A Symposium on Steven Smith’s Modernity and its Discontents

Date: 11 April 2017
Venue: Yale-NUS, Global Learning Room 1, East Core

8:30-8:45 Coffee

8:45 – 9:15 Welcome and Introduction (Lazar / Smith)

9:15 – 10:30 Modernity’s Place in Time

Taran Kang, Asst. Professor (History), Yale-NUS College
Modernity and the Problem of Beginnings

John Kane, Professor (Politics), Griffith University
A ‘third way’ for modernity: Solving the Kantian dilemma of moral idealism and political realism

10:30-10:45 Break

10:45 – 12:00 The Discontented Self in the Modern State

Sandra Field, Asst. Professor (Philosophy), Yale-NUS College
Modernity and the Natural History of Religion

Benjamin Schupmann, Lecturer (Politics), Yale-NUS College
The Artificial Nature of Autonomy and Its Effects

12:00 – 1:15 Lunch

1:15 – 2:30 Varieties of Discontent

Jiang Yi-Huah, Professor (Politics), City University of Hong Kong
Confucianism’s Painful Engagement with the Western Modernity

Rajeev Patke, Professor (Literature), Yale-NUS College
Modernity and Literary Modernism

2:30- 2:45 Break

2:45-4:00 Conservatism in Modernity

Martin Beckstein, Fellow (Philosophy), Columbia University
Tancredi’s paradox: Is there a place for non-emancipatory politics in liberal democracy?

Luke O’Sullivan, Professor (Politics), National University of Singapore
Dreaming between the Lines: The strange afterlife of Straussian Romanticism

4:00- 4:15 Summary and Conclusions

                                                         All are welcome