327723), or Andrea Purvis’s, The Landmark Herodotus (Anchor Books; ISBN: 9781400031146), or -- better yet! -- both
Newman, The Idea of the University, Part II, University Subjects
Tuesdays, January 6-March 24/31 9:00-10:30 pm ET
Seminar Leader: Reynaldo Miranda
Do you wish to investigate deeply or further investigate what are freedom, autonomy, self-possession, liberal learning, education, classical education, liberal education, knowledge, sciences, ends and means, liberal arts, wisdom, religion, theology, and their interrelations, relations with the person, and with a community of persons? Do you wish to read and discuss seriously with others one of the very greatest writers in the English language? Are you merely curious and wish to see what the fuss is about, perhaps read the text itself rather than just citations of fragments? If so, we invite you, especially if you are interested in liberal education and liberal learning, to join us as we are masterfully guided in our inquiries by one of the greatest classics, the neglected part 2 of The Idea of a University leisurely over the course of 12 weeks.
The Idea of a University is a composition of two parts, University Teaching, a series of nine public lectures given in Dublin in 1852 to select prospective donors, and a preface to them published in that same year as the first edition of Idea, and University Subjects, a collection of ten university lectures given also in Dublin between 1854 and 1858 to students and faculty and first published in 1859 as Lectures and Essays on University Subjects. The second 1872 edition of Idea incorporated the latter. Newman continued to revise the text, and the definitive edition is the 1899 publication by Longmans, Green, and Company. The University of Notre Dame Press inaugurated its Notre Dame Series in the Great Books with that complete and definitive, expertly annotated in 1982 and kept in print since as an accessible trade paperback. Of the many contemporary editions that are available, it is unique in that it is a complete reproduction of the definitive 1899 edition. PDFs will also be provided of a more thoroughly annotated edition with footnotes that may be helpful to us.
On average then we will read 20-25 pages per week. The prose is gorgeous 19th C. English, and the concepts conveyed are dense and very rich. We will seek to penetrate the surface, and really join Newman, face his words, engage, let him lead us by the hand to see where we get. The ISBN is 0-268-01150-8.
Sterne, The Physiks of Tristram Shandy (new 6 sessions)
Tuesdays, January 27-March 3, 2026 7:30-9:00 pm ET
Seminar Leaders: JJ Patton and Denise Alquist
"… the elements are exactly what every novelist might use; man and woman, birth, childhood, night, sleep, marriage, prayer, death. There is nothing paradoxical about all this. Only I am trying to build many planes of narrative with a single aesthetic purpose. Did you ever read Laurence Sterne?" (James Joyce, from a letter to Eugene Jolas)
In 1760, a Yorkshire vicar showed up in London with a curious book, the likes of which no one had seen before. Openly craving the celebrity of authorship, Laurence Sterne got his wish when his odd, silly, unpredictable work caught fire with a public enamored with the digression-rich story of the birth of Tristram Shandy — and one of the earliest, most creative and influential examples of the literary form that came to be known as the “novel” was given its own birth.
For Sterne's masterpiece is a sincere joke with life — self-conscious, analytic of art, destructive of substantial reality, forever searching out secret meanings yet still comically human. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman evokes a world we can recognize, where there is psychology and uncertainty, where choice and outcome do not always line up on the same page. Join us, dear readers, and discover Sterne's joyful, inventive science of telling.
Released serially, and awaited breathlessly over months and years (in the sections we will read for each week's seminar), Laurence Sterne’s experiments in hyper-attentive creativity of time, form, typography and narrative drew from the wellsprings of such as Shakespeare, Rabelais and Jonathan Swift and prepared the landscape of modern awareness for works like Ulysses, The Magic Mountain, and Remembrance of Things Past.
Yet for all his famously precise pastiches of typographical and mental squiggles, Sterne does not deny us a peek through the keyhole into the warmth of character and richness of humanity. We delve into his odd collection of people at their most interesting reveals — father Walter's Tristopedia, Uncle Toby's wound, the magnificent eyes of the Widow Wadman. And then delightfully digress into the sermons of Parson Yorick or Tristram's race with Death through France, on and on. We can see the genius in the light of present-day knowledge that no Enlightenment-era reader could have possibly comprehended, and in light of a past no modern reader can help but feel for. Sterne lives on — his world gone but his sagacious and snide passions surviving in the truths of philosophy, the craving for camaraderie and the relief, however momentary, of the curative powers of humor, of some serious laughter and lightness.
