The 2012 Founder's Lecture on Imagination and Testimony: Trusting What You're Told delivered by Professor Paul Harris, Harvard University, Emeritus Fellow and formerly Tutor in Experimental Psychology at St John's. The lecture took place on Thursday 10 May. Experimental work in psychology has traditionally focused on our capacity to observe and remember reality in a more or less veridical fashion. But recent research in developmental psychology has increasingly begun to analyze our human ability to set reality aside and to think about unobservable or fictional possibilities. Professor Harris will describe how this imaginative capacity emerges in early childhood, the key role that it plays in learning from what other people say and do, and its larger impact on our trust in historical, scientific and religious claims.
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Today, St John's is home to approximately 390 undergraduates, 200 graduate students, 100 fellows and 25 College lecturers. Nearly every subject studied at the University is represented in St John's. A vibrant international community, it fosters intellectual rigour, creativity, and independence in its students, teachers, and researchers.
St John's was founded in 1555 by Sir Thomas White, a wealthy London merchant. White was Master of the Merchant Taylors' Company, and established a number of educational foundations including the Merchant Taylors' schools.
Although primarily a producer of Anglican clergymen in the earlier periods of its history, St John's also gained a reputation for both law and medicine. Fellows and alumni have included Archbishop Laud, Jane Austen's father and brothers, the early Fabian intellectual Sidney Ball, and Abdul Rasul, one of the first Bengalis to gain the degree of Bachelor of Civil Law at Oxford.
More recently, graduates of St John's have included the novelists and poets A.E. Housman, Robert Graves, Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin and John Wain, as well as former Prime Minister, Tony Blair.