Tuesday, September 4, 2018, 11:30 AM – 1 PM EDT

Ann Hartle,  Professor of Philosophy Emerita

“Why Montaigne Matters: Recovering the Lost Virtue of Civility”

Over the past few decades, we have all heard repeated calls for greater civility in our public life. At the same time, the demand for greater civility is often exposed as the mask for an attempt to silence one’s opponents and to shut down free speech. This situation reveals our confusion over what civility is and what it is not. Civility is not a code of conduct but a virtue, a moral character that cannot be reduced to rules. If we wish to understand what civility is, we need to see it in its origins, its emergence as a new moral character at the beginning of the modern era. This character was first displayed and given expression in the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. And no one is better suited to share what Montaigne had to say than Ann Hartle, who has already published several books on this major thinker, and who’s working on another one right now.