Certain philosophies (both Western and Eastern) describe us as prone to forms of attachment that are illusory, and promise to indemnify us against the hazards of life by exposing such illusions. One such hazard is that of transience and temporal life itself, and it is sometimes urged that since the present is the only genuine reality, attachments to the past or the future are forms of illusion we can and should be free of. This talk raises some questions about the ideal of “living in the present.”
Richard Moran, Ph.D., received his doctorate from Cornell University in 1989 and began teaching at Princeton University, then at Harvard University, where he has been since 1995. His interests include philosophy of mind and moral psychology, the nature of testimony, and aesthetics and the philosophy of literature. His 2001 book Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge was hailed as “one of the most striking and original books in the Philosophy of Mind written in the last ten years.” Moran also has published papers on metaphor, and on imagination and emotional engagement with art.
This event is part in 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 about any of the events in this series, call (315) 445-6200 or send an email to
[email protected].