The Virtue Blog

Blogging about the good life. Host of podcast, Sacred and Profane Love.

Tag: Humanities

“What Good Are the Humanities?” by Talbot Brewer, available in Raritan

The Spring 2018 issue of Raritan features our scholar Talbot Brewer’s piece “What Good Are the Humanities?”

raritanquarterly.rutgers.edu/current-issue

You can watch a version of this talk on our website: http://virtue.uchicago.edu/brewer

DeeRnf-XcAARroA

Talbot Brewer is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of Virginia. He specializes in ethics and political philosophy, with particular attention to moral psychology and Aristotelian ethics.  Brewer is a scholar with the project Virtue, Happiness, & the Meaning of Life.

Abstracts from “Virtues in the Public Sphere”

oriel-college-universidad-de-oxford.jpg

Several of our scholars gave talks at the sixth annual conference of the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, “Virtues in the Public Sphere,” held at Oriel College, Oxford UK January 4-6, 2018. We’re delighted to share their abstracts with you.

 

Talbot Brewer, Keynote Speaker: Liberal Education and the Common Good

Defenders of liberal education often stake their case on its contribution to reasoned public debate. There is considerable force to this argument. Yet if we set out to design a program of higher education optimally suited to enhance political deliberation, much of what we know and value under the heading of liberal education would be omitted as irrelevant.  This is because the telos of the liberal arts is not the full development of citizens; it is the full development of human beings. The virtues of the university are those qualities and practices that conduce to this comprehensive human good.  Does this mean that liberal education has no claim to public subsidy?  No. The sort of thought that forms and deepens human beings is a public good, one that withers without public investment. Investment in such thought is especially important today, when the social order has become deeply hostile to it.

 

 

John Haldane, Keynote Speaker: Responding to Discord: Why Public Reason is Not Enough

Difference and disagreement, contest and dispute are common features of human interactions and relationships. Insofar as they are confined to the private sphere the inability to resolve them may be a matter for regret, but there are strategies for containing, coping with or evading them. Matters are not so easy when these occur in the public sphere since they generally concern matters of broad public interest and bear on public values and policies, and they tend to ramify and lead to further divisions and sectionalisation. The evidence of this is everywhere to be seen in disputes about beginning and ending of life issues, education, sexual identity and practice, political and cultural identity, even human nature itself. Since these are all closely connected with questions of public values and policy, the scope for containment, coping or evasion is severely limited, and such strategies are themselves contested as instances of resistance to due change. Against this background, we must think more and better about the nature of the private-public contrast, and about the nature of the resources available in the making of arguments about ethical, existential, social and cultural issues. The intention and value of recently advocated norms of ‘public reason’ are themselves matters of contest and we need to think more deeply about what is and what is not reasonable. Beyond that we need in private and public life to identify relevant intellectual and practical virtues and give priority to the advocacy and inculcation of these.

 

 

David Carr, Moral Character and Public Virtue in Public, Professional, and Political Life

There is a strong case for the virtuous professional practitioner especially in relation to occupations where the professional role involves being an example to others of how to be of good character. Perhaps the most conspicuous examples of such occupations are those of teaching and religious ministry. While such exemplification cannot be guaranteed to have the desired modelling effect on others, it increases the likelihood that such modelling may occur and is the only course consistent with the overall aims of teaching and ministry.

In this context, this paper will focus on politics, arguing that there is a compelling case for virtue and character exemplification by professional politicians and that bad political examples can have a deleterious effect on the general moral tone of the societies that politicians of bad character are elected to lead or represent.

 

Nancy Snow, Hope as a Democratic Civic Virtue

I argue for a conception of hope as a civic virtue that is most valuable when democracy faces significant challenges.  In Part I, I sketch an initial conception of hope as a democratic civic virtue.  In II, the stage is set for further theorizing of this conception in the present American context.  In III, I flesh out what hope as a democratic civic virtue could look like in the U.S. today.  Part IV concludes with comments about theorizing civic hope in the context of a modified pragmatism.