What can be learned from a man who has learned himself? Experience Tristram Shandy — the best cure for death ever written.
"For though the writer is always haunted by the belief that somehow it must be possible to brush aside the ceremonies and conventions of writing and to speak to the reader as directly as by word of mouth, anyone who has tried the experiment has either been struck dumb by the difficulty, or waylaid into disorder and diffusity unutterable. Sterne somehow brought off the astonishing combination.” (Virginia Woolf, from Phases of Fiction)
Book info:
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman [THE FLORIDA EDITION]
By LAURENCE STERNE
Edited by Joan New and Melvyn New
Paperback | $13.00
Published by Penguin Classics
May 27, 2003 | 720 Pages | ISBN 9780141439778
Shakespeare, Henry V
Wednesdays, January 14-April 1, 2:00-3:30 pm ET
Seminar Leaders: Eric Stull
The King is dead! Long live the King! He won’t, but he’ll have enough of a run to be remembered as “the mirror of all Christian kings.” Come to think of it, that description might turn out to be more ambiguous in its meaning than at first appears. The roustabout prince has vanquished Hotspur by his own hand, banished his “misleaders,” including (most emphatically) “plump Jack,” and buried the usurper of Richard, his own father and namesake. Even as some of the air goes out of the world, Henry, the fifth of that name, begins to look the part. But is there more to being king than looking the part? Is it merely a part? The play is the most overtly artful of all the history plays and one of the most in all of Shakespeare’s dramatic works. The king himself becomes player-director, staging a most princely and studious religiosity to leading prelates, a demonstration of noble indignation with tennis balls as props, the discovery at the water’s edge of a treasonous plot involving his dearest friend, the unfolding in dramatic speech of such horrors as will follow the siege of a walled town, an ingenious act of solicitous self-disguise among common soldiers on the eve of battle, the execution of an old drinking buddy in whose company we last saw him when he was on hand for a nocturnal visit with Doll Tearsheet, the delivery of a rousing pre-battle speech in the face of overwhelmingly long odds after a dramatic refusal to accept terms from the enemy, the pious enactment of a post-battle prayer, and the wooing in broken French of a royal princess who speaks broken English. What does he do for an encore? Does Falstaff appear in the list of credits at the end?
Text: any standard edition (e.g., Arden, Riverside, Folger, Signet, Pelican, Yale, Oxford) with act, scene, line numbers.
Shakespeare, Sonnets "Read Aloud" (Postponed)
Wednesdays, ---, 3:30-5:00 pm ET
Seminar Leaders: Reynaldo Miranda & Tim Pabon
Let us read Shakespeare's poetry out loud, as he intended it! This seminar invites participants to bear witness to Shakespeare’s sonnets, both as observers of the unfolding event and participants who enact and uncover the experience of the speaker. By performing variant recitations that the texts allow, we enter more deeply into the bard's work, and we hear the different meanings that only the human voice can convey. Although not an acting class per se (our common aim is not to train the next Dench or Olivier), we will familiarize ourselves with the rules of iambic pentameter and classical acting along with brief sojourns into XX century acting theory, including a few fundamentals about meter, enjambment, elision, overfull lines, French endings, etc. Particular attention will be paid to the aesthetic of “fire and ice,” simultaneously inhabiting the poem with both emotional connection and detachment. By thinking and feeling the line in performance, we turn our minds and hearts toward the universal preoccupations of the Bard and, ultimately, toward each other.
If Shakespeare truly succeeded in finding language that puts us back into sympathy with our nature, then we already have what we need by virtue of our experiences. Indeed, this seminar is for non-actors.
Perhaps it is time we return to the classical, common practice of usually reading aloud. Indeed, the best teachers of writing, as at Oxbridge, require their students to read their writing aloud, only upon hearing the human voice read can we spot infelicities in our prose.
The required text that we will use in common is Vendler, Helen, The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, Cambridge MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997, 696 pp., available in paperback or used hardcover, pb ISBN 978-0674637122.
Tim has 25 years of experience as a classically trained stage actor in the classical English and Spanish repertory, including of course our bard. Reynaldo is a seasoned seminar leader, lover of Shakespeare and language in general. For more on Tim see his website here.
