HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS TO PUBLISH
APPIAH'S FLEXNER LECTURES

K. Anthony Appiah

Alfred North Whitehead's Adventures of Ideas, I.A. Richards' The Philosophy of Rhetoric, Erwin Panofsky's Studies in Iconology and Frank Kermode's The Sense of an Ending are among the influential books that have emerged from Bryn Mawr's Mary Flexner Lecture Series. That tradition will continue, thanks to a recently inked agreement between the College and Harvard University Press to publish the manuscripts that derive from the Flexner Lectures, beginning with a series of four talks to be delivered this fall by renowned philosopher and African-studies scholar K. Anthony Appiah.

The lecture series, established in honor of Mary Flexner, a Bryn Mawr graduate of the Class of 1895, has brought some of the country's best-known humanists to campus. The pioneering Egyptologist James H. Breasted gave the first series of Flexner Lectures in 1928-29, to be followed in later years by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Alfred H. Barr Jr., Arnold Toynbee, Isaiah Berlin, Paul Henry Lang, Douglas Cooper, Natalie Zemon Davis and Harold Bloom, among others. Flexner lecturers typically give a series of three to four talks that introduce their unique scholarship and present some new chapters or developments in that work. While in residence, they often lead seminars or discussions with undergraduate and graduate students.

Appiah's The overarching theme of the series will be "Why Ethics?" The individual lectures are "Experimental Ethics," on Oct. 20; "The Case Against Character," on Oct. 27; "The Case Against Intuition," on Nov. 3; and "The Ends of Ethics," on Nov. 10. Each talk will take place at 8 p.m. in Thomas Great Hall; receptions will follow the lectures.

Appiah, Princeton University's Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy and director of Princeton's University Center for Human Values, is the son of an English mother and a Ghanaian father. Born in London, he was raised primarily in Ghana and educated at Cambridge University, and has since the early 1980s lived in the United States. He served on the faculties of Yale, Cornell, Duke and Harvard Universities before taking his current post at Princeton. With the publication in 1992 of In My Father's House, he became one of the world's leading theorists of race and identity.

His current interests range over African and African-American intellectual history and literary studies, ethics, and philosophy of mind and language; and he has also taught regularly about African traditional religions. His major current work concerns the philosophical foundations of liberalism.

<<Back to Bryn Mawr Now 9/29/2005

Next story>>