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    Oct 05, 2016 @5:30 pm - 7:00 pm

    What Must We Affirm

    We who live in comfortable circumstances often find our comfort at the expense of those who have sacrificed to make us so. This sacrifice comes in at least two forms. The first is the ongoing exploitation of those who work in menial jobs with low pay supporting our own more enjoyable work. The second is more philosophically vexed. It is the entirety of human history, with all its horrors, that have allowed many of us to enjoy the positions that we do. This lecture and discussion will ask the question of how we can and should relate to these two issues, arguing against a more nihilist view that we are required to affirm them in order to affirm who we are.

    Todd May, Ph.D., is the 2016-17 McDevitt Chair in Religious Philosophy at Le Moyne College and Class of 1941 Memorial Professor at Clemson University. May earned his doctorate from Penn State University in 1989, and has been at Clemson since 1991. He has authored 14 philosophical books, among which The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism has been influential in recent progressive political thought. His most recent work, addressing a more general audience on fundamental questions of human existence, include A Significant Life: Human Meaning in a Silent Universe (2015) and A Fragile Life: Accepting Our Vulnerability (2017), from which this lecture is drawn.

    This event is part of a series sponsored by the McDevitt Chair in Religious Philosophy and McDevitt Center, Vulnerable Life. As human beings, we are all exposed to suffering. We suffer physically and psychologically. We are confronted with moral dilemmas that have no clean resolution. We are all faced with our mortality and with the related fact that whatever lives we choose we cannot know what the alternatives would have been like. During the 2016-17 academic year, the McDevitt Center and the McDevitt Chair in Religious Philosophy will sponsor Vulnerable Life, a series of public lectures at Le Moyne College engaging the theme of our human vulnerability to suffering and how we can cope with it. The central question orienting the initiative is: Should seek to overcome our vulnerability, as some philosophies and spiritual practices counsel, or find ways to live with it?

    For more information, call (315) 445-6200 or send an email to [email protected].
    Location : Reilley Room (4th floor of Reilly Hall)
    Category : Lecture/Reading