The Philosophy Department, the Evolutionary Studies Program, the EvoS Club, and the NorthEastern Evolutionary Psychology Society present “Ethics as a Human Project,” a talk by Dr. Philip Kitcher, on Thursday, April 10, 4:45 PM in Lecture Center 100.

What makes ways of living good or bad, actions right or wrong? Can we make objective judgments about what is valuable? Western philosophy has struggled with these questions. This lecture will suggest that we can liberate ourselves from familiar difficulties in answering them if we treat ethical practice as an evolving project, with deep roots in our human (and pre-human) past.

Philip Kitcher is the John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He studied at Cambridge and at Princeton, where he obtained a PhD in the history and philosophy of science. He has taught at Vassar College, the University of Vermont, the University of Minnesota, and the University of California at San Diego, and he is a past president of the American Philosophical Association. The author of over a dozen books, Dr. Kitcher has written about philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of biology as well as ethical and political constraints on scientific research. His recent work focuses on the relation between science and religion, and evolution and ethics. He has also written on the work of writers James Joyce and Thomas Mann and the music of Richard Wagner.

We gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Provost’s Office and Campus Auxiliary Services.