Maksymilian Del Mar, Queen Mary University of London, will address the Helsinki Legal History Series on Monday 29 April 2024, 15-16:30 (UTC+2) in the Porthania Building, Room P545, University of Helsinki and on Zoom (Link to be published later). His lecture is entitled, Beyond Belief and Deeper than Argument: Character and Intellectual Historiography:
This talk explores the value of character for writing intellectual history, and in particular the history of philosophy and politics. The talk first considers the long and rich history of character – especially character writing in the rhetorical tradition – before suggesting what we might take from that history for historicising philosophy and politics. Character, on the model developed here, is a relational phenomenon: it consists in the manner or style with which a person relates with others in certain circumstances and over time. The talk illustrates this character-based intellectual historiography by showing how it can illuminate the philosophical and political life of Neil MacCormick, but also how it allows us to convey the complexity, richness, and value of the activities of philosophy and politics.
