Peter Berkowitz & John Gray – Independence and the State: America at 250
2024-02-08 17:00 - 19:00 (Europe/London) | To Be Confirmed, Oxford, United Kingdom
Peter Berkowitz gives a lecture on the ideas of the Declaration of Independence at (almost) 250, followed by a conversation with John Gray.

Adrian Goldsworthy - Superpower Conflict between Ancient Rome and Persia (The Eagle and The Lion)
2023-11-16 17:00 - 19:00
A Book Launch and Conversation with Simon Elliott. Held in the Old Library of All Souls College, Oxford on 16th November 2023.

Marie Kawthar Daouda – Romance and Reality in French Culture
2023-11-13 17:00 - 19:00
From the French Revolution to the aftermath of the Second World War, French literature appears as a field of tension between Romance and Reality. Marie Kawthar Daouda discusses the continuity and rifts between the main aesthetic currents of French contemporary literature, their connection with French and European politics, and how authors from Chateaubriand to Camus have endeavoured to distinguish permanent truth behind ever-changing circumstances.

How did the Romantic movement echo the philosophical issues raised by the French Revolution? Can literature describe the world as it is? How do symbols and language work together in poetry? Does the evil of the war make beauty irrelevant? Marie Kawthar Daouda discusses these questions by engaging with relevant passages of the novels, poems, and essays that shaped French literature from 1789 to the 1940s.
Filmed in the Old Library at St Edmund Hall and in the Ursell Room at Pusey House in November 2023, this series of lectures will be released online in May.
Lecturer in French Literature, University of Oxford

John Gray – What is Living and What is Dead in Liberalism?
2023-11-08 17:00 - 19:00
John Gray is a world-renowned philosopher, political theorist and intellectual historian. He has an asteroid named after him and until 2008 he was School Professor of European Thought at the LSE. He now writes principally for the New Statesman and has authored over twenty books including the bestselling Seven Types of Atheism, Straw Dogs, Black Mass, The Soul of the Marionette, The Silence of Animals and Feline Philosophy. His latest book, published by Penguin in September 2023, is The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism.
After his lecture, John Gray was joined on stage for a discussion by the world-leading ethicist Prof Nigel Biggar CBE.

Reidar Due – Freedom of Philosophy and the Philosophy of Freedom
2023-08-14 17:00 - 19:00
In this inaugural Pharos Tuesday Seminar, philosopher Reidar Due explores the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. Icons of the so-called ‘culture war’, this series of discourses takes the two thinkers out of the fire of contemporary debate, seeking to understand their place in a longer tradition of French philosophy as a precursor to a better understanding of their contemporary relevance.
Professor of Film Aesthetics, University of Oxford

Richard Dawkins - Science, the Poetry of Reality, Jewel in Humanity's Crown
2023-06-12 17:00 - 19:00
Richard Dawkins FRS FRSL is a world-renowned evolutionary biologist, author and atheist. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was Professor for Public Understanding of Science in the University of Oxford from 1995 to 2008. He has written many acclaimed books including The Selfish Gene (OUP, 1976), The God Delusion (Bantam, 2006), and Flights of Fancy (Head of Zeus, 2021).
After his lecture, Richard Dawkins was joined on stage by Dame Angela McLean, Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Government, for a discussion moderated by legendary journalist John Simpson.

Jonathan Sumption – The New Roundheads: Politics and the Misuse of History
2023-02-27 17:00 - 19:00
Jonathan Sumption is a renowned historian and former Justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom. Four instalments of his critically acclaimed history of the Hundred Years’ War have been published between 1990 and 2015, all by Faber & Faber. The fifth and final volume, Triumph and Illusion, was published in late 2023.
After his lecture, Lord Sumption was interviewed on stage by the eminent journalist and broadcaster John Simpson.
