Anbar Lecture – Seyla Benhabib

Dr. Seyla Benhabib (Columbia Law School)

The SU Philosophy Department is pleased to welcome Professor Seyla Benhabib for the 2023 Anbar Lecture. She will deliver a lecture entitled: “Cosmopolitanism Reconsidered.”

Abstract:

The intense interest in cosmopolitanism in the social and political sciences, cultural and legal studies dates back to the last two decades of the 20th century. By the beginning of the new century, cosmopolitanism had fallen on hard times. Not only political developments but philosophical critiques as well have cast doubt upon cosmopolitanism. Martha Nussbaum’s recent book, The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble but Flawed Ideal, heralds a retreat back from cosmopolitan universalism to liberal nationalism. Post-colonial critiques also reject cosmopolitanism for being complicit in European imperialism. In Sylvia Wynter’s words, how can we unsettle the coloniality of being and power, truth and freedom? I will argue that it is possible to defend a ‘cosmopolitanism from below’ that is sensitive to post-colonial critiques without falling back to liberal nationalism.

Speaker Bio:

Seyla Benhabib is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy Emerita at Yale University, where she taught from 2001-2022. She is currently Scholar in Residence at Columbia Law School and Professor Adjunct of Law, where she teaches legal and political theory as well as a course on refugee, migration and citizenship law in comparative perspective. She also holds appointments in Columbia University’s Center for Contemporary Critical Thought and the Department of Philosophy. Professor Benhabib is the recipient of the Ernst Bloch prize (2009), the Leopold Lucas Prize (2012), and the Meister Eckhart Prize (2014), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2011-12) and was Fellow at the WissenschaftsKolleg in Berlin in 2009. She has written and co-edited over 15 books on critical theory from Hegel to Habermas; Hannah Arendt; discourse ethics, feminist theory and human rights and her work has been translated into 12 languages.