PRINCETON, N.J., November 3, 2008 - Albert
Einstein is credited with the warning: "Beware of rotten
compromises."
Avishai
Margalit, George F. Kennan Professor in the
School of Historical Studies at the
Institute for Advanced Study, will attempt to explain and support
this principle in his talk,
Compromises and Rotten
Compromises.
The lecture will take place
on Wednesday, November 19, at 4:30
p.m. in Wolfensohn Hall on the Institute's campus.
Professor Margalit will discuss how we should be willing to
compromise a great deal to achieve peace, even at the expense of
justice, but that we should never settle for "rotten compromises,"
even for the sake of peace. Margalit will expand
on two historical examples: the Munich Agreement and the agreement
on slavery that enabled the American
Constitution.
Margalit joined the faculty of the Institute in 2006 as the
George F. Kennan Professor. He
is one of the foremost thinkers and commentators on the
contemporary human condition, the moral issues of our time and
current problems facing Western societies. While
trained as a philosopher, Margalit is highly regarded for his
profound and cogent observations of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict and the broader struggle between Islam and the
West. As the author of Idolatry (with
Moshe Halbertal, 1992), The Decent Society (1996),
Views in Reviews: Politics and Culture in the State of the
Jews (1998), The Ethics of Memory (2002) and
Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (with
Ian Buruma, 2004), Margalit has transformed philosophical
perspectives on a range of political and societal
issues. Margalit's forthcoming book
Compromise and Rotten Compromise will be published by
Princeton University Press.
Margalit received his education at The Hebrew University in
Jerusalem, where he was awarded a B.A. in philosophy and economics
in 1963, an M.A. in 1965 and a Ph.D. in 1970, both in
philosophy. Margalit joined The Hebrew University
as a lecturer in 1970, and was named Schulman Professor of
Philosophy in 1998. He remained on the faculty
until 2006, when he joined the Institute. Among his other
positions, he was a visiting scholar at Harvard University
(1974-75); Visiting Professor, Free University of Berlin (1984-85);
Visiting Fellow, Wolfson College, Oxford University (1979-80) and
St. Antony's College, Oxford University (1990); Fellow, Max Planck
Institute (1984-85); Rockefeller Fellow, the Center for Human
Values, Princeton University (1995-96); and Senior Fellow, Global
Law Program, New York University (2004-05).
Among his honors, Margalit delivered the inaugural lectures at
Oxford University as the first Bertelsman Professor in 2001,
delivered the Tanner Lecture at Stanford University in 2005 and
presented the Thomas Morus Lecture at Radboud University in
Amsterdam in 2008. He received the Spinoza Lens
Prize of the International Spinoza Foundation in 2001 and
the 2007 EMET Prize in the humanities (philosophy) from
the A.M.N. Foundation for the Advancement of Science, Art and
Culture in Israel.
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