Also, in my case, it is two speeches - lectures, really - and it's a tie. The first was a talk by novelist Morris L. West about the Biblical tale of Jacob wrestling with the angel as a metaphor for the lifelong struggle that is faith. The other was Father Edward Gannon's lecture on the difference between thinking in categories and thinking existentially, how interacting with an individual in terms of a category - regarding the man behind the wheel as merely a bus driver - reduces that individual to a function and precludes encounter with another person, and how merely remembering to say please and thank you can keep that from happening. To this day, I think categorism is the greatest impediment to arriving at truth by means of reason.
1) Isaac Asimov, who lectured at International House in NYC when I lived there (1983-84). He talked about how he started to write science fiction -- it was a brilliant and brilliantly funny lecture.
ReplyDelete2)Desmond Tutu, commencement speaker when I graduated from Columbia, probably more because of who he was than what he said though.
3)Also once heard a fabulous commencement speech at the university where I was teaching given by Ed Rendell, our Pa. governor, back when he was merely mayor of Philly. That guy is a truly rousing speaker.
Worst speech I ever heard: An incomprehensible lecture by Jacques Derrida on deconstruction and semiotics.
Whew, Susan, surprised you even got as far as gleaning the subject of Derrida's speech. Way. I prolly woulda remembered it as something about deconstriction and semidiotics :).
ReplyDeleteBest speech I've ever heard? Seamus Heaney on the enduring value of poetry (around the same time Foucault's "Cogito and the History of Madness" appeared).