Public Lectures

<div>Many of us are familiar with Aristotle’s virtue ethics from our student years. We can call up moderation, the golden mean, even practical wisdom (phronesis) and friendship. Nevertheless, a quick tour of the Nicomachean Ethics, as well as an unjustifiably brief visit to Kant and the utilitarians, will prepare us to see what is old and what is new in the radical ethics of Emmanuel Levinas and Knud Ejler Løgstrup. The priority of the other, not only in time but in importance, places the concern with self and self-actualization far into the background. No longer must we concern ourselves, with Kierkegaard, with our own purity of heart. Holiness does not belong to me, but occurs in responsiveness to the other’s suffering.</div> <div><br> <i>Please note the time difference for this event. If you anticipate attending this event in person, the event will be hosted from 5:00-6:30PM PT.&nbsp;<br> &nbsp;</i></div> <p><span data-rte-class="rte-temp"><span class="btn btn-default btn-gold"><a href="https://bostoncollege-lsoe.catalog.instructure.com/browse/pce/courses/and-we-shall-be-changed-radical-ethics-for-the-humanistic-disciplines" style="font-weight: bold;">Register</a></span></span></p> <p>Workshop made possible by the generosity of the John Templeton Foundation.<br> </p>

<div>Clinical psychologists have treated gaslighting as a form of psychological abuse in interpersonal relationships, but the term is increasingly being used to describe manipulative tactics used in politics and culture to support large-scale social injustices like sexism and racism. What is the injury and injustice of gaslighting in this broader sense?</div> <div> </div> <div>Focusing on anger gaslighting as a paradigm case, Dr. Shiloh Whitney argues that gaslighting can be an affective injustice (an injustice that concerns emotions and affective influence). Dr. Whitney appeals both to contemporary scholarship on the moral psychology of anger and to a critical phenomenology of emotion to understand the moral and sociopolitical functions of anger, and to explain why anger gaslighting is a uniquely affective variety of both moral injury and a social injustice. </div> <div> </div> <p><a href="https://youtu.be/XGnkOM778pg"><span class="btn btn-default btn-maroon">Watch full lecture now</span></a></p>

<p>This lecture explores the concept of ars vitae, Latin for the art of living. It calls on ancient ways of thinking about the enduring question of how to live in order to imagine new ways of addressing our challenges.&nbsp;</p> <p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwDIGHbmyPw"><span class="btn btn-default btn-gold">Watch the lecture</span></a></p>

<p>In this talk, poet and novelist Ben Lerner will consider some of the possibilities of aberrant perception – how common auditory and visual distortions, for instance, allow them to experience the constructedness and messiness of the human sensorium. What are some of the aesthetic and social possibilities opened up by hearing the limitations of their hearing or seeing the shared blindspots in their sight? What would it mean to ground the teaching of art and literature in an awareness of the ways they err together? Lerner&#39;s goal is to arrive at an optimistic reading of Niklas Luhmann’s quote that “communication is improbable”-- to refresh the wonder before the fact that there are moments, however fleeting, of common sense.</p>

<p>In this presentation, followed by a question-and-answer forum, Professor Tom Harrison will offer an overview of the Jubilee Centres’ and his own recent research investigating the impact of new and emerging digital technologies on the character and moral development of adolescents. Professor Harrison will outline some of the moral misdemeanors regularly perpetuated and/or experienced by adolescents and how these negatively impact human flourishing. Following this, Professor Harrison will explore how adolescents can be supported to develop digital-wisdom – the ability to ‘do the right thing at the right time whilst using digital technologies’. Research is starting to show how digital-wisdom education can mitigate some of parents’, teachers’, and wider societal concerns about the impact of digital technologies on the health and well-being of adolescents growing up in the digital age.<br /> </p>

<div>Developments in the relatively new field of positive psychology have focused sustained attention on character strengths and virtues, including the three at the heart of this discussion.<br /> </div> <div> </div> <div>Positive psychology tends to foreground the individual in cultivating character strengths; however, virtues are cultivated and sustained in communion with others. This presentation explores a key distinction between hoping-that and hoping-in. While the former describes the content of our hopes, the latter (which has its roots in Aquinas) focuses on how hope is kindled through other agents.</div> <div> </div> <p><b data-rte-class="rte-temp"><span class="btn btn-default btn-gold"><a href="https://bostoncollege-lsoe.catalog.instructure.com/browse/pce/courses/forgiveness-gratitude-and-hope-a-positive-psychological-philosophical-and-theological-examination">Register</a></span></b></p>

<div>Every political community requires a certain degree of self-governance on the part of its citizens. It is impossible to rule, or even live among, those who will not rule themselves. According to Nietzsche and Freud, beneath that commonplace observation lurks an unsavory history of violence, cruelty, and fear. To become civilized, we must turn our aggressive instincts and drives against ourselves. We must learn, in other words, the pain and the pleasure of a bad conscience. </div> <div> </div> <div>In the course of our investigation, we will come upon some unsettling truths about the nature of political power and what it requires of those who are subjected to it, and those who would wield it.</div> <div> </div> <p><span class="btn btn-default btn-gold"><a href="https://bostoncollege-lsoe.catalog.instructure.com/browse/pce/courses/guilt-and-shame-in-the-city-on-the-necessities-of-moral-legislation">Register</a></span></p>

