THE QUEST FOR MEANING: THINKING ABOUT ETHICS IN A WORLD OF CONFLICTING BELIEFS

Four-Week Course

Dates: Four Tuesdays, Oct. 7–28
Time: 6:30–8 p.m.
Location: See Course Locations and Parking page
Course Fee: $110 (discounted to $88 for select groups)

Robert Kane, Ph.D., Philosophy, UT Austin

We live in a world of many conflicting voices, philosophies, religions and points of view about fundamental matters of value. Who could fail to be affected by this modern Tower of Babel and not wonder as a consequence about the truth of their own beliefs? Are there objective values, and can we find common ethical ground in the welter of conflicting beliefs? This course will deal with such questions with the assumptions that we must begin to address old questions about values in new ways if our moral consciousness is to keep pace with the vast changes of the modern world. Topics we will consider along the way include conflicts between public and private morality, the degree to which law should enforce morality, the teaching of values in the schools, whether all values are relative, the role of religion in public life, the limits of liberty and privacy, the erosion of shared values in modern societies and how that might be remedied, and others. Discussion will be welcomed on all these matters.

Robert Kane is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. His M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy were received from Yale University. He is the author of seven books and over sixty articles on the philosophy of mind and action, ethical theory and social ethics, the theory of value, philosophy of religion and philosophy of science, including Free Will and Values (State University of New York Press, 1985), Through the Moral Maze: Searching for Absolute Values in a Pluralistic World (M. E. Sharpe Publishers, 1994), The Significance of Free Will (Oxford University Press, 1996), A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will (Oxford University Press, 2005). He is editor of The Oxford Handbook of Free Will (2002) and a multiple contributor to the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. His book, The Significance of Free Will was the first annual winner of the Robert W. Hamilton Faculty Book Award. His video and audio taped lecture series The Quest for Meaning: Values, Ethics and the Modern Experience appears in The Great Courses on Tape series produced and distributed by The Teaching Company of Chantilly, Virginia. Since coming to the university in 1970, Professor Kane has received fifteen major teaching awards, including the Friar Society Centennial Teaching Award; the President's Excellence Award for teaching in the University's Honors Program, Plan II; the Liberal Arts Council Teaching Award’; the Delta Epsilon Sigma award for teaching introductory freshman classes; among others. In 1995, he was named an inaugural member of the university's Academy of Distinguished Teachers.