PUBLIC LECTURE: Hearts of Darkness

Using Joseph Conrad’s metaphor of “Hearts of Darkness”, in this free public lecture leading philospher Professor María Pía Lara will explore the question of how such a metaphor best describes our current historical notion of human cruelty (evil) through models of political judgment. She reviews some important theoretical concepts provided by Hannah Arendt and her models of evil: as radical and as describing the perpetrator of a crime as “the banality of evil”.

María Pía Lara is a Professor of Philosophy at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Iztapalapa, Mexico. She is the author of Moral Textures (1998), Rethinking Evil (2001) and the forthcoming book Narrating Evil: A Postmetaphysical Theory of Reflective Judgment (Columbia University Press). She has published many papers and worked more recently at the New School and Stanford. She has written many articles on the subject of global justice, feminism and rights, and is currently working on a book on political and moral authority.

Maria Pia Lara's visit to Australia is hosted by "Thesis Eleven", School of Social Sciences at La Trobe University.

All Welcome. No RSVP required