One of Canada’s most famous philosophers, Mark Kingwell, will be the guest speaker at this year’s Morris Lecture, hosted by Lakehead University’s Department of Philosophy. “Mark Kingwell is Canada’s pre-eminent public intellectual, one of our best philosophers, an excellent writer, and a dynamic speaker,” said Lakehead Philosophy Professor Todd Dufresne.
Kingwell’s work combines scholarship and an unusual understanding of contemporary issues ranging from politics to culture. In this presentation, he promises to address a common problem of everyday life: procrastination. “Who couldn’t benefit from some quality time thinking about why it is we often put off doing things until tomorrow,” Professor Dufresne said.
Many readers know Kierkegaard as the philosopher of irony, faith, and anxiety, but he was also intimately acquainted with the mundane conditions of boredom and procrastination. Kingwell describes his lecture as an exploration of the “deeper meanings of why we put things off and how we can disappear into the full fridge in which there is, apparently forever, nothing to eat.”
Kingwell has appeared on TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin many times and has written several books, including In Pursuit of Happiness: Better Living from Plato to Prozac, The World We Want: Restoring Citizenship in a Fractured Age, and Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City. He is a professor of philosophy and associate chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto.
The annual Morris Lecture is free to the public and, based on attendance at Kingwell’s last lecture in 2008, Dufrensne is expecting a full house. So, don’t procrastinate—mark Thursday, October 3 from 7-8:00 pm on your calendar. The lecture will take place in ATAC 2001 and is free.
The 2013 Morris Lecture is sponsored by Lakehead University’s Dr. Gillian Siddall, Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, the Department of English and the Department of Sociology.
