Our Most Recent Courses

Should we Become Martians? A Group Discussion for Contemplating Humanity’s Past, Present, and Future in Space

Humans have dreamed of the stars since before the beginning of civilization. But wonder stopped being enough. Now we fantasize about living among them. As near-Earth space increasingly becomes the domain of military and commercial interests, it’s time to stop fantasizing and get real about humanity’s place in space.
This 4-weekend seminar, in late 2023, hopes to inspire thoughtful and engaging dialogue about humanity’s future in space among a group of interested peers through readings about philosophy, culture, and contemporary politics. We aim to help participants think critically about why and how humanity should engage with space and heighten the discourse about humanity’s future in this vital sector.
Reading include Arendt, Bacon, Stapledon et al; classical programmatic speeches; DoD statements, publicity by Musk and Bezos.

(Saint/Sir) Thomas More's Utopia

Utopia raises the fundamental problems of political philosophy and it evidently imitates Plato's Republic. But Utopia is not as austere as the city of the Republic (where a promised dinner is not given while Utopia occurs after a dinner and is followed by a dinner) and there are poets in Utopia but no extensive discussion of a class of guardians. The Republic abstracts from eros and the body, while the Utopia does not. Plato's Symposium, on the other hand, abstracts from reason and praises eros. Perhaps More attempted a synthesis of the Republic and the Symposium in light of Christianity as a feat of philosophic poetry.
In late March 2023, we engaged in an intensive study of More's Utopia. Themes will include: utopia and technology; utopia and the Golden Age; utopias and eschatology; utopia and natural man; utopia and satire; utopia and genuine political science.

Shakespeare's The Tempest and Fustel's Ancient City

The Tempest is perhaps Shakespeare's deepest reflection on the relations between philosophy, poetry, politics, and "magic." Prospero, the play's hero, is an anti-Hamlet in being the master of the spirit rather than haunted by it and an emblem of the poet-philosopher himself. This course took place in August 2021.
In the summer of 2022, we engaged in an intensive study of Fustel de Coulanges' Ancient City, using the new translation by Faith Bottum, with the translator herself participating:

https://www.staugustine.net/our-books/books/ancient-city-the/

Previous Courses

Cosmology and Biology in Descartes and Aristotle

Our first course took place in January 2018 at MIT and it was a study of cosmology and biology in Descartes and Aristotle.
Among other inquiries, we attempted to draw the line between a legitimate and an illegitimate anthropomorphization of the natural world.

Science and Politics

Our second course, in August 2018, started with two famous letters from Jefferson and Lincoln that stress the rationality of the principles of free government; each asserts the corollary that these principles are knowable to all and applicable always and everywhere despite the fact that each observes that these principles are vulnerable to being obscured, forgotten or debased.
To support these assertions, we returned to Locke's original arguments for liberalism and discuss Jefferson's expanded Lockean reflection on the relation of nature to politics. We then traced the fate of classical liberalism, on the level of political practice and on the level of political philosophy.
We also considered Strauss's remark that philosopher-scientists have lost the race in bridging the lag between the diffusion of popularized science and the opportunity for responsible exercise of popular freedom.
Finally, we considered, with Plato's help, what kind of science and politics can prevent technological liberal democracy from degenerating into stagnant technocracy or activist obscurantism. Plato's Statesman will also provide us with a broad framework for considering human freedom and progress.

Invigoration of Science: Newton, Goethe and Contemporary Physics

Our third and fourth intensive courses--a pair, the first of which was directed to political philosophers and the second to scientists--took place in January 2019 and focused on a central dimension of the disagreement between Goethe and Newton concerning the nature of color: the relative importance (and interpretation) of common experience compared to (as Goethe argues) theory-directed experimentation.
Goethe attempts to “save the phenomena,” restoring to the evidence of color and hence of sight its primary character.
We also considered the implications for AI and virtual reality (also the subject of several webinars we have presented).

Alliances and tensions between science and Society

Engineering and science have brought spectacular benefits to humanity, but they have also opened up challenges such as for species-wide genetic manipulation, climate effects, and the “existential threat” of artificial intelligence. The very freedoms that engineering and science have provided could thus transform themselves into the greatest threat to freedom. The intuitive approach might still be to address these problems using the same engineering and science that created them. After all, engineers and scientists are problem-solvers. But can such problems be reasonably addressed within the horizon of engineering and science?

This seminar, which took place at MIT in January 2020, was an exploration, with engineering and science undergraduates, of these questions in a way that broadened and deepened their understanding. Emphasis was on foundational readings, primarily from Bacon and Descartes, the founders of the modern scientific project, who have thought carefully about its ramifications. Special attention was paid to the relation between one's picture of the world and one's self-understanding.

Instauratio Magna Foundation