 

The Conference Programme and the Oratory School Schola concert programme are accessible by clicking the links  below:

Conference Programme: http://jubileecentre.ac.uk/userfiles/jubileecentre/pdf/conference-papers/Virtues_in_the_public_sphere/Virtues_in_the_Public_Sphere_Programme.pdf

Concert Programme: http://jubileecentre.ac.uk/userfiles/jubileecentre/pdf/conference-papers/Virtues_in_the_public_sphere/TheLondonOratorySchoolProgramme.pdf

The next Jubilee Centre conference will be “Educating Character Through the Arts,” and will be held at the University of Birmingham Conference Centre, July 19th through July 21st, 2018. The call for abstracts for the conference can be found here:

http://www.jubileecentre.ac.uk/1743/conferences/educating-character-through-the-arts

 

 

 

 

SUN, Nov 12: Candace Vogler at the Chicago Humanities Fallfest/17: Belief!

Being Well

be-inspired-src

This article originally appeared in Tableau, the Division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago’s quarterly publication, as Being Well | Want a more fulfilling life? Put down your phone and look another human being in the eye by Courtney Guerra.

It’s easy to ignore the sign-offs at the end of email correspondence—they’re essentially content-neutral beyond conveying “message over.” But Candace Vogler, David B. and Clara E. Stern Professor in Philosophy, has a different style. She ends nearly all of her emails with “be well,” and, after talking with her, you get the sense that it’s intended as an actual imperative—albeit a kind and hopeful one.

 

It’s a small, subtle habit, but that’s the point. If you’re seeking to live more meaningfully, you might as well begin by imbuing meaning into the tiniest gestures of your everyday life.

 

As coleader of the Virtue, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life project, Vogler is an expert on living meaningfully. She and her collaborators study universal issues: “questions about the relations between being a good person and enjoying your life or having happiness, and having a sense of meaning or purpose,” she says. “We want to think about what it takes for those to line up.” And because the issues are universal, she’s eager to share the project’s work beyond the academy (through a blog, a podcast, a lecture series, and a culminating conference open to all).

 

The alignment of a satisfying and virtuous life, in her view, begins with self-transcendence: “You’ve got to see your life as enabling you to participate in a good that’s larger than you.” She’s not necessarily talking about volunteerism or devotion to a low-paying, labor-of-love type career. “I mean even in most business settings,” she says, “you’re usually working on a team of one sort or another—and in most sectors of the economy that I know anything about, if things aren’t going well on the team, work isn’t going well.” In essence: we’re all in this together, and we’ll all be better off if we keep that more readily in mind.

 

This point seems especially crucial as so many personal interactions are mediated through technology. “I’m really glad I’m too old to have grown up in a world where there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of images of me available this way and any time,” Vogler reflects. “Because it really does put us in a kind of Rousseau world, where we need everything out there to mirror back to us all the time.” She posits that in our post-smartphone reality, a “particular sense of anxiety, tenuousness, and weirdly overpublicized isolation” results from “not having learned many skills about how to connect with other human beings. And it is something you have to learn to do.”

 

While insecurity and awkwardness aren’t newly emergent phenomena, she thinks they’ve gotten worse. “The depth of the hunger to be connected to other people—that doesn’t change. The thought that you might be able to do that at 4 o’clock in the morning on the phone, that’s different. That’s a new thing.”

 

Vogler doesn’t dispute the utility of screen-based communications in certain contexts, but warns against letting them replace face-to-face interactions. Something as simple as saying hello to other people can “reassure your whole body that you’re in a world with fellow human beings”—fulfilling a fundamental animal need and offering a brief respite from whatever obligations you’re running to and from. If you’re chronically overscheduled, Vogler urges, that means “you’re too busy not to stop and say ‘good morning.’ If you’re that busy, it’s critically important that you do these things that don’t actually cost very much time at all.”

