Lectures

Baylor's Political Science Department brings renowned lecturers to campus every year to meet with students and to deliver lectures on topics of interest to faculty and students alike. We sponsor the Miller Lecture Series, Constitution Day, and the Visiting Scholars Program. In addition, recent lecturers include:

Fuller Speaks on Hobbes, Oakeshott, and Voegelin

Faculty and students listen as Dr. Fuller (far right) discusses Hobbes.

Professor Timothy Fuller, of Colorado College, met with graduate students and faculty on November 12, 2009 to discuss Thomas Hobbes, and the different ways his work was interpreted by twentieth century political theorists Michael Oakeshott and Eric Voegelin. Participants read Oakeshott's famous "Introduction to Leviathan" and the sections on Hobbes in Voegelin's New Science of Politics. Professor Fuller visited campus to participate in the 2009 conference of the Michael Oakeshott Association, which was hosted at Baylor. He presented the opening address to the conference, "Victims of Thought: Restoring the Tradition of Political Philosophy in Arendt, Oakeshott, Strauss and Voegelin."

Professor Fuller is the editor of many of Oakeshott's most important works, including The Voice of Liberal Learning: Michael Oakeshott on Education (Yale 1990); Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life (Yale 1993); The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Skepticism (Yale 1995); and Rationalism in Politics (Liberty Fund). He has also edited a volume, Leading and Leadership (Notre Dame 2000) that includes reflections on leadership from classical thinkers such as Plato and Plutarch to more recent thinkers such as Max Weber, Woodrow Wilson, and Martin Luther King, Jr. He has also published widely in the history of political thought, including articles on Plato, Hobbes, Shakespeare, and Leo Strauss. 

Michael Zuckert Speaks on Dred Scott Decision

Michael P. Zuckert, Nancy Reeves Dreux Professor at the University of Notre Dame, spoke to faculty and students in May 2008 on the Dred Scott decision and its significance in our constitutional and political history. Professor Zuckert has published numerous books in American political thought and constitutional history.

Zuckert's works include Natural Rights and the New Republicanism (Princeton 1994); The Natural Rights Republic (Notre Dame 1996), which was named an oustanding book for 1997 by Choice magazine; Launching Liberalism: On Lockean Political Philosophy (Kansas 2002); and The Truth about Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy (with Catherine H. Zuckert) (Chicago 2006). He has written on a range of topics, including George Orwell, Plato's Apology, and Shakespeare, and contemporary liberal theory. He is currently completing a book called Completing the Constitution: The Post-Civil War Amendments, and has been commissioned to write the volume on John Rawls for a new series on Twentieth Century Political Philosophy. He co-authored and co-produced the public radio series Mr. Adams and Mr. Jefferson: A Nine Part Drama for the Radio and was senior scholar for Liberty, a six hour public television series on the American Revolution.

Catherine Zuckert Presents Her Work on Plato

Catherine H. Zuckert, Nancy Reeves Dreux Professor at the University of Notre Dame, discussed her work on Plato's philosophic interlocutors in a seminar with faculty and graduate students in May 2008. Zuckert explained the coherence of dialogues on the basis of the dramatic order in which Plato indicates they took place. Exploring the relation between Socrates and the other philosophic interlocutors in Plato's dialogues (the Athenian Stranger, Parmenides, Timaeus, and the Eleatic Stranger), Zuckert shows both the limitations that Plato attributed to Socrates as well as the centrality of Socrates to Plato's understanding of philosophy. Zuckert's monumental work on the Platonic corpus was published by University of Chicago Press in 2009, Plato's Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues.

Professor Zuckert's writings also include Postmodern Platos: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Strauss, Derrida (Chicago 1996); Natural Right and the American Imagination: Political Philosophy in Novel Form (Rowman and Littlefield), which was named the "most outstanding book published in philosophy and religion" in 1990 by the Association of American Publishers; Understanding the Political Spirit: Socrates to Nietzsche (Yale), which won a Choice award for the best book in political theory in 1988; as well as many journal articles on the history of political thought and politics and literature.

Salkever Speaks on Aristotle's Philosophical Pedagogy

Stehpehn G. Salkever, Mary Katharine Woodworth Professor at Bryn Mawr College in the Department of Political Science at Bryn Mawr College, spoke to graduate students and faculty on November 7, 2008, about "Teaching the Questions: Aristotle's Philosophical Pedagogy in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics." Professor Salkever visited Baylor as part of the Baylor Colloquium on Ancient and Modern Political Inquiry, sponsored by the Honors College, the Department of Classics, and the Department of Political Science. He spoke to the Colloquium on "Constructing Philosophical Conversations: We Moderns, the Ancients, and the Problem of Democracy."

Professor Salkever is the author of Finding the Mean: Theory and Practice in Aristotelian Political Philosophy (Princeton 1994) and editor of the Cambridge Companion to Greek Political Thought (2009). He is also the author of numerous articles, chapters, and reviews on ancient, modern, and contemporary political philosophy.

Howland Speaks at Baylor on "Primo Levi Nostalgia" and "Plato and the Talmud"