2000: After the Fall: The Future of Ethics in the Humanities

"All the King's horses and all the King's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again"

In the last half of this century, the text, empirical knowledge, history, and the author have all, like Humpty-Dumpty, taken a great fall within the academy. Theoretical shifts in the status of the objects of academic study have altered the base on which academic practice rests.

The purpose of this conference is to examine the possibilities of action available to artists and intellectuals in the wake of this shift and particularly to focus on the ways in which questions of human ethics may serve to constitute, bound, and interrogate our artistic and intellectual activities.

• Where does intellectual inquiry intersect with social responsibility?
• What notion of ethics could underlie the work of public intellectuals today?
• Can or should we recover through our studies some notion of ethics, personal responsibility, or wisdom?
• In what ways could or should our work as students of the humanities be brought to bear on the questions of how men and women can live in the world?