 

What’s her prescription for achieving a more meaningful life? “Greet people. You start with things like that. Notice that you’re in a human environment, that there are other people around, that you’re a member of a community that’s doing various things. Slowly, gently, in a friendly way, acknowledge them. That kind of little thing could be enough to make a huge difference.”

Scholarship of Self-Transcendence

DP319704
Allegorical Tapestry with Sages of the Past, The Cloisters Collection, 2014, CCO, 1.0.

This article originally appeared in Tableau, the Division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago’s quarterly publication, as Scholarship of Self-Transcendence: Candace Vogler leads a search for the meaning of life by Courtney C. W. Guerra.

 

Candace Vogler, the David B. and Clara E. Stern Professor in Philosophy, is invested in her fellow human beings, and she’s determined to help them—us—find fulfillment. To tackle such a complex issue, she proposed the collaborative research project Virtue, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life, the aims of which are every bit as ambitious as its name implies. With major support from the John Templeton Foundation, this multiyear initiative—jointly led by Jennifer A. Frey, a philosopher at the University of South Carolina—explores self-transcendence: a feeling of connection to something beyond the individual self.

 

Of course, there’s no single way for human beings to attain self-transcendence: it can happen through spiritual practice, professional drive, familial bonds, or any number of commitments to a higher cause. Vogler’s group includes psychologists, philosophers, and religious thinkers from a variety of traditions. Many are UChicago colleagues: assistant professor Marc G. Berman and professor Howard C. Nusbaum in Psychology, associate professor Tahera Qutbuddin in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and, in Philosophy, assistant professor Matthias Haase and Josef Stern, the William H. Colvin Professor Emeritus. The 30-scholar cohort represents institutions throughout the United States, Middle East, and Europe; they have been meeting and teaching since October 2015.

 

When she devised the project, Vogler says, “The ambition was to get a kind of deep integration between people working in very different disciplines” without relegating their work to the margins of less widely read, explicitly interdisciplinary publications. And it worked: the participants are “doing disciplinary work, they’re publishing in the disciplinary journals, and the inspiration for it is coming out of the frame of the project.”

 

These discussions have informed 10 published or forthcoming articles—a figure that “pretty dramatically exceeded” her initial expectations—with many more on the way. One essay that encapsulates the spirit of the project is being developed by Notre Dame theologian Jean Porter, about studies by Cornell University psychologist Katherine Kinzler on early childhood food preferences. Porter finds parallels between contemporary psychology and the views of Catholic philosopher Thomas Aquinas on the influence of group identity on what children choose to eat. (A draft is available on the Virtue Blog, along with other writings and filmed lectures.) This video helps to introduce and contextualize the group’s scholarship.

 

Like Porter’s essay, much of the project is “built on things that ought to be super interesting to people who are not academics,” says Vogler. She hopes a broad audience will attend the culminating conference at UChicago over the weekend of October 14–15. From there, Vogler plans to share her team’s findings with educators—from early childhood through MBA programs and beyond—to help promote self-transcendence at every stage of development. “There’s a big difference,” she points out, “between leading a life that’s super busy and leading a life that’s full.” Her hope is that the group’s work, as it reverberates out into the broader world, will help people achieve the latter.

VIDEO: Talbot Brewer, “What Good Are The Humanities?”

On Wednesday, December 14, 2016, at the University of South Carolina Law School, our scholar and philosopher Talbot Brewer, gave the talk, “What Good are the Humanities?”

The president of University of South Carolina, Harris Pastides, delivered the introductory address, and a Q&A followed the talk. To view the talk, click the image below or go to http://virtue.uchicago.edu/brewer.

