Bonjour Paresse: Literary Waste and Recycling in Book 4 of Gower’s Confessio Amantis

This lecture discusses the durable hostility to idleness, particularly idle reading. It presents a claim that late medieval, pre-Reformation textual practice is not driven by a need to define and expel cultural waste; rather, idle reading is an important part of a cultural economy. The lecture concludes that a literary education can easily feed the psyche's capacity for delusive satisfaction.

Judicial Independence: Who Cares?

This lecture discusses judicial independence. It notes that the increase in concern over judicial independence was due to recent developments in Scotland, England and Wales. The constitutional changes also led to new relationships between ministers and judges, which in turn has led to governmental declarations to respect the rule of law and judicial independence. The lecture also stresses the importance of considering and re-asserting the principles that justify judicial independence, as well as the underlying concept of separation of powers.

The Origins of Fair Play

This lecture gives a brief overview of an evolutionary theory of fairness. Most of the ideas discussed in the lecture can be found in the book Natural Justice. The lecture begins by determining how and why the norms of fairness evolved, and examines the device of the original position. This device is the stylised form of the common structure underlying all fairness norms. The lecture then looks at the possibility of having justice as fairness, pure foraging societies, and the basics of game theory. Coordination games, reciprocity, the folk theorem, selecting equilibria, and the deep structure of fairness are some of the concepts discussed in detail in this lecture.

The Devil in the Holy Water: Political Libel in Eighteenth-Century France

This lecture discusses an investigation of the vast but unstudied literature of libel that appeared in the French book market during the eighteenth century. It concentrates on four interconnected libelles from 1771 to 1793, and combines an analysis of the genre with an account of a colony of French refugees in London. These refugees were noted to have made slanderous attacks on public figures in Versailles, and even grafted a blackmail operation on to their literary speculations. The lecture shows how an ideological current was able to erode authority under the Ancien Régime and became absorbed in a new political culture.

Recovering Maya Civilisation

This lecture discusses three successive themes in relation to recovering Maya civilisation. The first is the origins of a settled society, and the second is the emergence of a complex literate civilisation in the latter part of the first millennium BC in the Maya lowlands. The third theme is the wider understanding of that culture's apogee in tenth century AD. The lecture sheds new light on the understanding of the Mayan culture. It looks at some factors of Mayan culture and everyday life, such as their hieroglyphic writing, rituals and structures. The information was based on the various archaeological digs and excavations conducted in the area where the Mayan civilisation was believed to exist.

Kinds of People: Moving Targets

This lecture gives a proposed framework within which to think about making up people as well as the looping effect. It elaborates on the kinds of people that will not be discussed, such as those belonging to different classifications called ‘ethnic’. The focus of this lecture is in the ways the social, medical and biological sciences create new classifications and new knowledge. The engines of discovery and autism are two of the topics covered by the lecture.

‘Now Shall I Make My Soul’: Approaching Death in Yeats’s Life and Work

This lecture traces W. B. Yeats' preoccupation with the changing forms of death throughout his life, from his fin-de-siécle love-poetry to his poems of death. These poems of death were linked to his interest in Celtic legend, Irish intellectual influences and conjunctions, and magical ritual and psychic research. The lecture considers Yeats' approach to death in his later work, concluding with his creation of a structured canon of work in the light of his own death and the work that he wrote on his deathbed.

Condorcet and the Meaning of Enlightenment

This lecture discusses the meaning of Enlightenment through Condorcet's eyes. It begins with the notion of lumières, which is a word best translated as ‘enlightenment’, but this time written in miniscule. This preserves the associations of wisdom and deeper insight that still cling to the word in English, such as in the phrase ‘spiritual enlightenment’. Next, the lecture explores the multiple senses of calculation. It also looks at how Condorcet sought to fight two variants of fear, one with lumières and the other with calculation. It finally concludes with some reflections on the Enlightenment, spiritual enlightenment, and the probability 0.999993.

Coercion and Consent in Nazi Germany

This lecture discusses three central propositions to a new consensus that the Third Reich was a ‘dictatorship by consent’. The first proposition states that the Nazis did not seize power; rather, they won it legally and by consent. The second is that the Nazi repression, which was exercised through the Gestapo and the concentration camps, was on a small scale and did not actually affect most of the population. The third proposition discussed in this lecture is that the overwhelming popularity of the regime was demonstrated by the staggeringly successful results it achieved in national elections and plebiscites.