The Tanner Lectures on Human Values – archive
2020s
2022: Providing for a Nation’s Health, in a Global Context – Professor Allen Buchanan, Professor Emeritus, Duke University; Professor of Philosophy, University of Arizona; Professor of the Philosophy of International Law, Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College, London.
Respondents: Professor Cécile Fabre, Professor of Political Philosophy and Senior Research Fellow in Politics, All Souls College, Oxford; Sir Paul Tucker, Research Fellow, Harvard Kennedy School; author, Unelected Power; Professor Trish Greenhalgh, Professor of Primary Care Health Sciences, Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, Oxford University; Professor Ama de-Graft Aikins, British Academy Global Professor, University College London; Professor Alexander Bird, Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy, University of Cambridge; Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge.
2021: Black Mirror: Race, AI and Inequity in the 21st Century – Professor Ruha Benjamin, Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, Founding Director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, and author of the award-winning book Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code.
Respondents: Dr Shakir Mohammed, Senior Staff Scientist at DeepMind; Associate Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, Cambridge; Professor Sennay Ghebreab, Professor of Socially-Intelligent AI, University of Amsterdam; Dr Mónica G Moreno Figueroa, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University of Cambridge.
2020: Gaining Power, Losing Control – Professor Jonathan L. Zittrain, George Bemis Professor of International Law, Harvard University.
Respondents: Dr Stephen Cave, Executive Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge; Professor Martin Rees, Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics, University of Cambridge; Professor Sophia Roosth, Frederick S. Danziger Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University.
Read a report by David Gosling.
2010s
2018: The Free Speech Century: A Retrospective and a Guide – Professor Lee Bollinger, President of Columbia University.
Respondents: Professor Rae Langton (the Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge);
Professor John Powell (Professor of Law and Professor of African American Studies and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley); Fred Schauer (David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia).
2017: Designing for Democracy: Architecture, Urban Space, and the Idea of Collective Self-Determination -Professor Jan-Werner Müller, Professor of Politics at Princeton University.
Respondents: Professor Martin Düchs, Professor David Runciman and Fraser Nelson.
2017: A Gendered Approach to Peace Building – Ambassador Melanne Verveer, Executive Director of the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security.
Respondents: Professor Seyla Benhabib, Professor Willy Brown, Baroness Arminka Helić and Professor Monica McWilliams.
Read a report by Robert Ackerman.
2016: Aerial Violence and the Everywhere War – Professor Derek Gregory, Peter Wall Distinguished Professor and Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.
Read a report by Robert Ackerman.
2014: Science, Secrecy and the Private Self – Professor Peter Galison, Joseph Pellegrino University Professor, Harvard University.
2013: The Great Crimes: The Quest for Justice Among Individuals and Groups – Philippe Sands QC, Barrister and Professor of Law and Director of the Centre on International Courts and Tribunals at UCL.
2012: The Viennese Interior: Architecture & Inwardness – Professor Joseph Leo Koerner, Harvard University.
2011: The Psychology and Economics of Authority – Professor Ernst Fehr, Director of the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich.
2010: Care-full Markets: Miracle or Mirage? – Professor Susan J. Smith, Professor of Geography, founding Director of the Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University (now Mistress of Newnham College, Cambridge).
2000s
2009: Art and Religion in the Modern West – Some Perspectives – Professor Sir Christopher Frayling.
2008: What’s Left of Culture and Society? – Professor Lisa Jardine.
2007: Medicine, Neuroscience, Ethics and Society – Professor Judy Illes and Lord Winston.
2006: Germany reunited – a lesson in political transformation – Professor Kurt Hans Biedenkopf, President of the State of Saxony from 1990-2002.
2005: Peace after War: Our Experience – Carl Bildt, Former Prime Minster of Sweden.
2004: The Meanings of Things – Neil Macgregor, Director, British Museum.
2003: Beyond the Social Contract: Toward Global Justice – Professor Martha Nussbaum, Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago.
2002: Homiletic Elegy: Beowulf and Wilfrid Owen; On Pastoral – Seamus Heaney, poet, playwright and translator.
Respondents: Helen Vendler, Porter University Professor at the Department of English, Harvard University; Professor Neil Corcoran, Head of the School of English at the University of St Andrews; Oliver Taplin, Professor of Classical Languages and Literature, Magdalen College, Oxford University; and Jerzy Jarniewicz, Department of English Literature at the University of Lodz.
2001: The State and the Shaping of Identity – Professor Antony Appiah, Professor of Afro-American Studies and Philosophy at the University of Harvard.
2000: Tanner Symposium – Culture and Calendar – Lawrence Sullivan, Mary Miller, Liba Taub, Silke Ackermann; Science and the Measurement of Time – Steven Chu, Michael Hastings, Craig Heller, Malcolm Longair, Joseph Taylor, Joseph Vining; The Performance of Time – William Bolcom, Peter Jeffery, Samuel Barrett; The Loss of Time – Toni Morrison.
1990s
1999 Happiness: Professor Jonathan Lear, John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago.
1998 The Idol of Stability – Professor Stephen Toulmin, Professor, University of Southern California, (formerly Oxford University).
1997: Why Animals Don’t Have Language – Professor Dorothy Cheney, primatologist, University of Pennsylvania.
1996: I. Jazz: A Historical Perspective, II. Duke Ellington, III. Charles Mingus – Gunther Schuller, Jazz historian, performer, arranger and editor.
1995 Space-time and Cosmology – Sir Roger Penrose, Professor of Mathematics, Oxford University.
1993: Problems of Christianization in Rome and the Post-Roman West – Professor Peter Brown, Professor of History, Princeton University.
1992: The Sources of Normativity – Professor Christine Korsgaard, Professor of Philosophy, Harvard University.
1991: On Doing Science in the Modern World – Dr David Baltimore, President of Rockefeller University.
1990: Environmental Challenges of the ippos: our responsibilities towards future generations – Dr Gro Brundtland, Prime Minister of Norway.
1980s
1989: Interpretation and Over-interpretation: World, History, Texts – Professor Umberto Eco, writer and Professor, University of Bologna.
1988: Islam in European Thought: The Nineteenth Century and After – Dr Albert Hourani, Oxford University.
1987: The Penalty of Imprisonment – Louis Blom-Cooper, QC, London, formerly Chairman of the Howard League for Penal Reform.
1986: Technology, Bureaucracy and Healing – Professor Roger Bulger, University of Texas.
1985: Architecture: Modernist and Post-modernist – Aldo van Eyck, architect, Netherlands.
1984: The Standard of Living – Professor Amartya Sen, Professor of Political Economy, Oxford University.
1983: Challenges of Neo-Darwinism – Professor Steven Jay Gould, palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist, Harvard University.
1982: Haydn and Eighteenth Century Patronage in Austria and Hungary – Professor H. C. Robbins Landon, Professor of Music, Cardiff University.
1981: A Voluntary Society – Dr Kingman Brewster, President of Yale University; formerly US Ambassador in London.
1980: The Arts as a Source of Truth – Professor John A. Passmore, Australian National University.
1970s
1979: Arms Control and Peace Research – Professor Raymond Aron, College de France and Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris.
1978: Morality, Politics and the Press – Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien, editor of the Observer.
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