Please join us on Friday, October 1 at the Center for Ethics for a special symposium featuring Professor Michael Rosen's manuscript, "Dignity," and responses from guest speakers. A preliminary schedule and details can be found below. If you have any questions, please contact Sabeel Rahman at rahman@fas.harvard.edu.

Friday, October 1, 2010
Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics
124 Mount Auburn Street
Fifth floor
Cambridge, MA

(Please note, the Center for Ethics has moved to a new location at 124 Mount Auburn...

On May 8, 9, and 10, 2008, researchers and scholars from disciplines such as law, philosophy, political science, and anthropology came together to explore topics in the area of human rights studies. This cosponsored event, organized by Mathias Risse, featured twelve talks over these three days, each with a commentator. To see Martin O'Neill's summary of the conference sessions, the list of cosponsors, and the photo gallery, please see the links below.

Conference Summary /...

Speaker: A. John Simmons, Commonwealth Professor of Philosophy; Professor of Law, University of Virginia

10:15-12:30pm POLITICS BETWEEN UTOPIA AND REALITY
MICHAEL WALZER - Should We Reclaim Political Utopianism
MALACHI HACOHEN - Cosmopolitanism, the European Nation State and Jewish Life: Berlin and Popper

2:15-4:30pm LITERATURE AND THE HISTORY OF IDEAS
SVETLANA BOYM - Dialogues on Liberty Beyond the Cold War: Isaiah Berlin and Anna Akhmatova
ALAN RYAN - The History of Ideas as Psychodrama

9:...

A symposium in honor of the career and contributions of Dennis F. Thompson

Co-sponsored by the Department of Government, the FAS Dean's Office at Harvard University, and the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics

Speaker: Barbara Herman, Griffin Professor of Philosophy; Professor of Law, University of California Los Angeles

Speaker: Melissa Lane, Professor of Politics, Princeton University

Abstract: This paper explores the problem of the relation of democratic judgment to expert knowledge, focusing in particular on the case of scientific knowledge and the implications of its forms of uncertainty. It begins by broadly characterizing the problem of knowledge in political theory and in democratic theory in particular, drawing on the history of political...

Speaker: Josiah Ober, Professor of Classics and Political Science, Stanford University

Josiah Ober, Constantine Mitsotakis Professor of Classics and Political Science at Stanford University, spoke on the central themes of his forthcoming book, Democracy and Knowledge(Princeton, 2008). He provided an overview of the empirical evidence that Athens outperformed its rivals among the contemporary Greek city-states, and identified a correlation...

Speaker: Rae Langton, Professor of Moral Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In her talk entitled “Speaker’s Freedom and Maker’s Knowledge,” Rae Langton examined the prospects for developing a knowledge-based argument for the protection of pornographic speech. Ultimately, she seemed to think the prospects are not very good but that thinking about why such an argument would fail allows us to see an important connection between the type of knowledge generated by pornographic speech and its...

Speaker: Seana Shiffrin, Professor of Philosophy, University of California Los Angeles

Summary by Amalia Amaya Navarro, Edmond J. Safra Graduate Fellow in Ethics


How is it possible just through a statement to will into existence an obligation? The main problem about promising is a metaphysical puzzle. The idea that an agent can intentionally form an obligation only through the mere expression of her will alone has been thought to be puzzling. Conventionalism purports to offer a solution to...

Speaker: Joseph H. Carens, Professor of Political Science , University of Toronto

Free and open to the public: no ticket required.

Speaker: Robert Goodin, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Australian National University

On April 13, 2009, Robert Goodin, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Australian National University, delivered a lecture entitled "Global Democracy: In the Beginning."

Global democracy is impossibly far off, a "hopelessly distant prospect" most people claim. Not so, Robert Goodin argues. While representative government as we know it, wherein leaders are chosen in freely contested...

Speaker: Yael (Yuli) Tamir, Professor of Philosophy, University of Tel Aviv

Speaker: Barbara Fried, William W. and Gertrude H. Saunders Professor of Law, Stanford University

In exploring the question of her talk's title, Barbara Fried focused specifically on whether there is a coherent alternative to cost-benefit analysis for risk regulation. Fried discussed the possibilities and shortcomings of non-welfarist (and in particular deontological) approaches to the problem of harm to others. She concluded that the principal approaches to date could not yield a coherent alternative...

Speaker: Carlos S. Nino, Professor of Law, University of Buenos Aires and Yale Law School; Former Human Rights Advisor to President Alfonsin; Coordinator, Council for the Consolation of the Democracy, Argentina