Tag: What do we live for?

Photos, tweets, and audience response: Anselm Mueller’s leture, “What Do We Live For?”

We will post the recording of Anselm Mueller’s April 11 lecture “What Do We Live For?” when it becomes available, but in the meantime thought you might enjoy some feedback we received on our surveys, photos, some of our live tweets, and first, this article about Mueller’s lecture with an interview with Candace Vogler about our Visiting Scholar program.
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Audience survey responses to Anselm Mueller’s “What Do We Live For?”
  • The tension between well-being and perfection is what living life day-to-day is all about.
  • I have a broadened grasp of the problems in trying to understand virtue.
  • The talk provided a different framework for which to shape my own perception of moral philosophy.
  • The lecture provided clear examples of competing factors and forces that we humans aim for both perfection and well-being, and the difficulties in choosing between them.
  • The lecture has contributed to my understanding of the meaning of life. It provided a framework for understanding personal virtue that I had ever thought of before.
  • The lecture gave me a broader understanding of theories on the dichotomy between well-being/perfection.
  • The event will lead to further exploration of these topics in personal reading and attendance at other events and lectures.
  • The lecture helped clarify the nature of the two specific tele as ways in which to frame my life.
  • I hadn’t considered the importance of the conceptual between well-being and perfection as different tele.
  • The lecture illuminated the function of perfection in relation to a meaningful life and the place of the pursuit of well-being within it.
  • The lecture helped to order the variety of philosophical approaches and their limitations.
  • The lecture helped me to see that the collapse of well-being and philosophical perfection is rife in ableism. The lecture provided with useful material to counter the basic claims in ableism.
  • The lecture certainly inspired me to do further reading.
  • The lecture helped me to see that philosophy is well equipped to clarify the tension between well-being and perfection but that it is not equipped to resolve it.

Photos by Valerie Wallace. For more photos from our events, visit our Flickr page.

Save the date: April 11 4pm Live-streaming Anselm Mueller, “What Do We Live For”

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Detail from The Temptation of St. Anthony by Hieronymus Bosch.

“What Do We Live For?” Lecture by Anselm Mueller

4 pm, April 11, 2016 | University of Chicago | The Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society

For those unable to make this event, you can watch it on live our website https://virtue.uchicago.edu/april11

Ethical conduct is not without its costs—delivering truthful testimony against well-connected murderers in a criminal trial can be dangerous; delivering bad news to good people is painful; facing down and working through a mountain of debt can require tightening your belt in unpleasant ways; and duly courageous action can get you killed.  Unethical conduct, on the other hand, often promises ease, comfort, wealth, and some important forms of success.  Points such as these have led many thinkers to notice that there seems to be a tension between acting well (the stuff of ethical conduct) and faring well (getting things that people generally want to get, and finding ways of holding onto those things).

 

In this lecture, Anselm Müller will consider the traditional opposition between acting well and faring well, and the kinds of steps that thinkers in different cultural settings have taken to address it.   Some urge that meaningful lives are primarily those centered on pursuit of ethical perfection.  Others urge that the best lives are directed to faring well (sometimes in ways that have nothing to do with satisfying desires for wealth or ease or comfort).  And a few urge that there is no such thing as really faring well unless one also is devoted to acting well.  How are we to understand these responses to the traditional problem?  Which, if any, look like sound ways of addressing the tension?

 

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Visiting Scholar Anselm Mueller

Anselm Mueller is Professor Emeritus, University of Trier, and a Visiting Scholar with Virtue, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life and the Department of Philosophy. A student of Elizabeth Anscombe and Anthony Kenny at Oxford in the early sixties, Professor Müller has taught philosophy at Oxford University, Australian National University, University of Trier, University of Luxemborg, and Keimyung University. He has written many books and articles in the following areas: ethics, rationality, action theory, philosophy of mind, and the history of philosophy.

 

For more details, visit: https://virtue.uchicago.edu/april11

 

Our Visiting Scholar Program is hosted by the Neubauer Collegeium for Culture and Society and made possible by a grant from the Chicago Moral Project. This talk is also made possible by generous support from the John Templeton Foundation.

Save the date: April 11, 2016: Anselm Mueller, “What Do We Live For?”

To the Sky

Skyward – photo by Chris Smith

Anselm Mueller, Visiting Professor with Virtue, Happiness, & the Meaning of Life and the Department of Philosophy to give lecture “What Do We Live For?”

4 pm, April 11, 2016

Neubauer Collegium 5701 S. Woodlawn Avenue, Chicago, IL

Reception to follow.

Ethical conduct is not without its costs—delivering truthful testimony against well-connected murderers in a criminal trial can be dangerous; delivering bad news to good people is painful; facing down and working through a mountain of debt can require tightening your belt in unpleasant ways; and duly courageous action can get you killed.  Unethical conduct, on the other hand, often promises ease, comfort, wealth, and some important forms of success.  Points such as these have led many thinkers to notice that there seems to be a tension between acting well (the stuff of ethical conduct) and faring well (getting things that people generally want to get, and finding ways of holding onto those things).  In this lecture, Anselm Müller will consider the traditional opposition between acting well and faring well, and the kinds of steps that thinkers in different cultural settings have taken to address it.   Some urge that meaningful lives are primarily those centered on pursuit of ethical perfection.  Others urge that the best lives are directed to faring well (sometimes in ways that have nothing to do with satisfying desires for wealth or ease or comfort).  And a few urge that there is no such thing as really faring well unless one also is devoted to acting well.  How are we to understand these responses to the traditional problem?  Which, if any, look like sound ways of addressing the tension?

 

mueller-1  Anselm Mueller is Professor Emeritus, University of Trier, and a Visiting Professor with the Department of Philosophy and the project “Virtue, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life”. A student of Elizabeth Anscombe and Anthony Kenny at Oxford in the early sixties, Professor Müller has taught philosophy at Oxford University, Australian National University, University of Trier, University of Luxemborg, and Keimyung University. He has written many books and articles in the following areas: ethics, rationality, action theory, philosophy of mind, and the history of philosophy.

This lecture is hosted by Neubauer Collegeium for Culture and Society and  supported by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation.