About the 2006-2007 Lectures
The University of California, Berkeley will host the prestigious Tanner
Lectures on Human Values, a three-day event to be held from April 10
to April 12, 2007.
The lectures and the seminar are free and open to the public.
Lecture Schedule
Power, Reason, and Politics
Lecture I: On Public Reason
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
4:10 p.m. – 6:30 p.m., Toll Room, Alumni House
With commentary by Charles Larmore
Lecture II: Democracy's Public Reason, Global Public Reason
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
4:10 p.m. – 6:30 p.m., Toll Room, Alumni House
With commentary by Elizabeth S. Anderson and Avishai Margalit
Seminar and Discussion with commentators
Thursday, April 12, 2007
4:10 p.m. – 6:30 p.m., Toll Room, Alumni House
With commentary by Charles Larmore, Elizabeth S. Anderson, and Avishai
Margalit
About Joshua Cohen
Joshua Cohen is a renowned political theorist trained in philosophy.
He specializes in democratic theory and its implications for personal
liberty, freedom of expression, electoral finance, and new forms of
democratic participation. Cohen is currently working on questions of
global justice, including the foundations of human rights, distributive
fairness, and supra-national democratic governance. He is the director
of the Program on Global Justice and professor of political science,
philosophy, and law at Stanford University.
Cohen's many publications on political philosophy include several written
with University of Michigan law professor Joel Rogers: On Democracy
(1983); Inequity and Intervention: The Federal Budget and Central
America (1986); Rules of the Game (1986); and Associations
and Democracy (1995). His collected papers are forthcoming from
Harvard University Press, and A Free Community of Equals: Rousseau
on Democracy is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Since
1991, Cohen has also been editor of Boston Review, a bi-monthly political,
cultural, and literary magazine. He is a fellow of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences, and among his many honors are the Harold E. Edgerton
Award, the highest honor given to young faculty at M.I.T., the James
and Ruth Levitan Prize in the Humanities, multiple teaching awards from
M.I.T., and the Carlyle Professorship at Oxford University in 1999.
Born in Brookline, Massachusetts in 1951, Cohen received both his B.A.
and M.A. in philosophy from Yale University in 1973, and went on to
earn a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University in 1979. He began
teaching philosophy and political science at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology in 1977, where he was Goldberg Professor of the Humanities.
In 2006, Cohen moved to Stanford University, where he is professor of
political science, philosophy, and law, and director of the Program
on Global Justice.
About the Commentators
Charles Larmore
W. Duncan MacMillan Professor in the Humanities, Brown University
Charles Larmore, a distinguished scholar of moral and political philosophy,
specializes in the history of ethics and romanticism and their influence
upon contemporary political thought. He has argued that the pulse of
romanticism continues to beat in modern ideas of the self, and its influence
can be found in the arts, philosophy, and politics. He also explores
the foundations of modern political liberalism.
Larmore has authored important articles and books in several languages,
and serves on the editorial boards of journals in the U.S. and overseas,
including the publication Ethics (since 2000). His books, which
include Patterns of Moral Complexity (1987), The Romantic
Legacy (1996), and The Morals of Modernity (1996), and Les
pratiques du moi (2004) offer interdisciplinary, trans-historical
arguments.
Recently appointed the W. Duncan MacMillan Professor in the Humanities
at Brown University (2006), Larmore teaches in the philosophy department.
Before coming to Brown, he taught at the University of Chicago for 9
years, and before that at Columbia University for nearly 20 years. He
earned his B.A. in classics and philosophy from Harvard University in
1972, and his Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University in 1978.
Elizabeth S. Anderson
John Rawls Collegiate Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies, University of Michigan
Elizabeth Anderson is renowned for her scholarship in democratic theory,
ethics and economics, feminist epistemology, and the philosophy of science.
She has developed new accounts of the philosophical roots of American
democracy, and argued that its central principles, such as equality,
may be compromised by "economistic" reasoning in contemporary
social policy.
Anderson is the author of Value in Ethics and in Economics (1993),
which analyzes controversial applications of market values to various
domains of social life, from surrogate motherhood to environmental protection.
She is currently writing a book on the ideal of integration in democratic
theory, paying special attention to African Americans and Latinos in
the United States, and Muslims in Europe.
Anderson is the John Rawls Collegiate Professor of Philosophy and Women's
Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She received her B.A.
in philosophy, with a minor in economics, from Swarthmore College (1981),
and her M.A. (1984) and Ph.D. (1987) in philosophy from Harvard University.
Avishai Margalit
George Kennan Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
Avishai Margalit is a leading scholar of social and political philosophy
and a prominent voice in current sociopolitical debate. He has contributed
valued perspectives on such divisive concerns as global terrorism and
the potential incompatibility of peace and justice. In 1978, he co-founded
the Israeli citizen's movement Peace Now, which continues to initiate
crucial reconciliation efforts in the Middle East.
Margalit has published prolifically in philosophical journals and contributes
frequently to the New York Review of Books. His own books include
Idolatry (with Moshe Halbertal, 1991), The Decent Society
(1998), The Ethics of Memory (2002), and Occidentalism: The
West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (with Ian Buruma, 2004).
Hebrew University of Jerusalem has served as Margalit's home institution
for over 40 years. He received his B.A. in philosophy and economics
in 1963, his M.A. in philosophy in 1965, and his Ph.D. in 1970, and
has taught at Hebrew University since. Margalit is currently Schulman
Professor of Philosophy. He also travels widely as a visiting professor,
lecturer, and research fellow, most recently as George F. Kennan Professor
in the School of Historical Studies at Princeton's Institute for Advanced
Study (2006-08).
