[UPDATED TIME] Whitehead Lectures: Michele Moody-Adams (Columbia University), "Political Philosophy and the ‘Empire of Affect’"

Thursday, 4/23: 5pm - 7pm

Lecture I: “Wonder and Awe as Pillars of Political Life” 

Friday, 4/24: 5pm - 7pm

Lecture II: “Poetry, Prophecy, and Political  Philosophy”

Abstract: Our affective responses to the world inform cognition, valuation, and action and they are essential determinants of what it is to be human. Understanding the “empire of affect”-- how our affective responses influence political life--is thus a vital task of political philosophy. 
• In Lecture I, I argue that wonder and awe are part of a quartet of politically consequential responses that also includes hope and fear. Unlike hope and fear, wonder and awe are fundamentally self-transcendent responses to others and to the world. Among other functions, they underwrite our capacity to meet the moral demands of ‘humane regard,’ which combines respect for the human capacity for agency with compassion for the human capacity to suffer. 
• In Lecture II, I  explore two important tasks of political philosophy: stimulating political imagination and inspiring political agents to pursue what imagination presents.  I argue that political philosophy cannot perform these tasks without assistance from poetry (by which I mean art in the broadest sense) and prophecy (which may offer initially unsettling insights about the demands of political life).  Yet when these hybrid projects succeed they can generate politically constructive hope and help us transcend our destructive fears.

Michele Moody-Adams is Straus Professor of Political Philosophy and Legal Theory at
Columbia University, where she also served as Dean of Columbia College and Vice 
President for Undergraduate Education. Before Columbia, Moody-Adams taught at Cornell
University, where she served as Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and Director of 
the Program on Ethics and Public Life. She has also taught at Wellesley College, the 
University of Rochester, and Indiana University, where she served as Associate Dean of Arts 
and Sciences.
She has published on equality and social justice; the nature of democracy and the 
implications of democratic disagreement; moral psychology and the virtues; the demands 
of academic freedom; and the philosophical implications of gender and race. She is the 
author of Making Space for Justice: Social Movements, Collective Imagination and Political 
Hope (2022), and a widely cited book on moral relativism, Fieldwork in Familiar Places: 
Morality, Culture and Philosophy (1997) She is also a co-author on the multi-author work 
Against Happiness ( 2023). She is currently working on two book projects tentatively
entitled Renewing Democracy and Reclaiming the Idea of the Human.
Moody-Adams holds a B.A. from Wellesley College, a second B.A. from Oxford University, 
and she earned the M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard University under the 
supervision of John Rawls. She has served as President of the Eastern Division of the 
American Philosophical Association. She is also a Lifetime Honorary Fellow of Somerville 
College, Oxford and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Free and open to the public.