9 April 2025, 4:30 pm

Institute of Philosophy CAS, Seminar Room 124a, Jilská 1, Prague 1

Public lecture, free entry

Abstract:

Given the rise of authoritarianism and the global crisis of empathy and compassion, is it still relevant to speak of the revolutionary power of care? Drawing on Revolutionary Care: Commitment and Ethos (Routledge 2024), this talk addresses how care has the latent potential to transcend sectarian differences and bring people together around a common cause that they know, even in their bodies, to have significant valency. Nevertheless, care is a term employed in different contexts and sometimes in harmful ways. Accordingly, this presentation offers an adaptive definition of good care, the relationship of care to normativity, why we should be committed to care, and what it would mean to share a spirit or ethos of care. The talk concludes by interrogating the transformative possibilities of care as well as the reality of its revolutionary potential. 

Maurice Hamington is Professor of Philosophy, and Affiliate Faculty in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Portland State University (USA). He is a care ethicist interested in both the theory and application of care. Maurice has authored or edited more than a dozen of books including Revolutionary Care: Commitment and Ethos (Routledge 2024), The Oxford Handbook of Jane Addams, with Patricia Shield and Joseph Soeters (Oxford 2022), Care Ethics and Precarity, with Michael Flower (University of Minnesota Press 2021), Care Ethics and Poetry, with Ce Rosenow (Palgrave Macmillan 2019), Care Ethics and Political Theory, with Daniel Engster (Oxford University Press 2015), Applying Care Ethics to Business, with Maureen Sander-Staudt (Springer 2011), Socializing Care, with Dorothy C. Miller (Rowman & Littlefield 2006) and Embodied Care (University of Illinois Press 2004). Maurice is a Member of the International Consultants for The Melete Center of Philosophy for Care, University of Verona, and a Steering Committee Member of the international Care Ethics Research Consortium, Utrecht, The Netherlands.

For more info visit mhamington.com