Philosopher Thomas M. Scanlon Jr. to give Tanner Lecture

January 5, 2007
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ANN ARBOR—Harvard University philosopher Thomas M. Scanlon Jr. will deliver the University of Michigan’s Tanner Lecture on Human Values, titled “The Status of Well-Being,” at 4 p.m. Oct. 25 in Rackham Amphitheater.

A panel of three influential scholars will respond to Scanlon’s lecture in a symposium at 9:30 a.m. Oct. 26 in the Michigan Room of the Michigan League. Both the Tanner Lecture and the symposium are free and open to the public.

Scanlon is currently the Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity at Harvard University. He previously taught at Princeton University. Since receiving his Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard in 1966, Scanlon has been awarded MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships. He was a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University, and was invited to deliver the Tanner Lecture at Oxford’s Brasenose College in 1986.

Participants in the Oct. 26 symposium include Peter Hammond, professor of economics, Stanford University; Shelly Kagan, the Henry R. Luce Professor of Social Thought and Ethics, Yale University; and Cass R. Sunstein, the Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor of Jurisprudence, Law School, and Department of Political Science, at the University of Chicago.

The Tanner Lecture on Human Values is funded by a grant from Obert C. Tanner and is established at six universities in the United States and in England: the U-M, Utah, Harvard, Stanford, Oxford and Cambridge.

Previous U-M Tanner lecturers have included sociologist William Julius Wilson, novelists Amos Oz and Toni Morrison and political economist and historian Albert O. Hirschman.

Cass R. SunsteinU-M News and Information ServicesUniversity of Michigan