Wolf to examine meaningful life in a meaningless world

Wolf
to examine meaningful life in a meaningless world
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The 2000-2001
Rice University Lecture Series on Ethics, Politics and Society
continues Feb. 1 with a talk by moral philosopher Susan
Wolf. She will lecture on “A Meaningful Life in a Meaningless
World.”

The lecture
will examine questions that confront all human beings: What
do we mean when we wish our lives to have “meaning”
or worry that our lives have become meaningless? What is
it to lead a meaningful life? Wolf’s lecture will try
to articulate and analyze what we mean by the idea of a
meaningful life. She also will confront the question of
whether it is desirable that one’s life should be meaningful
and, if so, why. After all, a happy life need not be a meaningful
one. She will pose questions about how, against the immense
backdrop of a vast cosmos, can humans lives have meaning.

Wolf is a professor
of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Majoring in math and philosophy, she graduated from Yale
in 1974. She did her graduate work at Princeton and has
taught at Harvard and at the University of Maryland as well
as Johns Hopkins. She has held visiting appointments at
the Australian National University and the University of
Utrecht in the Netherlands and has held fellowships from
the American Council of Learned Societies, the American
Association of University Women and the Guggenheim Foundation.

She is the author
of “Freedom Within Reason” (Oxford, 1990), a book
on free will and moral responsibility, and has written numerous
articles on ethics and the philosophy of the mind. These
include “Morality and Partiality,” “Two Levels
of Pluralism,” “Self-Interest and Interest in
Selves,” “Moral Saints” and “Asymmetrical
Freedom.” Her current research focuses on the relations
among happiness, morality and meaningfulness in life.