Friday Speaker Series

Spring 2025

An ongoing series of discussions with Yale faculty and visiting speakers on timely and timeless questions.

“Hear both Sides”: The Anti-Federalists and the Creation of America’s Public Square

Derek Webb | 12-1.30pm, January 31

When the Constitution was first proposed for ratification, Federalists demanded critics submit to the judgment of their “betters”, threatened to “tar and feather” critics of the Constitution, and often attempted to prevent them from publishing their critiques in newspapers or convention journals. In response, the Anti-Federalists developed America’s first theory of a public square in which ordinary citizens were considered to have both a right and a duty to consider the Constitution for themselves. How (and why) did the early critics of the Constitution do this? How did the Federalists respond? And what can we learn today from their argument that a public sphere of reason and argument in which “both sides” were heard was demanded by the revolutionary ideals of liberty and equality and vital to the legitimacy of the new Constitution?

Derek Webb is Assistant Professor in the Columbus School of Law, Catholic University of America.

Aquinas on Moral Mistakes

Nicholas Ogle | 12-1.30pm, February 7

Judgments of moral culpability play a crucial role in our lives, providing a rational basis for practices of accountability that are essential to any just society. Yet when they exceed their proper limits, such judgments can breed resentment and mistrust, thereby undermining the social bonds they are meant to preserve. How can we judge others fairly in a morally pluralistic world? When is someone blameworthy for acting on a sincerely held, yet mistaken, moral belief?

Nicholas Ogle is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society at the University of Pennsylvania.

Does Commerce Make Us Trivial? Adam Smith on Magnanimity 

Justin Hawkins | 12-1.30pm, February 14

Adam Smith is commonly thought to be the intellectual father of a system of economic life that prioritizes self-interest over virtue, competition over cooperation, and conformity over nobility. But attention to his version of magnanimity in the Theory of Moral Sentiments calls each of these assumptions into question. It turns out that Smith, in his later years, came to be wary of the commercial society he helped bring into existence. 

Justin Hawkins is a postdoctoral research fellow in bioethics at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

Marx as an Ethical Thinker

Michael Lazarus | 12-1.30pm, February 21

What does Karl Marx, who famously dismissed “bourgeois morality,” have to offer ethical thought? Against many common views, Marx is best understood in a tradition of ethics originating in Aristotle and Hegel that envisions the human good in the life-well lived of the political community. Drawing out the ethics of Marx’s critique of “value” pays rich dividends to grasping the role of human action in his thinking.

Michael Lazarus is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University and a visiting postdoctoral fellow in Comparative Literature at Yale University.

Auerbach’s Augustinianism: Figural Reading and Political Pessimism

J. Columcille Dever | 12-1.30pm, February 28

Erich Auerbach is perhaps best known as the founding father of the modern study of comparative literature, a field still in its infancy when he published his groundbreaking Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature in 1946. Trained as a classical philologist, Auerbach’s writings range across disciplinary boundaries and address enduring questions of human concern: Does history have meaning? Are the seeds of the “de-Christianization” of Europe already present in the doctrine of the Incarnation? What should our politics look like if the triumph of evil is nigh inevitable? Drawing upon thinkers from Augustine of Hippo to Dante and Blaise Pascal, Auerbach attempted to answer these questions with courage and insight in the midst of the traumatic unfolding of the twentieth century.

J. Columcille Dever is Assistant Professor of Theology, Providence College.

Augustine on Slavery, Human and Divine

Toni Alimi | 12-1.30pm, April 4

Why did Augustine judge chattel slavery to be permissible? What does chattel slavery have to do with slavery to God? And is slavery merely a peripheral theme in Augustine’s thought? The answers to these three questions turn out to be deeply interconnected, and shed light on Augustine’s deepest theological and ethical commitments.

Toni Alimi is Assistant Professor of Classics, Cornell University.