<div>In <i>The Denial of Death</i>, Ernest Becker examines the import that the works of the 19th-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard have on modern psychology. Calling Kierkegaard a psychoanalyst, he argues that the philosopher of religion saw deeper into the human psyche than most analysts today.</div> <div> </div> <div>Reading Kierkegaard not as a philosopher in the classical sense but a proto-psychotherapist, a precursor to Freud, Becker, Girard, and Lacan, participants will trace the early understandings of such fundamental psychological concepts as anxiety, despair, and repetition to the works of Kierkegaard and will explore his own concepts of absurdity, faith, mimesis, ethics, and desire. By the end of this course, participants will have an in-depth knowledge of the major works and ideas of one of modernity’s most prominent and influential thinkers.</div> <div> </div> <p><span class="btn btn-default btn-gold"><a href="https://bostoncollege-lsoe.catalog.instructure.com/browse/pce/courses/kierkegaard-for-clinicians-finitude-despair-and-the-absurdity-of-hope">Register</a></span></p>

<p>In the most general sense, Melancholic Joy is about how to contend with the possibility that the rational response to reality is despair. Working with engaging and accessible examples, diverse expressions of poetic and literary insight, and clear philosophical arguments, Dr. Brian Treanor offers an honest assessment of the human condition. It is one that unflinchingly acknowledges both the everyday frustrations and extraordinary horrors that counsel despair and the seemingly inexhaustible opportunities for joy and wonder that suggest the possibility of something beyond despair. The point is to see both aspects of reality clearly. Denying or dismissing the possibility of despair is a fool’s errand, first because there are legitimate reasons for despair, and second because much despair is not rooted in reasons at all, but rather in a kind of global mood or attunement.</p> <p>However, remaining insensitive to the more salutary aspects of reality is its own kind of failure-to-see, because beauty and goodness are happening everywhere, whether it is noticed or not. Dr. Treanor&#39;s goal, then, is not to argue against despair (because there are good arguments for it, and because emotionally rooted forms of despair are not vulnerable to reason at all); rather, the goal is to be trained to see the full picture, the beauty as well as the brutality, and then to cultivate habits that maximize the former while dealing with the latter.<br /> </p>

<p><span style="">Religious phenomena that include rituals and written accounts of spiritual experiences have been subject to psychological analysis for a long time. Some, like those of Freud, have been discounted as highly reductive and prejudicial while some like those of Jung have been discounted as no more than spiritual accounts in another form. The approach of William James has attracted more serious and measured consideration by scholarship interested in ways of analyzing religious phenomena using psychological tools. Dr. Ariel Glucklich&#39;s approach since the mid-1990s has been to simplify the task by focusing on religious phenomena that are both embodied and basic. By basic, he refers to affect-based events. This has included a study of the uses of pain in religious life and more recently, the uses of pleasure (both embodied and mental). The descriptive component of this work is both rich and simple: there is a multitude of examples in religious life for voluntary and self-inflicted pain geared to the production of altered states of consciousness. There are just as many examples of the use of pleasure, both discursive and ritual, in religious documents and in anthropological descriptions.</span><br /> </p>

<div>While many psychosocial theorists have drawn on psychoanalysis to explore conscious and unconscious connections between the psychic and the social, most such efforts have been in the realm of “applied psychoanalysis,” that is, the exploration of unconscious process in group relations, institutions, cultures, historical eras. Few, but increasingly more psychosocial psychoanalytic writers are taking up how socially shaped unconscious processes emerge and are worked with in the clinic and in institutions.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>In this talk, Dr. Lynne Layton reviews some of the psychosocial psychoanalytic theory that has informed clinical work, including the work of Fanon, Fromm, liberation psychologists, critical psychologists, psychoanalytic feminist theorists, and critical race theorists. Her focus is on how concepts that bridge the psychic and the social, without reducing one to the other, have found their way into clinical theory and practice.&nbsp;<br> </div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <p><b data-rte-class="rte-temp"><span class="btn btn-default btn-gold"><a href="https://bostoncollege-lsoe.catalog.instructure.com/browse/pce/courses/social-psychoanalysis-theory-and-practice">Register</a></span></b></p>

<div>Levinas’s philosophy provides a remarkably focused and prolonged attempt to present a singular idea. The suffering of the other person, he argues, renders me responsible without qualification, evasion, or limitation. Patterned after medical models for healing, the language surrounding suffering has been dominated by attempts to comprehend the cause and purpose of suffering. Healing, in medicine, is often maximized by comprehensive knowledge of the injury. Levinas resists this model, and psychologists who read his work find themselves torn between two different worlds.&nbsp;</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>This seminar takes its orientation from Levinas’s article “Useless Suffering,” in which Levinas makes the striking claim that suffering can be “meaningful in me, useless in the other.”<br> </div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <p><span class="btn btn-default btn-gold"><b><a href="https://bostoncollege-lsoe.catalog.instructure.com/browse/pce/courses/unjustifying-pain-levinass-philosophy-of-useless-suffering">Register</a></b></span><b><br> </b>&nbsp;</p> <p><i>Workshop made possible by the generosity of the John Templeton Foundation</i></p>