David Rodowick - “Hannah Arendt and the Humanities”

In recent decades, the value of a humanist education has been criticized from all sides with doubts cast upon its relevance in an increasingly precarious world. David Rodowick, Glenn A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, defends a philosophical education in the humanities not in terms of canons, methods, or disciplines to be mastered, nor even knowledges and skills to be acquired and transferred. But rather, the humanities are something deeper and more fundamental—the continuous forging of a revisable moral life guided by reason in open and contingent intersubjective conversations with others. In other words, the humanities in its deepest sense conceived as a lifelong education in judgment. Teaching in the humanities has no more important goal. This presentation is part of the Humanities Day event and will be both in-person and live streamed. To register, go to https://humanitiesday.uchicago.edu/registration.