Dante, Paradiso (new)
Wednesdays, begins January 14, 2026 8:00-9:30 pm ET
Seminar Leader: Jeff Johnston
Dorothy Sayers said that reading the Inferno without reading the Paradiso is like touring the sewers of London but never visiting the city. Whether you have read the first two parts of the Divine Comedy or not, we invite you to take this opportunity to read beautiful conclusion to Dante's magisterial work.
Plato, Republic (continued from 2025)
Wednesdays, January 7-March 25, 8:00-9:30 pm ET
Seminar Leaders: Eric Stull & Reynaldo Miranda
When Socrates went down to the Piraeus he went down into the human soul. But where is that? The soul is no place; it has no geography. And since it doesn’t, how can there be a city in it? And yet there seems to be a world there, and he says a city is to be found in that world -- somehow. The pattern of a city is laid up – laid down – therein. It is both hard and easy to speak generally of Plato’s dialogue, because it is hard to say what there is in the world that might concern a human being that the book does not, in some way, have in it, and it is also therefore easy to assert that there must be nothing of such a kind. The dialogue, an all-nighter (which would probably take ten to fifteen hours to read aloud without stopping), revolves around the single question what justice is, but that question turns out to involve everything human. One risks being tedious by even calling the dialogue (or its unforgettable narrator and main character) inexhaustible, so glaring is the fact. Does The Republic do – can any book do – that most elusive of things: show us how to live, how to be in the world? If every great book helps us in this endeavor, and is therefore always relevant, always timely, probably few careful readers of such books affirm, except in rare instances, that this is true without qualification of any particular great book, for one cannot so affirm without putting oneself on tricky ground: how much must one be presuming on the book and on one’s own life by making such a claim? And yet the question of choosing one’s own life is itself made part, rousingly, of the drama of this book. It puts us constantly on just this tricky ground. But in what sense, if at all, do we choose our lives, and what kind of city must lie within us if we are to do so?
Text: There are at least several good, but probably none unqualifiedly good, translations: those by Joe Sachs (this writer’s preferred), Raymond Larson, and Allan Bloom, are probably as good as any in English. (It’s probably best to avoid Jowett.)
Archimedes, The Works of Archimedes
Thursdays, January 8, 1:30-3:00 pm ET
Seminar Leaders: Eric Stull & Esa Palosaari
(Description forthcoming) We will work towards understanding The Method Treating of Mechanical Problems in about this order: (1) Measurement of a Circle, (2) The Sand-Reckoner, (3) On the Equilibrium of Planes I, (4) Quadrature of the Parabola, (5) The Method, and if time permits: (6) On the Sphere and Cylinder I (selections) (7) On Floating Bodies I
The Works Of Archimedes. Translated by Heath,T.L. Publication date 1897
Publisher Cambridge University Press (available online).
Aristotle, Politics, Books V-VI
Thursdays, January 8-March 26, 18 2:00-3:30 pm ET
Seminar Leaders: Reynaldo Miranda
If you are interested in a serious investigation into what is the political, how can politics work and not work, why so, that is to say the foundations of all politics, of politics as such, you are invited to join us, a happy few, a merry band of colleagues, in a close reading of Aristotle’s Politics and serious conversation thereof always guided by this master text. Put simply, typically where we start following our teacher Aristotle, how do we and how can we relate to one another beyond the household and the family. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once quipped, half-joking, that all Western philosophy was a series of footnotes to Plato. We might say the same about this text and Western political thought. It lays out virtually all the fundamentals, such that it remains a touchstone 2,500 years later and a continent and an ocean away for us. If you are sick of what Symposium’s founder calls “retail politics”, e.g. media, social media, polarized partisanship, this may be your welcome refuge. What are the political realities faced by MAGA, Democratic Socialists of America, the Chinese Communist Party, Erdogan, King Charles II, the states and peoples of Afghanistan and Norway, alike? Let us follow Aristotle under the trap door, and see the simple, most basic and underlying questions rather than rushing ahead of ourselves. For instance, Aristotle begins by proposing that the reason we are political critters is that we alone among all the animals speak. The other animals communicate by sounds and gestures, but they do not predicate or form sentences: many of the other animals are social, but they are not political. In the shelf of great books on politics arranged chronologically, this is the second one after Plato’s Polity/Republic, like Herodotus and Thucydides on the history shelf.
