FALL 2020 ACADEMIC SEMINARS
Revolution and Anti-Revolution: “Cultural Marxism” and its Dissidents
Led by R.J. Snell
Tuesday Evenings at 6:30 pm, Zoom
September 15th, 29th
October 20th
November 10th
For more information, contact: rsnell@winst.org
A certain style of conservative likes to warn about “Cultural Marxism,” which is supposedly less about reforming capitalism and more about capturing the sources of cultural power, like universities. Depending on who you ask, the idea of Cultural Marxism is either a ridiculous conspiracy theory or a real political agenda attempting a revolutionary “long march” through Western institutions.
Many conservative intellectuals point to Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse as the leading theorists of Cultural Marxism. For instance, Mark Helprin in a recent issue of Claremont Review of Books writes that “as Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse smile in their graves, the West they targeted poisons itself with utopian, phantasmagorical, hate-filled propositions that hasten its decline at a speed that would have made Rome blush.” So prevalent is this idea, in some circles, that Marcuse and Gramsci are thought to be “behind” earlier movements like Occupy as well as more current groups like Antifa and Black Lives Matter.
Of course, others think this is all paranoid nonsense and that the most revolutionary minded consider Gramsci and Marcuse passe and mostly irrelevant.
As in so many internet-style battles, too few calmly sit down and study the texts themselves. Which is exactly what we do at Witherspoon—study and reflect.
In this seminar, we’ll read selective texts from Gramsci on cultural hegemony, Marcuse on repressive tolerance and liberation, Louis Althusser on ideological state apparatus, as well as anti-revolutionary thinkers who are sharply critical of these ideas, such as Augusto Del Noce and Ryszard Legutko.
According to some, these questions and ideas are behind the major social and political struggles of our time. Maybe, maybe not—but before we can judge such questions, we have to at least read the texts, and we invite you to join us in doing so.
Open to currently enrolled Princeton students and alumni. Others may petition for enrollment. Only those committed to careful and fair readings, and civil (even if sharp) disagreement should enroll.
Recent SCOTUS Decisions: Explanation and Import
Led by Sherif Girgis
Wednesday Evenings at 7:00 pm, Zoom
September 23rd
September 30th
For more information, contact: jbrooks@winst.org
This past spring featured several potentially landmark Supreme Court decisions, with significant implications for religious liberty, separation of church and state, abortion access, and the status of DACA recipients. In this seminar, Sherif Girgis will guide a study of select Supreme Court decisions of Spring 2020, and explain their import.
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Sherif earned his A.B. at Princeton University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude. After earning a master’s degree at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and a law degree from Yale, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal, Girgis returned to Princeton to do a Ph.D. in philosophy, where he is currently completing his dissertation. He is an associate at Jones Day.Prior to joining Jones Day, Sherif served as a law clerk to Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. of the Supreme Court of the United States and to Judge Thomas B. Griffith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Sherif has written on social issues in academic and popular venues, including Public Discourse, National Review, Commonweal, the New York Times, the Yale Law Journal, the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, and the Wall Street Journal, and has spoken at more than 80 lectures, conferences, and debates, both popular and academic.
Plato's Cratylus and the Meaning of Words
Led by Joshua Katz, Cotsen Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Classics at Princeton University
Wednesday Evenings at 6:30 pm, Zoom
October 14th
October 21st
October 28th
For more information, contact: jbrooks@winst.org
One of the least read of Plato’s dialogues but arguably one of the most important is the Cratylus, which is about language, specifically the relationship between language and reality. At issue is whether objects have names by nature (so-called naturalism) or whether designations are instead matters of local convention (so-called conventionalism). In this mini-course, we will read and discuss this frankly enigmatic work, looking, as time permits, at the ideas from the perspectives of fourth-century B.C. Athens, twenty-first-century A.D. America, and philosophies of language generally over two and a-half millennia.
We will meet three times, each for 60–80 minutes—over Zoom, alas, though I am open to adding an extra meeting in person for all who are resident in Princeton. No knowledge is expected of Plato, Ancient Greek, philosophy, or linguistics.
For the first session, please come having read, or at least skimmed, C.D.C. Reeve’s introduction to and translation of the Cratylus (Hackett 1998). I will introduce some general linguistic concepts, and we will concentrate on the very start of the dialogue, in which naturalism and conventionalism are introduced respectively by Socrates’ two interlocutors, Cratylus and Hermogenes (pp. 1–5 in Reeve’s translation). In the second session we will discuss the dialogue as a whole, so you should be sure to have read it and Reeve’s introduction properly by then. Finally, in the third session we will, I hope, look beyond the ancient world and consider what we ourselves believe about why words sound and mean as they do.
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Joshua T. Katz is Cotsen Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Classics at Princeton University. He is also a member of the Programs in Linguistics, Teacher Preparation, and Translation & Intercultural Communication, as well as a faculty associate of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He has taught at Princeton since 1998 and is the recipient of numerous awards for both his scholarship and his teaching.
An Evening Discussion on Flannery O'Connor with Professor Jennifer Frey
Wednesday, November 4th at 7:00pm on Zoom
For more information, contact: mshea@winst.org
Flannery O’Connor’s beautiful but harrowing work has long placed her as one of the finest masters of the short story. Still, she continues to mystify and often frustrate readers with her disturbing explorations of human sin and folly, and her unique perception of the violent ways grace comes to visit us. Join Professor Jennifer Frey as she helps us unpack one of O’Connor’s greatest stories, “The Enduring Chill.”
