'Beautiful world! Where hast thou gone?" asks Friedrich Schiller in his famous poem The Gods of Greece. He laments the loss of harmony in a world divided by injustice both past and present. In this lecture, Lea Ypi reads from her forthcoming book on human dignity. In it, she reflects on the relationship between politics and art by focusing on historical injustice and its legacy in a divided world. Through the life of her grandmother, Leman Ypi, she travels from the utopia of classical Greek unity described by Schiller to the dystopia of her own past. A journey that begins in 1918 in Saloniki a few years before the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and ends in 2005 in Tirana, just over a decade after the fall of communism.

Research seminar with Lea Ypi, Professor in Political Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science and an Honorary Professor in Philosophy at the Australian National University.

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction of Lea Ypi
01:36 Lecture starts - the philosophical project behind the literary project
08:55 Reading starts
30:22 Reading ends - the moral and political meaning of dignity
31:16 The Kantian notion of freedom as moral agency
32:05 Human dignity as the core of freedom
53:00 Is art the only sphere that can free itself from political manipulation?
54:32 Lecture ends - QA starts

View also:
In December 2022 Lea Ypi came for a visit to the Institute for Futures Studies where she and our director Gustaf Arrhenius had a conversation about her book Free. See the conversation here:    • Lea Ypi in conversation with Gustaf A...  

Research seminar at the Institute for Futures Studies. Find all of them here    • Playlist  

Playlists by theme:
   • Philosophy  
   • Political Science  
   • Democracy  
   • Economics  
   • Climate change  

#leaypi #marxism #immanuelkant