Calendar of Events

Renewing Philosophical Ethics Today?

In Spring 2013, the European Union’s internal unity and external status came freshly into question. The occasion was the fractious discussion of the EU’s next five-year budget. That discussion concluded all too weakly. By contrast, some months earlier the EU’s two major global trading partners, the US and China, had in the one case re-elected its incumbent president for another four years and in the other appointed a new president for the next ten years. Shortly afterewards, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and the International Monetary Fund issued two very negative reports. Their analyses demonstrated that the EU’s continuing struggles with the manifold crises that had begun in the US five years previously were -- ineffectual. Resolving such crises would require serious self-limitation at many levels. The present lectures and seminars aim to elucidate, if only in a small way, the nature of such necessary limitations in several key areas of the political, social, and personal dimensions of European lives today. The cardinal notion will turn out to be what I shall be calling “bounded sovereignties.”

Two lectures and three seminars sponsored by the Philosophy Faculties of the Palacky University (Olomouc) and the Charles University (Prague) in cooperation with the Eastern European Ethics Network (Olomouc, Cracow, Ruzomberok, and Lviv).