Experts in politics: Lessons from Socrates and Aristotle
Thu, 30 May
|Online
This lecture considers the role of experts in contributing to public debate in a democracy, bringing Aristotle's work on rhetoric to bear on norms for expert communication and public debate.


Time & Location
30 May 2024, 18:00
Online
About the event
Part of: The Political Imagination: Ancient Greek Ideas
Socrates sought to test the expertise of everyone around him: the bombastic know-it-alls, the bashful youths, the confident generals, those (including the enslaved) with unsuspected mathematical competence, the workaday artisans. Aristotle later explored the ways in which expert claims can be made credible to popular judgement.
Melissa Lane is a Professor of Politics at Princeton University. Previously she was Senior University Lecturer at Cambridge University in the Faculty of History and Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. She studied for her first degree in Social Studies at Harvard University, and then took an MPhil and PhD in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. She is an author, lecturer and broadcaster who has received major awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship and Lucy Shoe Meritt Residency in Classical Studies at the American Academy of Rome. She has published widely in journals and authored or introduced nine major books including Greek and Roman Political Ideas; Eco-Republic; and Of Rule and Office: Plato’s Ideas of the Political.
This FREE event is run by Gresham College in London. You must regsiter at: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/whats-on/experts-politics