On the 17th of May, Professor Quentin Skinner delivered the annual Avineri Lecture at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Professor Skinner’s lecture was titled ‘On the Person of the State’. This year also marks the 20th anniversary of Professor Skinner’s Liberty Before Liberalism. He delivered the keynote lecture on ‘Neo-Roman Liberty in the English Revolution’ at a conference in honour of this anniversary at the University of Amsterdam. The conference was entitled Freedom: Liberalism, Republicanism and Beyond: A Workshop in Honour of the 20th anniversary of Quentin Skinner’s Liberty Before Liberalism, and more information about the event can be found here.

On the 10th of May, Dr. Mira Siegelberg gave a talk at the Planetary Futures Seminar Series based at University College London’s Institute of Advanced Studies. The seminar series aims to explore the following themes:

What is the future of the planet? Whether the impending ecological crisis, the movement of hegemonic ideological socio-political realms or the techno-scientific promises of life on mars, Planetary Futures engages a broad range of disciplines. This seminar series will generate dialogue across disciplines and we invite participation from all who have interest in the planetary, whether as a scale of inquiry or an object of study. The talks will be of interest to those in the social sciences, particularly Anthropology, Sociology, History, Politics, STS, Geography as well as the Sciences, particularly Physics, Astronomy, Geology and Space Science. The goal is also to spur a reflection among the broader interested public on the construction of planetary imaginaries and interrogate our current academic apparatus for thinking about planetary futures.

More details can be found at this website.

Professor Georgios Varouxakis will give a Lecture at the Université Paul Valéry – Montpellier as part of the series of lectures on the theme “Philosophie européenne et le monde”. The lecture will take place on 11th of May 2017 and its title is “Les relations internationales selon John Stuart Mill et Auguste Comte”. For more details see, please click here.

On the 10th of May, Professor Richard Bourke will give the 9th Gerald Stourzh Lecture on the History of Human Rights and Democracy. The abstract of his lecture, ‘Inventing Democracy’, can be found below:

Since democracy is a creation of human culture, it must in some sense have been “invented”. This does not mean that the process of invention was deliberate. Instead it was a fortuitous product of human struggle. However, unlike many other political values and practices, democracy was not invented just once, but twice. This lecture is concerned with the relationship between these two moments, between the original formation of ancient democracy and its subsequent renaissance in modern history. Both events are shrouded in obscurity. First of all there is no record marking its first establishment in Athens. As a result, historians disagree about when it came into being. Then, secondly, the circumstances of its rebirth in the Enlightenment are no less complex, spawning controversy about when modern democracy began. One fundamental reason for the uncertainty is that the relationship between the ancient regime form and its modern re-incarnation has rarely been systematically explored. My argument is that a clearer understanding of what modern democracy took from its ancient predecessor can clarify how the modern version was brought into existence, and how it came in due course to be transformed.