Is Virtue Sufficient for Happiness?
The Morningside Institute
by Nathaniel Ijams, The Morningside Institute
3w ago
According to ancient philosophers, all human beings want to be happy. But how can we achieve this?  In Books 3 and 4 of his dialogue “On the Greatest Good and Evil” (De finibus bonorum et malorum), Cicero and his interlocutor, the Stoic Cato, discuss what guarantees a person’s supreme happiness. Is it enough to be a morally good person (as the Stoics maintain) or do you also need some additional goods, such a health, wealth, or social standing? This ultimately raises the question of whether our happiness is entirely under our control, or whether external factors by necessit ..read more
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Secular Hope
The Morningside Institute
by Luke Seminara, The Morningside Institute
9M ago
Tradition describes courage, moderation, justice, and prudence as the cardinal virtues (a list going back to Plato) and faith, hope, and charity as the theological virtues (a list going back to Saint Paul). Can we conceive of hope as a virtue, as a good quality for people to have, without a theological framework — without any notion of salvation? On Monday, February 10, 2024, the Morningside Institute hosted Dhananjay Jagannathan, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, for a discussion on the possibility of secular hope. The seminar also explored questions including: What ty ..read more
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Natality and the Counter-Tradition of Birth
The Morningside Institute
by Luke Seminara, The Morningside Institute
9M ago
Birth is one of the most fraught and polarized issues of our time, at the center of debates on abortion, gender, work, and medicine. But birth is not only an issue; it is a fundamental part of the human condition, and, alongside death, the most consequential event in human life. Yet it remains dramatically unexplored. Although we have long intellectual traditions of wrestling with mortality, few have ever heard of natality, the term political theorist Hannah Arendt used to describe birth’s active role in our lives. On February 7, 2024, Morningside held a talk with Jennifer ..read more
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The Arabic Roots of Medieval Scholasticism
The Morningside Institute
by Luke Seminara, The Morningside Institute
1y ago
The translation of Avicenna and other writers of the Islamic Golden Age into Latin was one of the most formative events in the history of Western Philosophy. Professor Therese Cory (Notre Dame) provides a glimpse of the “detective story” of how knowledge was transmitted from Muslim scholars to the European scholastics. She also discusses (24:48) how one particular idea from Averroes played an important part in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas and continues to influence Christian theology today. As it turns out, the familiar claim that medieval scholastic philosophy was simply a rehash of Aris ..read more
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Transcendence, Providence, and Divine Agency in Nature
The Morningside Institute
by Luke Seminara, Prof. William Carroll (Oxford)
1y ago
This is the third lecture in a four-part series by Prof. William Carroll (Oxford) titled “Evolution, Cosmology, and Creation: From Darwin and Hawking to Aquinas”. This lecture explores whether it is possible to have an idea of God as providential (i.e. as someone whose Will is never frustrated) in the context of an evolving universe of contingency and chance. These lectures were presented from September 23 to October 14, 2020 at the Morningside Institute ..read more
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The City and Its Gods: Seeking the Go(o)ds of the City, from Aristotle to Activism
The Morningside Institute
by Luke Seminara, The Morningside Institute
1y ago
The first of two lectures by critic in architecture, Prof. Kyle Dugdale (Yale and Columbia). It is a commonplace of urban history to assert that the cities of antiquity belonged to their gods, and that those gods belonged to their cities. Athens belonged to Athena, and Athena to Athens, just as Babylon belonged to Marduk, and Marduk to Babylon. The city’s architecture reinforced those claims. But what of the modern city? Who are its tutelary deities, and where are its temples? In this two-part lecture series, Kyle Dugdale (Columbia and Yale) will explore how a city’s architecture reflects and ..read more
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Beginner's Mind with James Valentini
The Morningside Institute
by Luke Seminara, The Morningside Institute
1y ago
In his famous Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Shunryu Suzuki writes, “In the Beginner’s Mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.” These words have served as a guide for James Valentini during his time as a professor of Chemistry and then much-beloved dean of Columbia College. As he has developed it, the concept of beginner’s mind encourages us to put aside the judgment of others as our guide and to use self-awareness and self-reflection to formulate our own assessments of the world. It reminds each of us to consider the possibility that we might be entirely wrong in an ..read more
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Language Rights and Wrongs: Originalism, Textualism, Traditionalism, or Activism?
The Morningside Institute
by Luke Seminara, The Morningside Institute
1y ago
On Monday, October 9, the Morningside Institute and the Galileo Center at Columbia Law School hosted Joshua Katz (AEI) for the last lecture in our series Language Rights and Wrongs. This series explores the relationship between world and word, honing in on ancient texts, namely Homer, Plato, and the Bible. This evening's conversation was not about the Constitution of the United States per se but rather the things that interest comparative linguists when they read texts like Homer's Iliad. These peculiarities are related to larger and increasingly pressing issues of how to interpret words and p ..read more
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Learning to See: Images in Theology and Philosophy
The Morningside Institute
by Luke Seminara, The Morningside Institute
1y ago
We instinctively think of images as things we create, control, and consume. But in this lecture, Prof. Thomas Pfau (Duke) argued that our encounter with images and the visible world as a whole serves as a test of our spiritual and moral condition. Following a brief overview of his recent book on this subject, Prof. Pfau's lecture considered three images in some depth: the famous Pantocrator icon from Mt. Sinai monastery; a painting by Jan van Eyck; and a portrait by Paul Cézanne. On Wednesday, February 15, 2023, the Morningside Institute hosted Professor Thomas Pfau for an onlin ..read more
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Morality and Mortality in Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop | Sr. Ann Astell
The Morningside Institute
by Luke Seminara, The Morningside Institute
1y ago
This presentation by Sr. Ann Astell, Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame, was given as part of "The Moral Imagination of the Novel", a conference held at Columbia University on 4-5 October 2019. The conference was co-hosted by the Morningside Institute, Columbia University's Department of Philosophy, and the Thomistic Institute. The program included lectures by Paul Elie (Georgetown), Lauren Kopajtic (Fordham), Dhananjay Jagannathan (Columbia), Sr. Ann Astell ( Notre Dame), and Thomas Pavel (Chicago). For more information about this and other events, please visit MorningsideI ..read more
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