Gerst Program
Shaun King/ December 2, 2010/ Uncategorized
The Gerst Program was the predecessor to the Program in American Values and Institutions. It aimed at fostering an understanding of the central importance of freedom for democratic government, moral responsibility, and economic and cultural life. It focused on the theoretical foundations of freedom and responsibility, the development of liberty in the Western and particularly the American historical context, the role of freedom in political and economic institutions, and the character of morally responsible behavior
The Gerst Program included an interdisciplinary colloquium that brought together faculty and graduate students from different departments and divisions of the university for discussion of its core topics, an annual conference on a specific topic central to questions of liberty, democracy, and responsibility. The Program also supported a number of pre-doctoral and post-doctoral fellows who worked on these topics. For more information about the program contact the program’s director, Michael Gillespie, Professor of Political Science and Philosophy.
Gerst Conferences, 2000-2010
Virtue Ethics (April, 2010)
Paul Griffiths (Duke University) “Habit, Virtue, and the Attenuation of Experience: Agency Without Qualia?”
Michael Pakaluk (Institute for the Psychological Sciences), “Parsing Virtue”
Thomas Pfau (Duke University), “The Trouble with Voluntarism: Conceptualizing ‘Action’ and ‘Person’ After Aquinas”
Stephen Salkever (Bryn Mawr College), “Political Animals Now and Then:Internationalization and the Politics of Virtue”
Sovereignty in the Twentieth Century (April, 2009)
Ian Baucom (University of Virginia)
Susan Bickford (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Bruce Caldwell (Duke University)
Ellen Kennedy (University of Pennsylvania)
Catherine Zuckert (University of Notre Dame)
In Search of Goodness (February, 2009)
Philip Costanzo (Duke University), “The Nature and Nurture of Innocence: Reflections on Goodness”
Peter Euban (Duke University), “What Good is Innocence”
Michel Allen Gillespie (Duke University), “The Tragedy of the Goods and the Pursuit of Happiness”
Ruth Grant (Duke University), “Generous to a Fault: Goodness and Psychic Health”
Amelie Rorty (Tufts University), “Good for What? Good for Whom?”
David Wong “How Are Moral Conversions Possible?”
Discussants:
Sin-Yee Chan (University of Vermont)
Susan Collins (University of Houston)
Lawrence Cooper (Carlton College)
Andrew Delbanco (University of Columbia)
Daniel Hart (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey)
Susan Wolf (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Nietzsche, Strauss, and Mann: the Encounter of Music and Philosophy (April, 2008)
Gregson Davis (Duke University)
Bryan Gilliam (Duke University), “Strauss and the Sexual Body: The Erotics of Humor, Philosophy, and Ego-Assertion”
Tracy B. Strong (University of California San Diego), “Music, Language, and Politics in Nietzsche”
Hans Rudolf Vaget (Smith College), “’Schicksalsgeist’: Nietzsche, Music, Mann and Weimar Culture”
David Wellbery (University of Chicago), “Function and Form of Tragedy According to Nietzsche”
Charles Youmans (Penn State University) “Subjectivity and Sentimentality in the Late Works of Richard Strauss”
Sovereignty and the Right of Revolution (April, 2008)
Srinivas Aravamudan (Duke University), “Hobbes and Early America”
Joyce Lee Malcolm (George Mason University), “The English and American Revolutions”
Alan Houston (University of California San Diego), “On the Levellers”
David Loewenstein Marjorie and Lorin Tiefenthaler (University of Wisconsin Madison), “Milton and English Nationalism”
“We being a little darker then they:” Humanity, Slavery, and the Law (2007)
Introduction: Michael Munger (Duke University)
Daina R. Berry (Michigan State University), “Family Values and the Value of Slave Families”
Allan Buchanan (Duke University), “From Abolition to Human Rights”
Laura Edwards (Duke University)
Stan Engermann, University of Rochester “Slavery, Emancipation, and Freedom”
Stephen Middleton (Mississippi State University), “The Social Construction of Race Slavery in America”
Michael Munger (Duke University), “The Law of Slavery”
On Sovereignty (2007)
Michael Gillespie (Duke University), “Sovereign States and Sovereign Selves”
Maureen Quilligan (Duke University), “John Knox, Female Sovereignty, and the Problem of Elizabeth I”
Paul Rahe (University of Tulsa), “Under the Shadow of Averroes: Machiavelli and the Question of Civil Religion”
Nathan Tarcov (University of Chicago), “The Absence of Sovereignty in Machiavelli”
Homo Politicus and Homo Economicus (April, 2006)
Geoff Brennan (Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
James Buchannan (George Mason University)
Susan Collins (University of Houston)
Ruth Grant (Duke University)
Jack Knight (Washington University)
Iain McLean (Nuffield College)
Mike Munger (Duke)
Shannon Stimson (University of California Berkeley)
Tracy Strong (University of California San Diego)
Speak No Evil: Moral Judgment in the Modern Age (2004)
Peter Euban (Duke University), “The Butler Did It”
Michael Gillespie (Duke University), “Where Did All the Evils Go”
Ruth Grant (Duke University), “Rousseauian Revolution and the Problem of Evil”
Malachi Hacohen (Duke University), “Liberal Dilemmas and Moral Judgment”
Stanley Hauerwas (Duke University), “Seeing Darkness, Hearing Silence: Augustine’s Account of Evil”
Nannerl Keohane (Duke University), “Inequality and the Problem of Evil”
Elizabeth Kiss (Duke University), “Making Clear and Complex Judgments: A Layered Approach to Cross-Cultural Ethics”
Thomas Spragens (Duke University), “Between Bigotry and Nihilism: Moral Judgment in Pluralist Democracies”
David Wong (Duke University), “Evil and the Morality of Conviction”
Discussants
William Banks
Andrew Delbanco
Frances Ferguson
Jerome Levi
Sanford Levinson
John McGowen
Eleonore Stump
Georgia Warnke
Inventing Europe (April, 2004)
Gerard Delanty, Liverpool “The Idea of Europe”
Alan Levine, American University “European Visions of America”
Malachi Hacohen, Duke University “Cosmopolitanism and Multiculturalism in
Postwar Europe”
Susan Shell, Boston College “Europe as a Philosophical Idea”
Liesbet Hooghe, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill “The European Union”
Discussants
Antony LaVope, North Carolina State University
Jerry Muller, Catholic University
Claudia Koonz, Duke University
David Soskice, Duke University and Yale
Tom Spragens, Duke University
America’s Ambivalent Egalitarianism: Facts and Perceptions (April, 2003)
Dorothy Ross, Johns Hopkins “The American Ideals of Equality”
Emmanuel Saez, University of California, Berkeley “Economic Equality: The Distribution of Wealth and Income in America”
Jennifer Hochschild, Harvard University “The Impact of Race on American Views of Equality”
Stanley Renshon, CUNY “Coming to America: Immigration and Changing
Views of American Equality”
Catherine Zuckert, Notre Dame “American Perceptions of Equality in Literature”
Discussants
Inger Brodey, UNC
Philip Cook, Duke
Kerry Haynie, Rutgers University and Duke University
Nannerl Keohane, Duke
Noah Pickus, NCSU
The Ties That Bind: Community and Responsibility (March, 2001)
Michael Allen Gillespie, Duke University
Keynote Address: Jean Elshtain, University of Chicago and the National
Humanities Center
Panelists
William Galston, University of Maryland
Grant McCracken, Harvard University
W. Cary McWilliams, Rutgers University
Michael Moses, Duke University and the National Humanities Center
Hervé Moulin, Rice University
Thomas Peyser, Randolph Macon University
Robert Sugden, University of East Anglia
Cara J. Wong, University of Michigan
Reason and Virtue in an Age of Opulence (April, 2000)
Keynote Address: Alasdair MacIntyre, Duke University
Speakers:
Christopher Berry, University of Glasgow
Paul Cantor, University of Virginia
Timothy Fuller, Colorado College
Robert Frank, Cornell University
Neil DeMarchi, Duke University
Michael Allen Gillespie, Duke University
Nick Gillespie, Reason Magazine
Richard Newhauser, Trinity University and the National Humanities Center
