Lectures

Join Bill McKibben, Schumann Distinguished Professor at Middlebury College for a Barbara Weinstock Lectures on The Deadly Trade in Oil and Gas. This lecture will examine how the export of hydrocarbons, in particular, has become an enormous threat to efforts to rein in greenhouse gasses, and the role that America–the world’s biggest exporter of gas–plays in this ongoing catastrophe. It will also explore the role that non-tradable commodities–sunshine and wind–might play in easing this crisis.      

Join Susan Wolf, Edna J. Koury Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Emerita at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for a Howison Lecture on Character and Agency. This lecture rejects a philosophically prominent account that identifies a person’s character with the set of dispositions and traits that reflect and express the individual’s values as being both too narrow and too vague. One’s character may well include features of oneself that one does not endorse or even know about. And endorsing a value and acting to express it may be too shallow to constitute an aspect of one’s character if it is not reflective of or responsive to the exercise of an active intelligence. Changing the way we understand character to incorporate these proposals will also lead to the recognition of an important sense of agency that has less to do with actions and intentions than we are accustomed to think.  

Join us for a Howison Lecture with Sudipta Kaviraj, Professor of Indian Politics and Intellectual History, Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University. Kaviraj lecture will explore The Search for Paradise, focusing on the colonial history and social science that habituated Indians intellectuals to two questionable certitudes. The first was the radical dissimilarity between modern social theory and pre-modern philosophical traditions of other, colonized societies. A second prejudice was the radical inferiority of pre-modern traditions in thinking of solutions to modern human life. In this lecture, Kaviraj will try to contest both these prejudices by using an analysis of two great traditions of Indian aesthetic-social philosophy: the Upanishads, and Vaisnava theology and poetry.