Session 2

In-person and live streamed: In recent decades, the value of a humanist education has been criticized from all sides with doubts cast upon its relevance in an increasingly precarious world. The presenter defends a philosophical education in the humanities not in terms of canons, methods, or disciplines to be mastered, nor even knowledges and skills to be acquired and transferred.

In-person and live streamed: In recent decades, the value of a humanist education has been criticized from all sides with doubts cast upon its relevance in an increasingly precarious world. The presenter defends a philosophical education in the humanities not in terms of canons, methods, or disciplines to be mastered, nor even knowledges and skills to be acquired and transferred.

We often talk about climate change in the past through overly scientific lenses: for example, proxies of cooling or warming weather, fluctuations in species, or records of resource stress. These science-heavy conversations also lean toward identifying or explaining societal catastrophes through the direct influence of climate change on ancient societies. How can we better understand the complex ways that cultures and states navigate climatic variability at multiple scales?

In 1902–1904, when phonography was in its infancy, the voice of the last castrato Alessandro Moreschi was recorded to preserve a vanishing performance tradition. How might an archaeology that goes beyond those recordings uncover more sonic remains than meet the ear? How might it give purchase on Moreschi’s idiosyncratic and bewildering vocal habits as acoustic shards of past practices that surface in the form of what Derrida called a trace—above all laryngeal catches in the throat manifested as unpitched phonations, aspirates, large upward scoops, and even sobs?

In recent years, buildings and streets have been re-named, statues destroyed or moved on the grounds that the recipients of these honors behaved immorally. This is the public or expressive counterpart of a more inward question: how should we think and feel about people in the light of their vices and virtues? Is it possible to (justly) admire someone (for her achievements) if she also did terrible things? What is it to admire someone for an achievement? Are we admiring the person or the action?

In the midst of a worldwide pandemic, how does an artist catch the day and conceive of keeping to a schedule and building a scaffolding for writing? This panel is a conversation between three authors on broken scaffolding, and a report on and exploration of diverse methods of reading, writing, and teaching outside of a schedule while negotiating global imbalance. How does a pandemic reform our notions of time? The pages we read and write? And the classes we teach?

Classical Athens and Rome sustained two of the longest-lived democracies in history. By their reckoning, each lasted at least 500 years. Yet each also ended, and the stories of their endings has much to say to another age when democratic institutions, and democratic cultures, feel imperiled. This session will describe the circumstances that led to the ends of democracy in Athens and Rome. Particular attention will be given to the role of legislatures and law, which they imagined as a bulwark of democratic rule but which appear also to have been instrumental in its failure.