Robert O. McClintock

Morningside Park Stairway with Seligman Fountain, New York City

May 3, 2017.  

We continue our series on the value of the liberal arts in contemporary society with a conversation with Robert O. McClintock, John L. and Sue Ann Weinberg Professor Emeritus in the Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Education at Teacher's College, Columbia University in the City of New York, about his monograph, Formative Justice: To Make of Oneself What One Can and Should Become.

Text of Formative Justice (pdf).

44:28 minutes.

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Martha C. Nussbaum

September 28, 2016.

Martha C. Nussbaum, Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, discusses her book Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice, just published by Oxford University Press.

"Written with her usual mix of grace, precision, passion, and breathtaking scope, Nussbaum probes two seemingly polar emotions underlying our notions of justice-anger and forgiveness. She finds them part of the same vindictive drama, and each problematic. Her call is to move beyond them to become 'strange sorts of people, part Stoic and part creatures of love.' The book offers an important and timely challenge, a most worthwhile and enlightening read for those interested in philosophy, psychology, law, politics, religion-or simply living in today's world." -- C. Daniel Batson, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, University of Kansas

45:14 minutes.

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Christopher D. Johnson

April 9, 2014.

Christopher D. Johnson, Professor of early modern literature in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UCLA, discusses his book, Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg's Atlas of Images, published by Cornell University Press in 2012.

"This is a rich and learned book, and also an extremely humane and attractive one. The final chapter, on Warburg and Bruno, has the status of revelation. It is absolutely fascinating, not only as a dialogue in intellectual history but also as a political allegory. Christopher D. Johnson pays close attention to Warburg's ethical and epistemological aspirations when he focuses on Warburg’s final and uncompleted project: the Atlas of Images. Assembled during the years prior to his death in 1929, these collages strove to mount a history of cultural memory via a dense series of images from antiquity to the present." — Michael P. Steinberg, Brown University

45:24 minutes.

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View select panels from Warburg's Bilderatlas and other materials on the book's companion website.

Michael H. McCarthy

February 27, 2013.

Michael H. McCarthy, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Vassar College, discusses one of the Twentieth Century's most important political philosophers, Hannah Arendt, and his book: The Political Humanism of Hannah Arendt, published in 2012 by Lexington Books.

“In this penetrating analysis, McCarthy reveals how anti-political biases within the Western philosophical tradition spawned 'anthropologies' that Arendt regarded as profoundly at odds with human dignity, plurality, and freedom. Rejecting both the reductionism that conflates people with beasts and the romanticism that conflates them with gods, Arendt emerges as a civic republican whose highest political virtue is devotion to a common world that, by uniting and separating us, allows us to actualize the full range of human possibilities."   -- Sandra K. Hinchman.

79:49 minutes 

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David Weinberger

April 1, 2008.

David Weinberger, philosopher, author, commentator, and Fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for the Internet & Society discusses his latest book: Everything is Miscellaneous: the Power of the New Digital Disorder, published by Times Books.

49:44 min.

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Grace Roosevelt

January 30, 2007

Grace Roosevelt, Professor of History and Education at Metropolitan College of New York and author of Reading Rousseau in the Nuclear Age, talks about the history of the liberal arts curriculum, the encroachment of market forces on higher education, and the relation between liberal education and liberal politics.

42:12 min.
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