2025 Adams Symposium: Love, Beauty, Interpretation: Other Ways of Knowing?
featuring Alexander Nehamas, Edmund N. Carpenter II Class of 1943 Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature, Princeton University
The systematic, articulate, and quantifiable pursuit of knowledge is one of modernity’s great achievements. It has established the detached, impersonal attitude of scientific investigation as the paradigm of our cognitive relationship to the world and one another. But we all live within a vast web of personal relationships with both people and things. Here, love and beauty are paramount. Blending intellect with feeling and knowledge with passion, they impose upon us the task of interpretation. Unlike the generalizing tendency of science, interpretation reveals the individuality of what we love and, to the extent it succeeds, it contributes to our own. It is a knowledge that changes us. And it is the purpose of the humanities to try and make sure that it changes us for the better.
ABOUT OUR SPEAKER
Alexander Nehamas was born in Athens, graduated from Athens College, and attended Swarthmore College and Princeton University, where he is currently Professor in the Humanities, Philosophy, and Comparative Literature. Before coming to Princeton, he taught at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Pennsylvania. His books include Nietzsche: Life as Literature, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault, Virtues of Authenticity: Essays on Plato and Socrates, and Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art. He has translated, with Paul Woodruff, Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus into English. At Princeton, he has chaired the Council of the Humanities, directed the Program in Hellenic Studies, and was the Founding Director of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts. In 1993, he was the Sather Lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley. He has received a Mellon Foundation Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities, and he was recently named a Brigadier of the Order of the Phoenix by the Greek Government.
Influenced by the place of philosophy in the life of Ancient Greece and Rome as well as by Nietzsche, he questions the transformation of philosophy from a way of living into a purely academic discipline. Similarly, he holds the view that the arts constitute an indispensable part of human life and not a separate domain, of interest only to a few. He teaches courses on Plato, Nietzsche, the philosophy of art, and intention and action.
Panelist Information to be announced.
DETAILS
The Adams Symposium is free and open to the public. There is no need to register if you plan to attend in person.
DATES & TIMES:
Friday, April 4, 2025 | 5:30 pm Keynote Address; 7:00 pm Welcome Reception
Saturday, April 5, 2025 | 10:00 am Panel Discussion
LOCATION: TBA
Many thanks to our sponsors:
