Dostoevsky’s Demons
Study Dostoevsky's great novel on the nature, logic, and social origins of revolutionary politics.
Sundays | January 9, 16, 23, 30, February 6 & 13
Online Seminar Series
Fyodor Dostoevsky uniquely deduced the political horrors of the twentieth century from the ideological viruses of the nineteenth. His final novel and masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov (1880), is unsurpassed in its portrayal of the internal conflicts and spiritual strivings of late-modern man and society.
As its titular brothers struggle between faith and doubt, the novel invites readers to reflect on ultimate matters of human freedom, suffering, and the choice between good and evil.
Image Credit: Mikhail Vasilyevich Nesterov, In Russia; The Soul of the People, 1914–1916, The Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
Jacob Howland on the liberal arts university.
This course takes place via Zoom over six sessions, held on Sundays, from 5 to 7 PM ET. Fellows will receive a $200 stipend contingent upon participation in the course and completion of a brief response paper. All course materials will be provided.
Jacob Howland is Chief Academic Officer and Director of the Intellectual Foundations Program at UATX. His research focuses on ancient Greek philosophy, history, epic, and tragedy; the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud; Kierkegaard; and literary and philosophical responses to the Holocaust and Soviet totalitarianism.
Jacob Howland is Chief Academic Officer and Director of the Intellectual Foundations Program at UATX, prior to which he was the McFarlin Professor of Philosophy (emeritus) at the University of Tulsa. His research focuses on ancient Greek philosophy, history, epic, and tragedy; the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud; Kierkegaard; and literary and philosophical responses to the Holocaust and Soviet totalitarianism.
His most recent book is Glaucon’s Fate: History, Myth, and Character in Plato’s Republic. His other books include Plato and the Talmud and Kierkegaard and Socrates: A Study in Philosophy and Faith.
He earned a B.A. from Swarthmore College and a Ph.D. from Penn State.
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Jacob Howland
Jacob Howland is McFarlin Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Tulsa. He has written about Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, Kierkegaard, the Talmud, the Holocaust, ideological tyranny, and other subjects. His most recent book is Glaucon’s Fate: History, Myth, and Character in Plato’s Republic.
Flagg Taylor
Flagg Taylor is an Associate Professor of Government at Skidmore College, and serves on the Academic Council of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. He is editor most recently of The Long Night of the Watchman: Essays by Václav Benda, 1977–1989. He is currently writing a book on Czech dissent in the 1970s and 1980s.
Eliot Cohen
Eliot Cohen is the Robert E. Osgood Professor at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) where he has taught since 1990. He served as Dean of SAIS from 2019 to 2021. In addition to public service in the Department of Defense he served as Counselor of the Department of State from 2007 to 2009.
Antón Barba-Kay
Antón Barba-Kay is Associate Professor of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America, in Washington, D.C. (He is also, at the moment, Visiting Professor of Humanities at Deep Springs College, in California.) He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, with a dissertation on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. The bulk of his research has concentrated on the subjects of recognition and aesthetics in nineteenth-century German philosophy. He is also writing a book about the political and philosophical implications of the digital revolution.
Ryan P. Hanley
Ryan Patrick Hanley is Professor of Political Science at Boston College. His research in the history of political philosophy focuses on the Enlightenment. He is the author of Our Great Purpose: Adam Smith on Living a Better Life and Love’s Enlightenment: Rethinking Charity in Modernity.
Bryan Garsten
Bryan Garsten is Professor of Political Science at Yale University. He writes on questions about political rhetoric and deliberation, the meaning of representative government, the relationship of politics and religion, and the place of emotions in political life.