Spring 2020

January 30 – R. J. Snell, Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Philosophy Program, Eastern University

“The Terrible Covenant of Sloth: Acedia and the Hatred of Being”

Can acedia, often translated as sloth, be understood not simply as a personal vice but as deeply informing our cultural moment? Sloth is a lack of magnanimity, a failure to desire and will the fullness of our good, a perverted humility which rejects the good as making too many claims on our freedom. Rather than being magnanimous or great-souled, we’d rather be free. Oddly, sloth is less about laziness than we might think, and even our addiction to work reveals our sloth, our impatience with limits, our odd lust for power, and our addiction to autonomy and freedom.

February 20 – Christopher Shields, George N. Shuster Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame

“Good Bad Better Worse”

Here is a choice for you, supremely, multiply gifted student that you are. You might choose one of two careers: given your remarkable musical talents and your love of music, you might become a concertizing cellist; but given your shrewd legal mind and your passionate commitment to justice, you might become an eminent jurist. You realize that as a practical matter, you cannot do both at the level at which you might wish to do either; and you do not wish to do both sub-optimally. Your goal in life is to maximize value overall. Which do you choose? You reasonably see your choice as enhancing one of two values: you can augment the world’s beauty or you can augment the world’s justice. We will pursue two questions about this choice: First question: is justice worth more or less than beauty? Second question: does this first question make any sense?

March 3 – Lee Braver, professor of philosophy, University of South Florida

“How to Say the Same Thing: Heidegger’s Missing Language of Being”

Heidegger argues that language contains an interpretation that leads us to think inappropriately about reality and ourselves. He creates new terms and new ways of writing in order to express his views which conflict with this traditional interpretation. One of these ways is polysemy, the simultaneous use of multiple senses of a word or phrase. This feature of language is usually condemned by philosophers as a cause of confusion, but Heidegger uses it to express phenomena that elude normal ways of using language. Being has many ways to be which are simultaneously profoundly unified, a relationship he calls “the same.” Statements that hold multiple meanings within the same words can express this (and even embody it) in a way that clear-cut statements cannot. This has important ramifications, for Heidegger uses polysemy both to express obscure ideas, and as evidence and inspiration for some of these new ways to think about language, poetry, subjectivity, history, thinking, and technology. Understanding polysemy both helps us comprehend his difficult writing and illuminates some of the phenomena his writing addresses.

March 26 – Rescheduled for September – Meghan Sullivan, Rev. John A. O’Brien Collegiate Chair and professor of philosophy, University of Notre Dame

“The Love Imperative: A Defense”

We naturally think of love as discriminatory — you love your partner more than strangers, your friends more than your adversaries. Universal love, if we can even understand it, seems only like an option for saints or hippies…not a realistic ethical framework for most of us and not a normative ideal to evaluate our preferences against. I think this partiality assumption is unmotivated, and we should take more seriously the view that we ought (morally, rationally) to love everyone with dignity. In this paper, I’ll develop a secular case for the Love Imperative based on a long-standing arbitrariness problem for our preferences over people. I will defend it from some difficult objections, indicate how it stands as a viable alternative to other prominent normative accounts of love and friendship, and discuss the practical consequences of adopting the imperative.

April 2 – Rescheduled date TBA – Leslie Francis, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Alfred C. Emery Endowed Professor of Law, University of Utah
James Steintrager Lecture in Political Philosophy and Jurisprudence

“States of Health: Federalism and Bioethics”

April 16 – Rescheduled for November – Colleen Murphy, Professor in the College of Law and the Department of Philosophy and Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign