Each year, an inaugural lecture launches the Vera List Center’s annual theme, defining the intellectual territory that will be explored in public programs throughout the year. The lecturer introduces the theme in the broadest sense, serving as guide to the range and richness of the topic at hand, and rooting the concept within The New School’s intellectual tradition.
Thinkers associated with The New School have played a major role in rethinking the meaning of the public sphere. The inaugural lecture of the Vera List Center’s 2006-2007 theme “The Public Domain” will be delivered by Richard J. Bernstein, Vera List Professor of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research.
Professor Bernstein will explore the meaning of the concepts of public life and public space in the works of John Dewey, Hannah Arendt, and Jurgen Habermas, and will consider how these concepts are relevant for understanding public freedom and democracy. The aim will be to highlight what each of them contributes to a revitalized sense of the public life of a democratic polity in the twenty-first century.
Vera List Professor of Philosophy since 1989 and formerly Dean of The New School for Social Research, Richard J. Bernstein has produced an outstanding body of scholarly work concentrating on American pragmatism; social and political philosophy; critical theory; and Anglo-American philosophy. Among his many publications are The Abuse of Evil: The Corruption of Politics And Religion Since 9/11 (2006); Radical Evil: A Philosophic Interrogation (2002); Freud and the Legacy of Moses (1998); Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (1996); The New Constellation: The Ethical/Political Horizons of Modernity/ Postmodernity (1991); Philosophical Profiles (1986); Habermas and Modernity (editor, 1985); Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (1983); Praxis and Action (1971); and John Dewey (1966).
This event is presented as part of the Vera List Center’s program cycle on “The Public Domain.”