"The Arab Spring and the Israeli Spring"

(Henry Bugbee Annual Lecture on Philosophy)

8:00 PM Friday, February 20, 2015
University Center Ballroom

"Betrayal: Political and Personal"

3:10 PM Friday, February 20, 2015
Gallagher Business Building 123

Please join us for a seminar with Avishai Margalit, one of the foremost living philosophers and particularly renowned as a brilliant commentator on contemporary moral issues facing Western societies. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1970 from Hebrew University in Jerusalem and taught there until his retirement in 2006. He also was the Rockefeller Fellow in 1995-1996 at Princeton’s University Center for Human Values, the Bertelsman Professor in 2001-2002 at Oxford University, and the Tanner Lecturer in 2005 at Stanford University. He held the George F. Kennan professorship from 2006-2011 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is currently a visiting professor of law and philosophy at Stanford University. His seminar at Stanford, “Betrayal and Loyalty, Treason and Trust,” draws on a rich variety of philosophical, historical, and literary works.

In addition to Professor Margalit’s work as a teacher of philosophy, he provides cogent and independent-minded analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the broader struggle between Islam and the West, for The New York Review of Books and other publications. The extraordinary range of his published work reflects the protean variety of his intellectual interests and competencies. His books include:

• Idolatry (with Moshe Halbertal, 1992)
• The Decent Society (1996)
• Views in Review: Politics and Culture in the State of the Jews (1998)
• The Ethics of Memory (2002)
• Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (with Ian Baruma, 2004)
• On Compromise with Rotten Compromises (2009, the 2012 winner of the Philosophical Book Award, given by the Hannover Institute of Philosophical Research)

Deserving of special mention among Professor Margalit’s honors are the Spinoza Lens Award in 2001 by the International Spinoza Foundation in Amsterdam; the E.M.E.T. Prize in 2007, given by the Israeli prime minister, for civic education; and the Israel Prize in Philosophy in 2010, awarded by the State of Israel as its highest honor. The Israel Prize committee described Professor Margalit as “one of the most important philosophers in the State of Israel and one of the most valued in the world today.”

The seminar and lecture are free and open to the public.