James Miller, chair of liberal studies and professor of politics at the New School for Social Research, will speak on “Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche” Tuesday, Sept. 25, at 7:30 p.m. in the Austin Reading Room in the Nicholson Library at Linfield College.
Miller’s lecture will be based on his latest book, “Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche,” in which he explores the lives of 12 great philosophers and reconstructs their answers to life’s most fundamental questions.
Miller, who received his Ph.D. in the history of ideas from Brandeis University, is the author of five other books, “Flowers in the Dustbin: the Rise of Rock & Roll, 1947-1977,” winner of an ASCAP-Deems Taylor award and a Ralph Gleason BMI award for best music book of 1999; “The Passion of Michel Foucault,” an interpretive essay on the life of the French philosopher and a National Book Critics Circle Finalist for General Nonfiction, which has been translated into nine languages: “’Democracy is in the Streets’: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago,” an account of the American student movement of the 1960s, also a National Book Critics Circle Finalist for General Nonfiction and recently recommended by Michael Kazin as one of the five essential books to understand the roots of the Occupy Wall Street movement; “Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy,” a study of the origins of modern democracy; and “History and Human Existence – From Marx to Merleau-Ponty,” an analysis of Marx and the French existentialists.
The debate is sponsored by the Frederick Douglass Forum on Law, Rights, and Justice, launched by the Department of Political Science to provide opportunities for students, faculty, staff and the public to participate in discussions of the rule of law, individual rights and competing conceptions of justice. For more information, contact Nick Buccola, assistant professor of political science, 503-883-2246, nbuccol@linfield.edu.
