Yale Bulletin and Calendar

January 28, 2000

Volume 28, Number 18

Castle Lectures to explore "The Cosmopolitan Tradition"

Martha Nussbaum, the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, will deliver the four lectures in the 2000 Castle Lecture Series, "The Cosmopolitan Tradition."

Nussbaum's first lecture, titled "Duties of Justice, Duties of Material Aid: Cicero's Problematic Legacy," will be held on Tuesday, Feb. 1. Her second lecture, "Cynic and Stoic Origins: The Worth of Human Dignity," will follow on Wednesday, Feb. 2. Nussbaum will deliver the last two lectures, "Kant and the Stoics: Non-Aggression and Equal Worth" and "Toward a Viable Cosmopolitan" on Feb. 29 and March 1 respectively.

All the talks, which are free and open to the public, will be held at 4 p.m. in the Luce Hall Auditorium, 34 Hillhouse Ave., and will be followed by a reception in the common room.

Nussbaum's intellectual pursuits extend across the areas of ancient Greek philosophy, ethics, political philosophy, philosophy and literature, aesthetics, and law and literature. At the University of Chicago, she has joint appointments at the Law School, Divinity School and philosophy department. Her publications include "Love's Knowledge," "Poetic Justice" and "Sex and Social Justice."

Nussbaum is a member of the Council of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the board of the American Council of Learned Societies. She currently chairs the Committee on the Status of Women of the American Philosophical Association. She previously chaired the Committee on International Cooperation and was a member of the Association's National Board. From 1986 to 1993, Nussbaum was a research advisor at the World Institute for Development Economics Research.

Nussbaum's honors include the PEN Spielvogel-Diamondstein Award for best collection of essays in 1991 and the Brandeis Creative Arts Award in Non-Fiction in 1990.

The Castle Lectures were endowed by John K. Castle to honor his ancestor, the Reverend James Pierpont, one of Yale's original founders. The series is sponsored by the Program in Ethics, Politics and Economics.

Rabbi to discuss link between healing and religion

Rabbi Richard L. Eisenberg of Congregation B'nai Jacobs in Woodbridge will discuss "Miracles and Healing from the Bible through Maimonides to the Present" on Thursday, Feb. 3, as part of the Program for Humanities in Medicine.

His talk will begin at 5 p.m. in the Beaumont Room of the Sterling Hall of Medicine, 333 Cedar St. The event is free and open to the public.

Eisenberg hopes to spread a wider understanding of how both faith and reason can be employed in the healing process. He believes that healing services and prayer groups are no longer solely within the domain of fundamentalist religious groups. Mainstream religious organizations, he believes, have become increasingly interested in creating models of worship designed to promote spiritual and even physical healing.

In his lecture, Eisenberg will explore the Biblical perspective concerning miracles and divine intervention and analyze how Maimonides' view of miracles sheds new light on this issue.

Organic farmer to speak on genetically modified foods

Journalist and organic farmer Shep Ogden will discuss "Cultivating Efficiency: An Organic Perspective on Genetically Modified Foods," on Friday, Jan. 28.

His talk, the first in the second annual Other Voices series, titled "Alternative Perspectives on Environmental Problems," will take place at 4 p.m. in Bowers Auditorium of Sage Hall, 205 Prospect St. The series is free and open to the public. The lecture will be followed by an informal reception.

Ogden is an outspoken critic of genetically modified foods. In his lecture he will discuss the environmental and social effects of biotechnology, and discuss how business, science and the media contribute to those effects.

Owner of The Cook's Garden seed company, Ogden farms in southern Vermont. He lectures in agro-ecology at Green Mountain College in Poultney, Vermont, and has written four books, including "Straight Ahead Organic."

For more information about the lecture series, contact Heather McGray at (203) 772-3726 or via email to heather.mcgray@
yale.edu.

Gates to join celebration of Black History Month

Henry Louis Gates Jr., the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, will be the featured speaker at an event celebrating Black History Month on Friday, Feb. 4, at Calhoun College.

Gates, who also directs Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research, will be the guest at a master's tea that day at 4 p.m. in the Calhoun College library, 189 Elm St. All are invited to attend.

Following the tea, Gates will also be the keynote speaker at a dinner and program being held at 5:30 p.m. and 6:15 p.m. respectively at the college. For information about those events, call (203) 432-0740.

The day's activities are sponsored by Calhoun College and The James Humphrey Hoyt Memorial.

A Yale alumnus who taught at the University from 1979 to 1985, Gates is an expert in African-American literature and cultural theory. He is the author of "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man," "Colored People: A Memoir," "Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture of Wars," "The Signifying Monkey: Towards a Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism" and "Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the Racial Self."

Gates is general editor of the "Norton Anthology of African-American Literature" and a staff writer for the New Yorker, and his articles appear in numerous scholarly periodicals and newspapers. He is coeditor of Transition magazine, which received the 1993 Association of American Publishers Award for "Best New Journal in the Social Sciences and the Humanities."

His other honors include Mellon and MacArthur Prize fellowships, the Zora Neale Hurston Society Award for Cultural Scholarship, the Candle Award of Morehouse College and the Norman Rabb Award of the American Jewish Committee, among others.

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