The Tanner Lectures on Human Values are presented annually at a select list of universities around the world. The University Center serves as host to these lectures, in which an eminent scholar from philosophy, religion, the humanities, sciences, creative arts or learned professions, or a person eminent in political or social life, is invited to present a series of lectures reflecting on scholarly and scientific learning related to “the entire range of values pertinent to the human condition.”
Fintan O’Toole, a journalist, author, and columnist for the Irish Times, will consider the relationship between democracy and art. In Lecture II: Negative Capability, he argues that democracy cannot sustain itself without what poet John Keats called “negative capability”: the capacity to live with doubts, uncertainties, and mysteries, without having to impose apparent resolutions. The current crisis of democracy is rooted in the loss of this capacity and the insistence that contradictions are inherently intolerable. How can artists seek to restore it?
More information here.
This lecture is part of a series. O’Toole will deliver Lecture I: Against Artfulness on Wednesday, November 9.
SPONSORS
Center for Collaborative History
Department of Anthropology
Department of Art & Archaeology
Department of English
Department of Philosophy
Department of Politics
Lewis Center for the Arts
Princeton School of Public and International Affairs
Princeton University Art Museum
Princeton University Humanities Council
Princeton University Public Lectures
The Program in Creative Writing at Princeton
The Program in Journalism at Princeton