Our common translation is by Joe Sachs, in the Focus Philosophical Library series published by Hackett Pub., 2012. ISBN-10: 1585103764, ISBN-13 : 978-1585103768. You are welcome to use any secondary translations privately, we recommend Carnes Lord, in the second edition, University of Chicago Press, 2013. Both books have outlines and glossaries, and are easily available in trade paperback. We will begin on Bk. E. You are welcome to read the first three books on your own, and the group is happy to fill you in.
Exodus (continued from 2025, chapters 17-40, new participants welcome)
Thursdays, January 8-March 26 8:00-9:30 pm ET
Seminar Leaders: Reynaldo Miranda & Jason Happel
Slavery, freedom, law, and worship: these widely recognized themes of Exodus invite us to reflect on “the moral meaning of communal life, the nature of political leadership, and the standards for judging a social order,” (Kass) as well as the possibility of a transcendent presence among human beings. As is our Symposium custom, we will strive to read this story of the formation of a particular people, the Jewish people, with a view to universal human concerns, and to make a good faith effort not to impose either a traditionally religious reading or an anti-religious reading on the book (even if we make occasional use of diverse philosophic and theological resources). We will simply start with the words on the page. This story of the founding of a nation deserves study on its own terms, even as the legacy of Greek political philosophy looms over us. While we resist the introduction of secondary sources in our weekly discussions, we encourage readers to have their own private dialogue with any resources they find useful. For example, Leon Kass’s Founding God’s Nation is an accessible introduction to Exodus and makes a nice conversational companion as one reads at home; but, of course, there are millions of other secondary sources.
We will use the Contemporary JPS translation of Exodus, found online at Sefaria.org, and invite participants to consult other translations, such as one by Robert Alter, and other versions published in Tanakhs or Bibles (JB, NIV, or KJV). We plan to start at chapter 17 and read through to the end.
This seminar is part of an ongoing series that explores Jewish and Christian texts. Anyone who is interested in a pluralistic, serious (with some playfulness), conversational approach to religious texts, read for the purpose of personal understanding is invited to join each quarter. We like to think we are contributing to interfaith dialogue by not adopting “a theory of interfaith dialogue,” but by just doing it.
Rumi, More Selected Poems (6 sessions, Postponed)
Thursdays, ---, 7:00-8:30 pm ET
Seminar Leaders: Randy Wooton & Susan Wooton
You have probably encountered Rumi via quotes on coffee mugs, in Instagram posts, or during wedding (or funeral) readings. But Rumi’s poetry is so much more than good one-liners. Rumi, a 13th-century Persian poet, theologian, and Sufi mystic, started life as a jurist and preacher before meeting a wandering dervish (Shams of Tabriz). Their friendship transformed Rumi’s life, igniting a torrent of poetry and ecstatic teaching.
The Essential Rumi translated by Coleman Barks, invites us to get to know Rumi as a poet, mystic, and teacher who wrestles with love, loss, friendship, and the divine.
This six-week seminar is meant to be an introduction. As such, we’ll focus on six themes and read several sections to inform our conversation (i.e., we will not read the entire collection together). Our approach will be less about decoding than dwelling: sitting with images, asking questions, and tracing the currents of longing, joy, and transformation that run through Rumi’s poetry. The goal is not to “master” the text, but to try to inhabit his world of longing, joy, and transformation together.
Famous Poems Revisited
Friday afternoons, February 6 to March 13, 4:30-6:00 PM ET
Seminar Leaders: Jason Happel
Famous Poems Revisited continues a series of shorter seminars that invites readers to "sit with" poetic treasures. This seminar will approach the poems of Keats, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Yeats, Poe, and Longfellow, with an eye to the words on the page, the similes and sound of the language, and the simple pleasure of reading a good poem. The plan is to revisit famous poems with fresh eyes. In each case, we’ll help each other obtain small rewards for the efforts of looking carefully and talking through the details together.
