About the 2004-2005 Lectures
The University of California, Berkeley will host the prestigious Tanner
Lectures on Human Values, a three-day event to be held from March 14
to March 16, 2005.
The lectures and the seminar are free and open to the public.
Lecture Schedule
Reification: A Recognition-Theoretical View
Lecture I: The Priority of Recognition over Cognition
Monday, March 14, 2005
4:10 p.m. – 6:30 p.m., Toll Room, Alumni House
With commentary by Raymond Geuss
Lecture II: Reification as Loss of Recognitional Attitudes
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
4:10 p.m. – 6:30 p.m., Toll Room, Alumni House
With commentary by Judith Butler and Jonathan Lear
Seminar and Discussion with commentators
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
4:10 p.m. – 6:30 p.m., Toll Room, Alumni House
With commentary by Raymond Geuss, Judith Butler,
and Jonathan Lear
About Axel Honneth
Axel Honneth is an internationally renowned social theorist who has
creatively continued the legacy of the Frankfurt School's Critical Theory.
Under his direction, the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research has
reclaimed its earlier mission of combining radical social and political
analysis with rigorous philosophical inquiry. Drawing on the work of
Habermas in particular and combining it with insights from recent French
thought, he has explored the themes of recognition and power with special
insight.
A prolific writer, Honneth has published numerous critical essays
and books on social theory and its history, including "The Struggle
for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts" (1996),
and "The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social
Theory" (1993). Honneth's more recent publications include "Suffering
from Indeterminacy: A Reactualization of Hegel's Philosophy of Right"
(2000), "Recognition or Redistribution? Changing Perspectives on
the Moral Order of Society," with Nancy Fraser (2003), and "Anxiety
and Politics" (2003). Honneth has been a member of several research
institutes, including the Danish National Research Foundation's Center
for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen since 2002,
and the Institute for Cultural Sciences at the University of Bern in
Lucerne, Switzerland since mid-2004. He has lectured at universities
around the world, including McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and
Kyoto University in Kyoto, Japan.
Born in 1949 in Essen, Germany, Honneth received his M.A. in philosophy
from the Universities at Bonn and Bochum in 1974 and his Ph.D. in philosophy
from Freie Universität, Berlin in 1982. From October 1989 to July
1990, he was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin. Honneth has
been Professor of Philosophy at the Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe University
of Frankfurt/Main since 1996, and Director of its Institute for Social
Research since 2001. In May 2004, Honneth received the F. Palacky Honorary
Medal for Merit in Social Sciences, presented by the Academy Council
of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic Awards.
About the Commentators
Judith Butler
Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature
University of California, Berkeley
Judith Butler is internationally recognized for her work on cultural
theories of gender, criticisms of identity politics, and new visions
of radical democracy. Her research addresses a range of fields including
psychoanalysis, social theory, feminist studies, and philosophy and
literature.
Butler is the author of many works on European philosophy as well as
feminist and queer theory. Her publications include Antigone's Claim:
Kinship Between Life and Death (2000); Excitable Speech (1997); The
Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (1997); and Gender Trouble:
Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990). Her most recent works,
Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence and Undoing Gender,
both appeared in 2004, a year that also saw the publication of The Judith
Butler Reader, edited by Butler and Sara Salih.
In 1984, Butler received her Ph.D. in philosophy at Yale University,
having earned her MA (1982) and B.A. (1978) at Yale as well. She studied
Philosophy at Heidelberg University as a Fulbright Scholar. Subsequently,
she taught at Wesleyan University and Johns Hopkins University before
joining the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, in 1993,
where she is currently Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of
Rhetoric, Comparative Literature, and Gender and Women's Studies.
Raymond Geuss
Reader in Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Cambridge
A distinguished political philosopher, Raymond Geuss has contributed
widely to current research into the paradigms and aims of the social
sciences. Geuss is critically lauded for uncovering and addressing fundamental
assumptions and confusions in contemporary political philosophy.
Geuss has authored and edited numerous works on political philosophy
and critical theory, including The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas
and the Frankfurt School (1981); Morality, Culture, and History: Essays
on German Philosophy (1999); History and Illusion in Politics (2001);
Public Goods, Private Goods (2001); Glück und Politik: Potsdamer
Vorlesungen (2004); and Outside Ethics (forthcoming in 2005).
Raymond Geuss received his BA (1966) and Ph.D. (1971) from Columbia
University. He taught in Heidelberg, at Columbia University, the University
of Chicago, and Princeton University before joining the Faculty of Philosophy
at Cambridge in 1993. He is a series editor of Cambridge Texts in the
History of Political Thought and a former editor of Cambridge University's
Modern European Philosophy Series.
Jonathan Lear
John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor of Social Thought
University of Chicago
Jonathan Lear is a celebrated scholar of psychoanalytic theory and
the history of philosophy. Much of his research and teaching probes
the intersection of ancient and modern philosophy with psychoanalytic
explorations of the mind.
Lear has written prolifically on philosophy and psychoanalysis, and
several of his works have garnered the Gradiva Award, bestowed by the
National Association for Psychoanalysis to the best psychoanalytic book
of the year. His publications include Aristotle and Logical Theory (1980);
Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (1988); Love and its Place in Nature:
A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis (1990); Open
Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul (1998); Happiness, Death,
and the Remainder of Life (2001); and Therapeutic Action: An Earnest
Plea for Irony (2003). Lear's book Freud will appear in spring 2005
as the latest title in the Routledge Philosophers Series.
Jonathan Lear received psychoanalytic training in addition to his education
and research in philosophy and social thought. He earned bachelor degrees
from both Yale University (1970) and University of Cambridge (1973).
Lear received his MA from Cambridge in 1976 and his Ph.D. from Rockefeller
University in 1978. After teaching at both Yale and Cambridge, Lear joined the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago (1996), where he is the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor of Social Thought.
