As our society becomes increasingly dominated by technology, market logics, and commodified culture, what has happened the ideals of humanism, democracy and equality? Although some see the concept of humanism as looking backward and marked by identity politics and Euro-centrism, I will defend a modern concept of humanism, one that can serve to transvalue our existing values and defend a more humane form of ethical life.
Michael J. Thompson is Professor of Political Theory in the Dept. Political Science, William Paterson University. He is the Founding Editor of the quarterly journal Logos: A Journal of Modern Society & Culture. He is also the author of The Politics of Inequality (Columbia, 2007), The Domestication of Critical Theory (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) and the forthcoming The Specter of Babel: A Reconstruction of Political Judgment (SUNY Press, 2020). This talk is based on the book he is currently writing, The Disenchantment of the Good: Ethical Life in an Age of Nihilism.