Screenshot 2017-02-03 12.21.56.png

talbTalbot Brewer is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of Virginia and a Scholar with Virtue, Happiness, & the Meaning of Life. He specializes in ethics and political philosophy, with particular attention to moral psychology and Aristotelian ethics. He is the author of numerous essays, including “Reflections on the Cultural Commons” (in Nestor García, ed, Being Human in a Consumerist Society, 2014), “Two Pictures of Practical Thinking” (in Jost and Wuerth, eds, Perfecting Virtue, 2011), “Is Welfare an Independent Good?” (Social Philosophy & Policy 26, 2009), “Three Dogmas of Desire” (in Chappell, ed, Values and Virtues, 2007), “Virtues We Can Share: A Reading of Aristotle’s Ethics” (Ethics 115, 2005), “Two Kinds of Commitments (And Two Kinds of Social Groups)” (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 66, 2003), and “Maxims and Virtues” (The Philosophical Review 3, 2002). He has been a visiting professor in the Harvard University Philosophy Department and has authored two books, the most recent of which is The Retrieval of Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2009). He is currently at work on two books, one on Aristotelian action theory and its intersection with ethics, and another on a phenomenon that he calls “tragedies of the cultural commons”.

“Finding camaraderie and illumination from others in the more treacherous passages of human life” – Interview with Talbot Brewer

chris-smith-ida-noyes-hall-auditorium
Ida Noyes Hall Auditorium at the University of Chicago – photo by Chris Smith
Margaret “Peggy” Ryan Binette is Associate Director of Public Relations for the Office of Communications & Public Affairs at the University of South Carolina; she conducted this interview with Talbot Brewer in advance of his lecture “What Good Are The Humanities?” on December 14, 5:30pm at the University of South Carolina.

Peggy Binette: How can the humanities contribute to happiness and meaningfulness in life – regardless of socioeconomic position?

Talbot Brewer: There is at best a tenuous connection between the humanities and happiness. Serious engagement with literature and art does of course have its pleasures, and we professors would be falling down on the job if our students did not come to know these pleasures. But If you went to a production of, say, Shakespeare’s Othello in hopes of making yourself happier, you’d be making a serious mistake. Seeing Othello can be, and indeed ought to be, a crushing experience. But while you probably would not walk out of the theater brimming with happiness, you might walk out with a deeper understanding of intimate love and the potentially deadly pathologies to which it exposes us. Whether such understanding makes life more meaningful is a complicated question. I think that it does. I would not wish to deny that someone who has never learned to read or write, and never learned to appreciate art, can have an extremely meaningful life, nor would I wish to rule out the possibility that someone with an advanced degree in philosophy or literature might lead a superficial existence. Still, I do think that when pursued in the right spirit, the humanities can deepen one’s experience of life, and that is an enormous gift.

PB: In this chaotic and ever-demanding world, how important is it for people to reflect on the concepts, virtues and values espoused in the humanities?

talbTB: We have devised a world in which mercenary words and images press upon us during almost every waking hour. When amid this clamor of manipulative messages we suddenly encounter something quite different, something called literature, or art, or philosophy, it is not easy to adjust our habits of attention and open ourselves fully to this newcomer. The cultural environment has not encouraged the traits required for proper engagement with the humanities: the habit of sustained attention and of patience and generosity in interpretation; the openness to finding camaraderie and illumination from others in the more treacherous passages of human life; the expressive conscience that cannot rest until it lights upon exactly the right words for one’s own incipient thoughts. By creating a space within which we can nurture such habits of mind and put them to their proper use, we make room for a kind of self-cultivation that has become increasingly rare, despite all the lip service we pay to authentic self-expression.
PB: What is the one point or thought you want anyone who attends your talk to take away?

TB: Some have tried to ground the value of the humanities in their contribution to economic productivity. Others have tried to ground the value of the humanities in their contribution to the health of our democratic institutions. Neither approach seems to me very convincing. What drives so many friends of the humanities to these two options, I believe, is the thought that if the humanities do not boost the economy or strengthen the polity, then their value must be an entirely individual matter, hence not a genuine public concern. This way of framing the issue trades on a mistakenly atomistic conception of human culture. The attainment of a sophisticated level of articulacy about human life both depends upon, and contributes to, a background cultural sophistication about human life. When it comes to the contest between depth and superficiality, we are in it together. At a time when our metastasizing material productivity poses a serious threat to the future of human life on this planet, perhaps we would be well advised to put less emphasis on economic growth and more emphasis on this entirely sustainable shared pursuit, to which the humanities can make an important contribution.

