The Morningside Institute

Mar 06 2025 54 ep. 141 mins 2

The Morningside Institute Podcast artwork

The Morningside Institute is an independent scholarly endeavor dedicated to examining human life through the liberal arts. Morningside helps scholars and students contribute to academic disciplines and understand them in light of the rich traditions that lie at their origin. The Institute also helps students integrate the beauty of culture in New York City with their search for truth in the intellectual life.

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Believe, with Ross Douthat

In his new book Believe, NY Times correspondent Ross Douthat offers a blueprint for thinking one's way from doubt to belief. Douthat argues that religious belief makes sense of the order of the cosmos and our place within it, illuminates the mystery of consciousness, and explains the persistent reality of encounters with the supernatural. On Monday, March 3, at 6:30 PM, Columbia’

The Metamorphoses in the Twenty-First Century

The Metamorphoses is a work with an insistent modern resonance and relevance. In terms of Roman political commentary, socio-cultural implication, historical awareness, and psychological investigation, Ovid constructs a poem about change that is itself fundamentally slippery in its meanings, hard to deconstruct, and full of human eccentricity. The poem pulses with life, both ancient

Is Virtue Sufficient for Happiness?

According to ancient philosophers, all human beings want to be happy. But how can we achieve this? In Books 3 and 4 of his dialogue “On the Greatest Good and Evil” (De finibus bonorum et malorum), Cicero and his interlocutor, the Stoic Cato, discuss what guarantees a person’s supreme happiness. Is it enough to be a morally good person (as the Stoics maintain)

Secular Hope

Tradition describes courage, moderation, justice, and prudence as the cardinal virtues (a list going back to Plato) and faith, hope, and charity as the theological virtues (a list going back to Saint Paul). Can we conceive of hope as a virtue, as a good quality for people to have, without a theological framework — without any notion of salvation? On Monday, February 10, 2024, the

Natality and the Counter-Tradition of Birth

Birth is one of the most fraught and polarized issues of our time, at the center of debates on abortion, gender, work, and medicine. But birth is not only an issue; it is a fundamental part of the human condition, and, alongside death, the most consequential event in human life. Yet it remains dramatically unexplored. Although we have long intellectual traditions of wrest

Language Rights and Wrongs: Originalism, Textualism, Traditionalism, or Activism?

On October 9, 2023 the Morningside Institute and the Galileo Center at Columbia Law School hosted Joshua Katz (AEI) for the last lecture in our series Language Rights and Wrongs. This series explores the relationship between world and word, honing in on ancient texts, namely Homer, Plato, and the Bible.This evening's conversation was not about the Constitution of the United States

Language Rights and Wrongs: Is Language Truthful?

Does language contain truth in itself? And whether or not it does, at what level are the words we use natural, and at what level are they a matter of convention? Plato’s Cratylus provides the earliest in-depth discussion of these matters, and it turns out that we can learn something about our own linguistic problems today by considering this neglected dialogue.On October 3,

Language Rights and Wrongs: In the Beginning Was the Word?

This fall, the Morningside Institute and the Galileo Center at the Columbia Law School hosted Joshua Katz (AEI) for a three-part lecture series on the relationship between word and world. The series focused on ancient texts—namely, Homer, Plato, and the Bible—and what these reveal about the nature (or artificiality) of language. On September 26, 2023, Dr. Katz introduced the se

Beginner's Mind with James Valentini

In his famous Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Shunryu Suzuki writes, “In the Beginner’s Mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.” These words have served as a guide for James Valentini during his time as a professor of Chemistry and then much-beloved dean of Columbia College. As he has developed it, the concept of beginner’s mind encourages us t

Aquinas and Structural Racism

Thomas Aquinas's ethical system is framed in terms of evaluating an individual's intentional actions, which may be good or bad depending on their conformity with the natural law. Can such a framework make sense of the notion that social structures and practices can also be just or unjust, as in the contemporary notion of structural racism? On Thursday, February 23, 2023, the