NASHVILLE, Tenn. — A philosopher from Emory University will deliver
Vanderbilt University‘s Berry Lecture, an annual community lecture
designed to show how philosophy can impact our lives.
Thomas Flynn, the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at
Emory, will speak at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, March 15, in Room 126 of Wilson
Hall on the Vanderbilt campus. A reception will precede the lecture at
6:30 p.m.
Flynn will speak on “Philosophy as a Way of Life.” The Berry Lecture is free and the public is welcome.
Flynn is the author of several books on existentialism and Jean-Paul
Sartre. His latest work is the second of two volumes titled Sartre, Foucault and Historical Reason: A Poststructuralist Mapping of History.
“As philosophy has become more ‘academic‘ and ‘professional,‘ it has
become more technical and unavailable to the general public,” Flynn
said. “But it was not always so. √ñ Socrates and his pupil Plato
supported a much broader understanding of philosophy than simply the
constructing of clever arguments for what people believed anyway. In
fact, in their view, philosophy proposed a certain way of living and
not simply or primarily a set of abstract ideas, systematically
arranged.
“The challenge is to reunite, or at least to intertwine, these divergent strands once more.”
Flynn will deliver the 18th Berry Lecture. The series began in 1988
funded by John and Shirley Lachs, Alan Berry and Kendall Berry. In
addition to the annual lecture, the Berry Fund finances travel for
graduate philosophy students and awards annual prizes for outstanding
service, prospectuses and publications.
Media contact: Jim Patterson, (615) 322-NEWS
jim.patterson@vanderbilt.edu