“What Good Are The Humanities?” on December 14, 5:30pm at the University of South Carolina.

Bandar Togel Terpercaya dengan Reputasi Internasional dan Layanan Terbaik di Asia

Kami adalah bintang utama di dunia togel online, diakui secara internasional dan di seluruh Asia! Dengan kualitas yang luar biasa, komitmen kuat, dan profesionalisme yang tak tergoyahkan, Bandar Togel telah menjaga reputasi ini selama bertahun-tahun di dunia judi toto togel. Mari bergabung dan rasakan semangat serta kualitas terbaik bersama kami!

Situs togel online resmi yang menawarkan pasaran Hongkong menjadi salah satu pilihan Toto Togel aman dan terpercaya bagi pemain. Dengan metode deposit yang fleksibel seperti Dana, pemain dapat dengan mudah menyetorkan modal mereka tanpa kesulitan. Pasaran HK menawarkan hasil yang adil dan cepat, menjadikannya salah satu pasaran yang paling diminati oleh para pemain togel.

Kemudahan transaksi menjadi salah satu alasan pemain memilih situs togel tertentu. Dengan pilihan deposit menggunakan Dana dan Gopay, beberapa Togel Terbesar menawarkan proses yang cepat dan aman untuk pemain, sekaligus menyediakan pasaran lengkap dengan peluang besar.

Strategi Terbaik untuk Menang di Bo Togel dengan Hadiah Tertinggi

Menang di Bo Togel bukan hanya tentang keberuntungan; ada strategi yang dapat meningkatkan peluang Anda secara signifikan. Dari memilih nomor yang tepat hingga memahami pasaran yang paling menguntungkan, artikel ini akan membahas strategi terbaik untuk meraih Bo Togel Hadiah Terbesar. Dengan sedikit perencanaan dan analisis, Anda dapat meningkatkan kesempatan untuk meraih kemenangan besar di Bo Togel.

Daftar Slot Gacor Sekarang dan Menangkan Jackpot

Pengembang Link Slot Gacor seperti NetEnt dan Play'n GO terus berinovasi dengan menghadirkan permainan slot yang kaya grafis, efek suara yang memukau, serta animasi yang memikat.

Salah satu rahasia sukses dalam bermain slot adalah mengelola modal dengan baik. Tentukan batas taruhan dan sesuaikan dengan peluang di setiap putaran. Dengan strategi pengelolaan modal yang tepat, Anda dapat bermain lebih lama dan meningkatkan peluang menang tanpa perlu mengorbankan terlalu banyak dana. Selain itu, manfaatkan juga scatter hitam yang tersedia di dalam permainan slot mahjong ways 2 terbaru hari ini.

Saat ini, banyak situs judi online yang menyediakan Slot Depo 5k dengan peluang kemenangan yang besar. Dengan modal yang sangat kecil, pemain masih memiliki kesempatan untuk menang besar. Slot ini sangat cocok bagi mereka yang ingin bermain hemat namun tetap merasakan sensasi kemenangan besar.

Link RTP Slot Gacor Paling Tinggi Malam Ini

RTP slot tertinggi menjadi daya tarik utama dalam dunia perjudian slot online, karena memberikan peluang menang yang lebih tinggi dibandingkan game dengan RTP rendah. Dengan memanfaatkan rtp live, pemain bisa mengetahui apakah sebuah slot gacor hari ini atau tidak. Slot rtp tertinggi hari ini sering kali menawarkan kesempatan menang yang lebih besar, sehingga sangat penting untuk selalu memperbarui informasi tentang rtp slot tertinggi hari ini. Ini membantu para pemain untuk mengambil keputusan yang tepat dalam memilih permainan.

Related Links:

Togel178

Pedetogel

Sabatoto

Togel279

Togel158

Colok178

Novaslot88

Lain-Lain

Partner Links