The Nellie Wallace Lectures
The biennial Nellie Wallace Lectures, which are shared between the Faculty of Classics and the Faculty of Philosophy, enable scholars from outside the University to visit Oxford in order to lecture and conduct seminars in a subject in the field of Literae Humaniores (that is, ancient philosophy, ancient history, and the Greek and Roman languages and literatures)
Nellie Wallace Lectures 2022
Professor Rachel Barney, University of Toronto
The Just Society and its Enemies: Rereading Plato's Republic in 2022
Professor Rachel Barney gave the most recent Nellie Wallace Lectures in Trinity Term 2022. The lectures took place at 3:30-5:00pm on Tuesdays in weeks 3 to 8, in the Lecture Room (except Week 8, which will be the Ryle Room), at the Radcliffe Humanities building.
Those who were unable to attend in person were welcome to join remotely via MS Teams, by clicking this link.
Abstract
Since the publication of Karl Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies in 1945, Plato's political ideas in the Republic have generally been shunned with distaste. These lectures will make a case for the permanent value of the Republic as a work of political theory. While it has detailed and highly pertinent arguments to make about the requirements for a just society, it is a book not so much about justice or politics itself as about the preconditions for both: about the features of human nature and society which make the problem of injustice universal, urgent, and -- just barely -- solvable.
Thinking with language: from grammar to free speech
In this series of lectures and seminars, Ineke Sluiter will discuss different aspects of (ancient) linguistic thought, not primarily in its technical aspects, but with attention to the roles and functions of ideas about language in different genres. She will be paying particular attention to Plato's Cratylus; to the different roles of ‘language talk' in Greek drama, particularly in Sophocles; and to etymology, its link with genealogy, and its various discursive functions. The introductory lecture will focus on an icon of modern language ideology, free speech.
In the seminar sessions, she will introduce and discuss a number of passages from Plato's Cratylus that illuminate Socratic rhetoric, and the interconnectedness of literary, rhetorical and philosophical issues.
Opening lecture: Free speech, political deliberation, and the marketplace of ideas
This lecture explores the metaphor of the “marketplace of ideas” in debates over freedom of speech and political deliberation. Starting from the legal case against controversial Dutch politician Geert Wilders, it takes a look at the archaeology of the concept in ancient Greece, fast-forwards to the United States at the beginning of the 20th century, analyses the nature of the frame of the “marketplace”, and studies three subsequent theories that take their lead from this metaphor: marketplace mechanisms as a way to elicit information from a group in order to make the deliberative process more effective (Sunstein); the analysis of the metaphor as a vehicle of social criticism (Ingber); and the consequences of more recent insights into the functioning of the actual economy for ideas about freedom of speech (Blocher). After a brief return to the Wilders case and the “rhetoric of free speech”, I will end with the briefest of suggestions for an alternative model for thinking about free speech: an evolutionary theory of rhetoric.
Seminars (both 5 p.m. in the Okinaga Room, Wadham College)
Tuesday 11 May: Seminar 1: Socratic rhetoric in Plato's Cratylus
Tuesday 18 May: Seminar 2: ‘Language talk' in Plato's Cratylus: literary form, rhetorical function, philosophical content.
Aristotle's Rhetoric and Aristotelian Philosophy'
