Lindley Lectures

The E. H. Lindley Memorial Lectureship Fund was established in 1941 in memory of Ernest H. Lindley, Chancellor of the University of Kansas from 1920 to 1939. In February 1941 Mr. Roy Roberts, the chairman of the committee in charge, suggested in the Graduate Magazine that:
The Chancellor should invite to the University for a lecture or a series of lectures, some outstanding national or world figure to speak on "Values of Living" -- just as the late Chancellor proposed to do in his courses "The Human Situation" and "Plan for Living."

In the following June Mr. Roberts circulated a letter on behalf of the Committee, proposing in somewhat broader terms that: The income from this fund should be spent in a quest of social betterment by bringing to the University each year outstanding world leaders for a lecture or series of lectures, yet with a design so broad in its outline that in the years to come, if it is deemed wise, this living memorial could take some more desirable form.

The fund was allowed to accumulate until 1954, when Professor Richard McKeon lectured on "Human Rights and International Relations." The next lecture was given in 1959 by Professor Everett C. Hughes, and has been published by the University of Kansas School of Law as part of his book Student's Culture and Perspectives: Lectures on Medical and General Education. The selection of lectures for the Lindley series has since been delegated to the department of Philosophy.

Recently, the department has had most of the Lindley Lectures converted to electronic files and can be downloaded at KU Scholarworks.

Complete list of Lindley Lectures

The lectures with the * notation are only available in print form from the Department of Philosophy, University of Kansas 66045 at a price of $5.00 plus $1.00 for handling ($6.00 per lecture).

1961 "The Idea of Man - An Outline of Philosophical Anthropology," by Jose Ferrater Mora, Professor of Philosophy, Bryn Mawr College.
1962 "Changes in Events and Changes in Things," by A. N. Prior, Professor of Philosophy, University of Manchester.
1963 "Moral Philosophy and the Analysis of Language," by Richard B. Brandt, Professor of Philosophy, Swarthmore College.
1964 "Human Freedom and the Self," by Roderick M. Chisholm, Professor of Philosophy, Brown University
1965 "Freedom of Mind," by Stuart Hampshire, Professor of Philosophy, Princeton University.
1966 "Some Beliefs about Justice," by William K. Frankena, Professor of Philosophy, University of Michigan.
1967 "Form and Content in Ethical Theory," by Wilfrid Sellars, Professor of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh.
1968 "The Systematic Unity of Value," by J. N. Findlay, Clark Professor of Philosophy, Yale University
1969 "Buber and Buberism — A Critical Evaluation," by Paul Edwards, Professor of Philosophy, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.
1971 "What Actually Happened," by P. H. Nowell-Smith, Professor of Philosophy, York University
1972 "Moral Rationality," by Alan Gewirth, Professor of Philosophy, University of Chicago.
1973 "Reflections on Evil," by Albert Hofstadter, Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Santa Cruz.
1974 "What is Dialectical?" by Paul Ricoeur, Professor of Philosophy, University of Paris and University of Chicago.
1975 "Some Confusions about Subjectivity," by R. M. Hare, White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford University and Fellow of Corpus Christi College.
1976 "Self-Defense and Rights," by Judith Jarvis Thomson, Professor of Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
1977 "What is Humanism?" by Georg Henrik von Wright, Research Professor of Philosophy, The Academy of Finland.
* 1978 "Moral Relativism," by Philippa Foot, Senior Research Fellow, Somerville College, Oxford, and Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Los Angeles.
1979 "The Idea of the Obscene," by Joel Feinberg, Professor of Philosophy, University of Arizona.
1980 "Goods Beyond Price and Other Apparent Anachronisms," by Warner Wick, Professor of Philosophy, University of Chicago.
1981 "Morality, Property and Slavery," by Alan Donagan, Professor of Philosophy, University of Chicago.
* 1982 "Expressing Evaluations," by Donald Davidson, Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley.
1983 "How Not to Solve Ethical Problems," by Hilary Putnam, Professor of Philosophy, Harvard University. 1984 "Is Patriotism a Virtue?" by Alasdair Maclntyre, W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University.
1985 "How Free Does the Will Need to Be?" by Bernard Williams, Provost of King's College, Cambridge.
1986 "Moral Agent and Impartial Spectator," by Gilbert Harman, Professor of Philosophy, Princeton University.
1987 "Projection and Truth in Ethics," by John McDowell, Professor of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh.
1988 "The Politics of Imagination," by Arthur Danto, Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University.
1989 "Constituting Democracy," by David Gauthier, Distinguished Service Professor of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh.
1990 "Justice and the Good Life," by Ronald Dworkin, Professor of Jurisprudence, Oxford University, New York University Law School.
1991 "Equality or Priority?" by Derek Parfit, Professor of Philosophy, All Souls College, Oxford and Harvard University.
1992 "Objectivity and Position," by Amartya Sen, Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy, Harvard University.
1994 "Families, Nations, and Strangers," by Samuel Scheffler, Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley.
1995 "Wittgenstein on Practice and the Myth of the Giving," by Susan Hurley, Professor of Political and Ethical Theory, University of Warwick.
1996 "The Diversity of Objections to Inequality," by T. M. Scanlon, Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity, Harvard University.
1997 "The Feminist Critique of Liberalism," by Martha C. Nussbaum, Ernst Freund Professor of Law and Ethics, University of Chicago.
1998 "A Second-Best Morality," by Joseph Margolis, Professor of Philosophy, Temple University.
1999 "The Myth of Egoism," by Christine Korsgaard, Professor of Philosophy, Harvard University.
2000 "Cosmopolitan and Civic Justice," by Onora O'Neill, Professor and Principal of Newnham College, University of Cambridge.
2001 "Some Mysteries of Love," by Harry Frankfurt, Professor of Philosophy, Princeton University.
2002 "On Pictorial Representation," by Richard Wollheim, Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley.
2003 "Political Responsibility and Structural Injustice," by Iris Marion Young, Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago
2004 "Liberalism, Religion, and the Sources of Value," by Simon Blackburn, Professor of Philosophy and Fellow of Trinity College, University of Cambridge
2005 "The Geometry of Desert," by Shelly Kagan, Professor of Philosophy, Yale University.
2006 "The Importance of Moral Rules and Principles," by Thomas E. Hill, Jr., Kenan Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
* 2007 "Is There a Human Right to Democracy? The Vicissitudes of Rawlsian Public Reason," by Seyla Benhabib, Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy, Yale University.
2008 "Solidarity and the Root of the Ethical," by David Wiggins, Wykeham Professor of Logic (Emeritus), Oxford University.
2009 "Evolving Moral Knowledge," by Allan Gibbard, Richard B. Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy, University of Michigan.
2010 "Ought Implies 'Can'," by James Griffin, White's Professor of Moral Philosophy, Emeritus, Oxford University
* 2011 "A Lost Conception of Irony," by Jonathan Lear, John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor at the Committee on Social Thought and in the Department of Philosophy, University of Chicago
2012 "Must Criticism Be Constructive?," by Raymond Geuss, Professor of Philosophy, University of Cambridge
2013 "Responsibility, Incompetence, and Psychopathy," by David Brink, University of California, San Diego
2014 "Social Movements, Experiments in Living, and Moral Progress: Case Studies from Britain's Abolition of Slavery," by Elizabeth Anderson, John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
2015 "Virtue and Heroism," by Julia Annas, Regents Professor of Philosophy, University of Arizona
2016 "Moral Learning and Artificial Intelligence," by Peter Railton, Professor of Philosophy, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor