This episode is part of a special series for 2023-2024 featuring some of our popular talks from our annual Katz Distinguished Lecture series. This month’s episode features Alexander Nehamas’s talk from 2005 titled “Only in the Contemplation of Beauty Is Human Life Worth Living.”

Alexander Nehamas is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. He is a champion of aesthetic values and is committed to the view that the arts and humanities are an indispensable part of human life for all people. His books, including Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art published in 2007, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (1999), and Nietzsche: Life as Literature (1985), have been translated into nine languages. He is also a translator (into English) of Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus and he is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The 2023-2024 season of Going Public features select Katz Distinguished Lectures from our archive. Learn more about the lecture series and peruse the archive:

https://simpsoncenter.org/katz-lectures.