School of Law Author Series 2020/21. Seminar 21 with Professor Brian Leiter.
School of Law Author Series 2020/21 - Conversations with Donna Lyons. Seminar 21 with Professor Brian Leiter.
Brian Leiter, Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Chicago Law School, will speak about ‘Marx’s Philosophy Today’, at Trinity College Dublin on 9 March. We are also delighted to welcome Professor Brian O'Connor (Head of School, UCD Philosophy) to the discussion.
Date and time: 7pm (Dublin) / 1pm (Chicago), Tuesday, 9 March 2021
Attendees can join the webinar directly via Zoom and the event will be simultaneously live-streamed on the Law School Facebook Page. This event is free and open to all and there will be an opportunity for Q&A. The webinar can accommodate 100 attendees and participants will be admitted on a first come, first served basis. If the webinar fills to capacity, it will be possible to watch the Facebook Live Stream, and a recording will also be made available following the event. We look forward to seeing you there!
Brian Leiter is Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the Center for Law, Philosophy, and Human Values at the University of Chicago Law School. Brian Leiter came to the Law School in 2008, after thirteen years at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was (at the time) the youngest chairholder in the history of the law school. He has also been a Visiting Professor of Law at Yale University, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and the University of Paris X-Nanterre, and a Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Oxford University and University College London.
His teaching and research interests are in moral, political, and legal philosophy, in both the Anglophone and Continental European traditions, and the law of evidence. His books include Nietzsche on Morality (Routledge, 2002; 2nd ed., 2015), Naturalizing Jurisprudence (Oxford, 2007), Why Tolerate Religion? (Princeton, 2013), and Moral Psychology with Nietzsche (Oxford, 2019). Recent papers include “The Death of God and the Death of Morality” (The Monist, 2019) and “Legal Positivism as a Realist Theory of Law” (The Cambridge Companion to Legal Positivism, 2021). He is presently working on two books: one exploring realism in political and legal theory, From a Realist Point of View, for Oxford University Press, and a co-authored one on Marx, for Routledge.
About ‘Marx's Philosophy Today’:
Leiter proposes that Marxism in academic philosophy has collapsed into irrelevant moral philosophy under the influence of G.A. Cohen (in the Anglophone tradition) and J. Habermas (in the German tradition). But the core of Marxism was always a descriptive-explanatory theory about historical and economic change. Topics to be discussed include historical materialism and the irrationality at the core of capitalism, the Marxian theory of ideology (and its applications to law and morality), and the abrogation of freedom by wage slavery under capitalism.
Many of these ideas are broached in three pieces by Professor Leiter, which are below: