Events

Man is a sexual and procreative creature as well as a social animal.  From sexuality, tradition holds, came children and family formation to protect child development.  Until recently, most political philosophers began their treatise on the nature of the commonwealth or the state with a consideration of the family.  But what does the family mean today?  Have the old relationships of family, kinship, and tribe disappeared or have they been merely transmogrified?  Are new types of families being formed?  And how does a growing population of single people fit into...

Quadrant 1: critical and integrative thinking and Quadrant 2:  the study of the polymaths 

Inimicus inimici mei amicus meus est, (the enemy of my enemy is my friend).  This ancient proverb proves most powerful when alliances between assumed adversaries form and contribute to social justice.  In 1848 at the Seneca Falls Convention, men joined forces with women to challenge patriarchy; in the 1920s, elite, conservative, Protestant white women allied with Pueblo Indians to fight for Native American religious freedom; and in the 1950s and 60s, privileged whites marched hand in hand with blacks to end racial discrimination.  In this Polymathic Pizza session on Civility...

Quadrant 1: tapestry and Quadrant 2: communication 

Ours is an age that prizes privacy.  Yet we also inherit a tradition, dating from ancient times, East and West, that sees the good life in terms of promoting the common good, or at the least, not detracting from it.  Politics or some form of public career has proven a time-honored pathway to such fulfillment.  Of late, however, philanthropy and other forms of non-profit public service have come to the fore as important constituents of civic value.  In this discussion, Professor Paul Lichterman will challenge students to examine from a variety of perspectives and...

A philosophy of ethics implies an effort to discern the good in a specific situation and to choose it as a matter of right conduct.  Easier said than done!  How do we form our own ethical standards?  What are the roles played in this process by religion, family, ethnicity, society, and law? How does one deal with the cacophony of opposed positions on so many ethical points?  Is the search for ethics in our contemporary society of necessity a highly personalized struggle: energized by tradition, perhaps, but made real, made functional, by experience, hard knocks, and choice...

Historian Lewis Mumford, among others, has argued that warfare as an ongoing and necessary expression of the state originated with the rise of urbanism in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley thousands of years before the Common Era.  The twentieth century witnessed global, regional, and local war on a near-continuous basis.  For ten of the first fourteen years of the twenty-first century the United States has been at war in the Middle East.  The threat of terrorism, meanwhile, remains continuous and has altered the social psychology of these United States in ways that we have only...

You are what you eat. So runs a time-tested folkloric observation. The past four decades have witnessed a mounting concern with good nutrition as the basis of health. The nation, meanwhile, seems caught in an epidemic of obesity. Hunger, famine, and starvation seem permanently established in certain areas of the planet. Should we accept such disjunctions as part of a pattern of Malthusian necessity? Or will the ambition to feed the Planet be a signature accomplishment of the 21st century? Professor Alison Dundes Renteln has spent a lifetime seeking answers to these questions and will lead an...

For the first time in human history the urban population outnumbers the rural. While cities represent prominent centers of trade, finance, innovation, and education, there are wide-ranging social and ecological tradeoffs associated with these concentrations of people and power. Local air, climate, and water systems are degraded as a result of the transformation of native landscapes into urban environments, which, in turn, pose increasing threats to human health and quality of life among residents. Cities are now pursuing alternative development strategies aimed at minimizing adverse impacts...

Using theatre and aesthetics to advance diplomacy with China may be the most polymathic approach to international relations to date. In this Polymathic Pizza session, discover with University Professor Geoffrey Cowan how his life and work as academician, as playwright, and his position as a foundation president have intersected to engage China's leadership and its citizenry politically and culturally. The aesthetic dynamic of this polymathic equation will launch the discussion naturally into the political and academic aspects of Professor Cowan’s diverse life/work and will inspire...