Berkeley Institute Graduate Conference 2016

Tuesday, February 14th: “The Origins of the Big Bang” by  Prof. Karl van Bibber (UC Berkeley – Nuclear Physics) Tuesday, March 7th:  “Citizenship and the Limits of Empathy” by Prof. Kathleen Peterson (UC Davis – English) Tuesday, April 18th: “The Fate of Beauty in...

How might assuming the best help us understand the world? According to Gottfried Leibniz, the world is most rationally explained by assuming that all things are ordered with an eye towards what is good and even best. Things happen for a good reason—not only human...

We often talk about identity to get at questions about being ourselves–who am I, what am I, and what makes me this person I am? But when we start to press these questions, we can find it hard to capture the most basic experiences of selfhood–the values, intuitions,...

What Christianity Offers the Secular University What place do assumptions that are distinctly religious have in the contemporary, secular academy?  Often, when people are asking this question, they want to know whether there might be some conflict between being a...

The Character of Work: Finding Meaning in Your Vocation The relationship between our professional lives and moral identities is by all accounts conflicted.  We are unsure how much personal fulfillment our work should provide.  We are unsure whether our jobs ought to...

Reading List: Matthew Crawford "The World Outside Your Head" Alasdair MacIntyre, "Intolerance, Censorship and Other Requirements of Rationality." Henry Frankfurt, "On Bullshit." Michael Oakeshott, "The Voice of Liberal Learning" Josef Pieper, "Leisure: A Theory of...