The Tanner Lectures on Human Values online library
April 25, 2007 2:57 PM   Subscribe

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values are all online for you to peruse. The library consists of around 180 full text PDFs by a wide variety of authors -- Christine Korsgaard, Antonin Scalia, Jared Diamond, John Rawls, Richard Dawkins, Frans de Waal E.O. Wilson, Francis Fukuyama and the previously mentioned Elaine Scarry among them. Lots of interesting reading to be... read. Navigation is to the left. The collection is sorted alphabetically by author.
posted by cog_nate (12 comments total) 30 users marked this as a favorite
 
so bill viola is hosting tanner lectures? wow.

Man, the navigation sublinks read like a who's who of philosophy. Thanks for the post.
posted by phaedon at 3:10 PM on April 25, 2007


damn, only the text of the lectures is available, no podcasts?
posted by bhouston at 3:25 PM on April 25, 2007


Nice find, thanks for posting it (hi cog_nate).
posted by sleepy pete at 4:04 PM on April 25, 2007


Thanks for this link.

I have actually read the Scalia Tanner lecture in that incarnation. But it also was adapted into his book A Matter of Interpretation. I highly recommend that book to anyone who wants to be able to read and understand constitutional and statutory interpretation (and thus be able to talk intelligently about it). Scalia presents his argument, which is similar to this Tanner lecture. There is are then rebuttals from Professors Larry Tribe, Gordon Wood, Mary Ann Glendon, and Ronald Dworkin. Then Scalia replies to their responses. It is great stuff.

I'd also highly recommend Stephen Breyer's Tanner lecture on Active Liberty (which was also turned into a book). It's near unimpeachable stuff and will teach you how to understand that the Constitution is a document which constitutes a government to encourage citizens to utilize active liberty; not a document protecting negative liberty (even though the majority of modern political discourse attempts to (ab)use the document so).
posted by dios at 4:30 PM on April 25, 2007


Gah! Too much excellent content! Too little time to read! *headdesk*
posted by everichon at 4:43 PM on April 25, 2007


Great, great stuff and thanks for the post. Korsgaard's had been on my mental list to look for since I knew she was giving them, but I'd somehow forgotten to write it down.

On one page, you see Nagel, Nozick, Nussbaum, O'Neil, AND Parfit. It's like rolling in the warmth of moral philosophy.

bhouston is right. Podcasts would make this even better.
posted by ontic at 5:56 PM on April 25, 2007


Hi, sleepy pete!

dios, yeah, I think virtually all of the lectures get fleshed out and then published. I'm reading de Waal's Primates and Philosophers right now. It's based on his 2005 lecture.
posted by cog_nate at 6:49 PM on April 25, 2007


Re: Elaine Scarry. I followed an Amazon link to one of her books and found this in the Publishers Weekly review:

[Scarry] is best known for her 1985 study of torture and physical pain, The Body in Pain, and for her much-publicized contention, first expressed in the New York Review of Books, that electromagnetic interference caused the crash of TWA Flight 800

Allll righty then!
posted by storybored at 7:46 PM on April 25, 2007




Excellent.
posted by OmieWise at 6:50 AM on April 26, 2007


Weird - J.M. Coetzee's lecture is reading a work of fiction that eventually became Elizabeth Costello. Great book. This is a fantastic FPP!
posted by bonecrusher at 9:23 AM on April 26, 2007


Coetzee's lectures were also published as The Lives of Animals.
posted by OmieWise at 9:30 AM on April 26, 2007


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