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Jennifer Frey is associate professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina, and the host of thevirtueblog.com and the philosophy and literature podcast, Sacred and Profane Love. She writes about virtue, action, practical reason, and what it might mean to live well as a human person
Women’s Seminar: “Hearth-fires and Holocausts” - Cauterizing Virtues in Jane Eyre
Led by Maura Shea
Thursday Evenings at 6:30pm, Zoom
September 10th
Sep 17th
Sep 24th
Oct 1st
For more information, contact: mshea@winst.org
In George Cukor’s award-winning 1940 romantic comedy, The Philadelphia Story, Jimmy Stewart’s character famously assures Katharine Hepburn’s Tracy Lord, “You’re lit from within, Tracy. You’ve got fires banked down in you, hearth-fires and holocausts.”
The same could be said of Charlotte Brontë’s heroine Jane Eyre, whose calm exterior belies her intense, riveting and profound interior struggle to uncover the truth about herself and her relationships. The novel is a remarkable study of how human beings must navigate the challenges of the past, their own interior wounded-ness, vices and those of others in order to develop freedom in virtue. This women’s seminar will examine the interior work we must do to heal, to flourish, and to support others in pursuing true freedom. We will read Jane Eyre together and watch a movie version, and possibly The Philadelphia Story as well for some interesting connections about the complex relations between men and women.
Open to Princeton undergraduate, graduate and young professional women
Beauty and the Great Chain of Being
Led by Felix James Miller
Monday Evenings at 7:00pm, in person
Thursday Evenings at 8:00 pm, Zoom
In Person:
Sep 7th, 14th, 21st, 28th
October 12th, 19th, 26th
November 2nd, 9th, 16th
Online:
Sep 10th, 17th, 24th
Oct 1st, October 15th, Oct 22nd, Oct 29th
Nov 5th, Nov 12th, Nov 19th
For more information, contact: fmiller@winst.org
To RSVP for the first in-person session on Sept 7th, please email Felix: fmiller@winst.org
In 2020, Princeton students are unable to return to their beloved campus—a place of great beauty—and young professionals are largely prevented from experiencing the common life that helps orient them to the good. Many may spend their days hiding from the pandemic in cramped rooms devoid not just of their fellow students, but also of the beauty of art and nature. Much has been made of the effects “quarantine” is having on our psychological health, but what is it doing to our intellectual lives?
Over the course of the semester we will ask a wide array of questions including: Why does beauty matter? What does beauty have to do with your intellectual life, especially after completing your formal studies? How do you cultivate a receptivity to the beauty that surrounds you even during this time of isolation? We will look to such luminaries as Plato and Plotinus, Aquinas and Kant, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Gerard Manley Hopkins to shed some light on these crucial questions.
This weekly seminar will be held both in-person (socially-distant with dinner provided) and online. If you would like to take part, please email fmiller@winst.org, indicating whether you will be attending in-person or via zoom. It is open to recent Princeton alumni and all Princeton undergraduates.
Buying and Belonging: The Exchange of Friendship
Led by Joaquim Brooks
Tuesday Evenings at 6:30, Zoom
September 8th, 22nd
October 13th, 27th
November 17th
For more information, contact: jbrooks@winst.org
Many opponents of the free market are appalled by the atomization of society into a collection of rational consumers, often associating support for markets with approval of radical individualism.
Some supporters of the market either embrace this consequence or dismiss the social aspects of markets as irrelevant to the descriptive science of economics.
Both approaches are incomplete, or so this seminar humbly proposes. The connection between the market and how we understand interpersonal relations is not a spurious one; as Leo Strauss says in the introduction to The City and the Man, economics is the handmaiden of political philosophy.
The market is an economic term for the sum of a relationships of financial exchange. Understanding the market empirically grants insight into interactions which bind societies together. Understanding interpersonal relationships, in particular friendship, requires investigation of their nature, motivation, and manifestation, all of which the market encompasses, and which economics attempts to explain. Eschewing the economic perspective impoverishes our view of the whole, a poverty which this seminar will attempt to rectify.
In this seminar, we will study closely the market and market relations, which will grant insight into the nature of friendship, community, and the polity. Readings will include Aristotle, Cicero, Smith, Rand, Strain, and papers from economic journals.
The Pedagogy Project: On the Philosophy and Practice of Education
Led by Maura Shea
Saturday mornings, brunch, in person
For more information, contact: mshea@winst.org
The seminar is dedicating to developing a community in Princeton of graduate students, young teachers, and those interested in education who can provide support, advice, and friendship to one another. It will be called The Pedagogy Project: On the Philosophy and Practice of Education.
My own experience of eight years of classroom teaching, coaching other teachers, working as a dean of curriculum and instruction, and graduate studies has taught me that many educational institutions — high schools, middle schools, elementary schools, universities — do a lot of good, but often suffer from impoverished understandings of the human person and of the purposes of education. I would like for us to come together to uncover our own implicit and explicit philosophies of education, and to better understand the philosophies of education that have formed and continue to form us. We will look at all sorts of brilliant people who have thought about these questions — Augustine, Aquinas, Paulo Friere, John Dewey, Luigi Guissani, Jacques Maritain and more.
Open to Princeton graduate students and young professionals
