Counter-Composition: Conversations on Ethics

This event is jointly organised with LSE Arts

Wednesday 17 February, 6.30 – 8.00pm
 Wolfson Theatre, New Academic Building, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, LSE

Alex Voorhoeve, Senior Lecturer, Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, LSE

Steve Pyke, leading portrait photographer

Website

Alex Voorhoeve is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at LSE. He has published on moral psychology and on ideals of equality, responsibility and well-being. Conversations on Ethics (OUP, 2009), which collects dialogues with eleven leading thinkers, is his first book

Website

Steve Pyke is one of the world's leading portrait photographers. His work was selected this year for the Portraiture Now exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C.; he has been staff photographer for the New Yorker since 2004. He has published eight books, including the famous collection Philosophers. Steve supplied the portraits for Conversations on Ethics.

The evening will contain two lectures. Alex Voorhoeve will assess and expand on Plato's arguments for the use of dialogue in ethical enquiry. True to the spirit of these arguments, the lecture will engage the audience in exchanges about a series of moral cases. Our judgments in these cases, Voorhoeve claims, help characterize the moral point of view.

Steve Pyke will discuss the idea of his portraiture as ‘an investigation into the nature of being’. His lecture will explore his investigation into the nature of being a philosopher. Pyke will also explain how he approaches his subjects, how he chooses from among his photographs and what his portraits reveal about them.