Prof. Raymond Geuss Lectures at Bilkent
Last week, Bilkent hosted a prominent scholar of political philosophy and the history of continental philosophy, Prof. Raymond Geuss. Prof. Geuss, who is currently on the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, has also taught at Princeton University, Columbia University and the University of Chicago in the US, and Heidelberg and Freiburg universities in Germany. Born in 1946 in Evansville, Indiana, he received both his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Columbia University.
Prof. Geuss gave two talks, "The Authority of Democracy and Human Rights" on Tuesday, October 16, and "Must Criticism be Constructive?" on the following day. His first talk focused on his wider project dealing with, in his words, "the binary ideology of political authority." This is an attempt at reconciling individual human rights and democracy, which is, for Prof. Geuss, in certain respects a paradoxical and difficult undertaking. He suggested the tackling of questions like "What, indeed, is demos?" and "What does it mean for demos to rule?" could provide a firmer grasp on the problem. In this context, Prof. Geuss elaborated on his thoughts concerning the internal structure of demos, its unitary will and its possibilities.
In his second talk, Prof. Geuss explained his conception of criticism in regard to what constitutes that which we call a "critique." He discussed the nature of "constructive criticism" and tried to answer the question of whether such criticism is a possibility or not. After the talk, Prof. Geuss joined graduate students for dinner, where he further shared with them his academic and life experiences.