Symposium 2025: Ian Corbin

Common Good Pluralism? American Politics After the Age of Neutrality

WHEN: Thursday, April 10, 2025
WHERE: KOSC Chair's Room
TIME: Reception at 1:30 p.m. | Lecture at 2:00 p.m
Free and open to the public

Symposium Schedule

About the lecture

For at least the past few decades, Americans have made a wager that our public life can simply be run by the numbers, following the neutral dictates of big data, competent technocrats and, recently, smart algorithms. This illusion is disintegrating before our eyes. Without vision, a people perish, and we desperately need new, expansive, moral and spiritual visions to give shape to our public life. But what can this mean for a multicultural, multi-faith nation like America? How do we propose and advocate for new political visions without demanding total unanimity, or descending into civil war?

About our speaker

Ian Marcus Corbin is a philosopher on faculty in Neurology at Harvard Medical School, where he co-directs the Human Network Initiative, and is a Faculty Member at the HMS Center for Bioethics. He serves as a Senior Fellow at the think tank Capita, co-directs the Trust and Belonging Initiative at Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program, and serves on the ethics committee at Brigham and Women's Hospital. His first book, on belonging in the modern world, is forthcoming from Yale University Press. He advises elected officials at the federal and state level, along with leaders of for-profit and non-profit enterprises, on issues of belonging, culture and flourishing.

Corbin has studied politics, religion and philosophy at Gordon College, Oxford University, Yale University and Boston College, always with an eye to the ways that deep human values function in the formation and evolution of human communities. He has taught at a number of colleges and universities in the Boston area and published widely in venues such as the Washington Post, The New York Times, Newsweek, The Point and Plough. In a former life he founded and ran a contemporary art gallery in Boston's South End.