Free Lecture on Robert Burns's The Jolly Beggars: Love and Liberty - A Cantata, January 23, 4:30-6:00 pm
Days before Burns Night, when literally dozens of people around the world celebrate Scotland's national poet, Jason Happel, noted authority, will deliver a new version of his risqué vanity lecture, On Love and Liberty (30 minutes on a good night), which has been heard at more than one of his family's Burns Suppers over the past 20 years. Join us for a celebration of Burnsian themes: love, liberty, and human sympathy. The poem has been called "Shakespearean" and one of Burns's greatest compositions -- whether the poem is ultimately sympathetic with the down-trodden characters is debatable, but it does appear to celebrate love and liberty, even in their less than noble forms. The talk will be followed by a discussion on a few passages from the poem; raucous, if the Scotch is pouring, subdued, if not. Join us, but don't judge us by this indiscretion.
Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed
Sundays, 10:30-12:00 am/pm ET
Seminar Leader: Jess Joseph
Maimonides did not write the Guide of the Perplexed for readers in a hurry. This seminar gives us the chance to slow down—free from exams and term papers—and read a book that still surprises and challenges people more than eight centuries after it was written.
Each week we’ll focus on just a few pages—four to eight at most—so we can pause over Maimonides’ words, discuss difficult passages, and let the ideas unfold. We’ll begin with the Introduction, where Maimonides shows us how to approach the Guide—a work that also opens up new ways of reading the Bible. From there we’ll turn to his striking interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve. In the following weeks, depending on our pace, we’ll explore his teachings on prophecy, providence, and his reasons for the many commandments in the Hebrew Bible.
As Leo Strauss once wrote, The Guide is like an “enchanting forest”: the deeper you go, the more it comes alive. No prior knowledge of Judaism, the Bible or Hebrew is required. We will use the Pines translation of the Guide, now available in one volume from the University of Chicago Press.
Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War
Sundays, January 4 to March 22, 11:00-12:30 am ET / 8:00 am PT
Seminar Leaders: John Samples & Jason Happel
"Thucydides of Athens wrote the war of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, how they waged it against each other." We'll look carefully at the year-by-year account of the war as an example of an inquiry into, and an education in, politics. By comparing and contrasting the pretexts and causes of the war, words and deeds, Thucydides walks us through the issues of politics and the questions we should be asking, regardless of which side we're on. (Go Spartans!) He calls his work "a possession for all time" which suggests that it is more than a mere historical report of an ancient war. To begin, we'll set aside the labels of "political realist" and "historian," and follow Thucydides's lead for an education in war, peace, and political life.
Preferred edition: Thucydides: The War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought), Jermy Mynott, trans., ed. Cambridge University Press 2013 ISBN 0521612586 / 978-0521612586
Beginning Ancient Greek (new)
Sundays, January-June 8:00-10:00 pm ET
Seminar Leader: Reynaldo Miranda
This language seminar is intended for beginners who have no or almost no background in classical Greek. By the end of the course, you will be able to read passages from the New Testament and from Classical Greek literature, including extracts from Socrates' trial speech, Sophocles' Antigone, and the tragic expedition to Sicily described by Thucydides – and more. This seminar promises to be fun, while giving participants a sense of accomplishment and completion.
The textbook is Jones, Peter, Learn Ancient Greek in the Daily Telegraph QED series, London: First pub. by Gerald Duckworth & Co., Ltd., kept in print by Bristol Classical Press, and currently by Bloomsbury Academic, 1998, paperback, 216 pp, ISBN 978071562758. Publisher site: Learn Ancient Greek: : Peter Jones: Bristol Classical Press - Bloomsbury. Author: Peter Vaughan Jones, MBE, DPhil Cantabrian (on Homer), 1942-, retired senior lecturer in Classics in the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, co-founded the charitable NGO Friends of Classics, former spokesman for the UK's national Co-ordinating Committee for Classics, and collaborator in Cambridge University Press' Reading Greek and Reading Latin. Supplementary materials will be provided.
As late as 1997 London’s Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph offered a serial column entitled Q. E. D. to help readers learn Greek and Latin. The columnist, Peter Jones, compiled them into a book in 1997 and offered a Greek primer the following year in response to reader demand. Both books are UK bestsellers. Each of the 22 chapters includes sections on Greek history and culture, and on the influence of the ancient language on our own, enabling you to see why the ancient Greeks have played such a central part in the culture, language, and history of western civilization. The prose is engaging and humorous, as one might expect. As Jones makes clear in his preface and introduction, this is a gentle start to just dip one's toes, but prepares one for a more rigorous, second beginning.
Led by Reynaldo Miranda-Zuniga, alumnus of St. John's College, Annapolis, and lover of language.