The Ancient Quarrel: Philosophy and Literature, with Rebecca Goldstein | The Shelley Lecture 2015

The British Humanist Association presents The Shelley Lecture 2015, delivered by Rebecca Goldstein, philosopher and novelist, and recipient of the 2014 National Humanities Medal for her work to popularise philosophy.

Since at least the time of Plato, philosophy and literature have been engaged in a fierce debate over which is better, referred to as the ‘ancient quarrel’. Philosophers have argued that literature trespasses on their territory by getting people to arrive at philosophical conclusions without having first ‘reasoned’ their way to them. Plato intensified the quarrel by proposing that in his utopia the best of the poets would first be praised... and then escorted to the nearest border! And yet from its earliest origins, the language of philosophy was one carved out by poets.

For humanist poet Percy Shelley, for whom the BHA Shelley Lecture is named, it is poets who are ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’ - the driving force behind social progress - and not philosophers. Whose side should we take - Plato’s, or Shelley’s?

Now in Oxford, in 2015, Rebecca Goldstein, a past recipient of the American Humanist Association’s Humanist of the Year Award, will weigh up the arguments on either side of this age-old clash of ideas.
 

About the speakers

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a philosopher and novelist, and both an alumna and former professor at Barnard College. She is the author of many acclaimed works of philosophical fiction, including The Mind-Body Problem, Thirty-Six Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, and Plato at the Googleplex, as well as many other works of fiction and non-fiction.

Richard Dawkins, the world-famous evolutionary biologist and author of such books as The God Delusion and The Blind Watchmaker, will chair.