The

Sophia

Lectures

The Sophia Lectures are a series of annual lectures delivered at Ralston College, which feature distinguished academics, prominent artists, and public intellectuals. This lecture series promotes engagement with the fundamental questions of human life, and has explored such topics as the essence of culture and creativity, the nature of reality, and the limits of rational knowledge.

Established in the College’s first academic year, these lectures offer the riches of its curricular life with the wider world, fostering the same kind of intense and enriching conversations and debates that are central features of student experience at Ralston. By sharing the spirit of its seminars and lectures with larger audiences—both in Savannah and beyond—the Sophia Lectures seek to inspire deep thinking and productive exchanges about topics that truly matter.

Taking their name from the Ancient Greek word for wisdom (σοφία), the Sophia Lectures are informed by the ultimate values of Ralston College: truth, freedom, beauty, and fellowship. They are an expression of our commitment to fostering a free and flourishing culture, and our belief that the transformative power of the humanities can achieve this end.

The 2025 Sophia Lectures (April 9th & 10th) will draw on evolutionary biology to explore the seemingly miraculous character of nature. 
 
Biology is the study of organic nature: our cells and our selves, our emotions and our ecosystems. In seeking to understand these fundamental realities, we can discover how abstractions, too — thought and creativity, love and justice — are the products of evolution.
 
Unlike the laws of physics and mathematics, which exist independently of life, everything organic is a product of evolution. Although it is not sentient, evolution creates sentience. Evolution produces forward thinking and imaginative creatures – the very things that it itself cannot be. Do we create the idea of love? We do not, as other mammals also experience love, in its earliest form — a mother’s love for her child. From there, love blossoms, expands, into romantic love, greater familial love, love between friends, and then into yet further abstractions — love of country, for instance. Of all the things that human cherish—love and justice, creativity and loyalty—are any unique to us?

Loyalty emerges from ancient realities far older than humans: all of Earth’s social, long-lived organisms with long childhoods and generational overlap show loyalty to tribe; they just don’t have language for it. And so, if loyalty isn’t a human creation, is it a creation at all? It may instead be seen as a product of evolution — something that we can discover, and create in various forms, but that pre-dates us, and so is not solely ours. 

Using an evolutionary lens to interpret and make sense of our natural world, we can begin to understand who we are. Some things appear to be miraculous, but science has uncovered beautiful and true explanations for what is observed. Other things appear to be miraculous, and we have intimations of where an explanation might lie, but we do not yet know. Indeed, we may never know: some things may prove to be unknowable. In looking to science to understand our nature, we can deepen our sense of awe at all that we are.

In the Sophia Lectures for 2023 Professor Hedley explores the underlying philosophical dimension of play in all of its forms. To explore the question in its full breadth, the series engages with a wide array of sources—from Greek philosophy to Patristic and medieval theology, and from Indian metaphysics to contemporary ludic studies.

Is there a principle that unites the play of animals, the simple games of children, the intricacies of fine art, and the paraphernalia of professional athletics? And what connection obtains between the free play of the imagination and the divine act of creation?

Professor Hedley takes up these questions, among many others, in conversation with interlocutors such as Friedrich Schiller, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Johan Huizinga, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.