3:00 p.m. Panel Discussion featuring Daniel Cullen, Professor of Political Science, Rhodes College; Alicja Gescinska, Philosopher and Novelist; John Haldane, J. Newton Rayzor, Sr. Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Baylor University; and Mark Johnston, Henry Putnam University Professor of Philosophy​, Princeton University.

4:45 p.m. Public Lecture by Sir Roger Scruton, Writer and Philosopher; Senior Fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center, on Philosophy in the Public Culture.

The following books will be available for sale by Labyrinth Books; the book signing will occur after the lecture, at 6:00 p.m.

On Human Nature (Princeton University Press, 2017)
Confessions of a Heretic (Notting Hill Editions, 2016)
Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (Bloomsbury, 2015)
Notes from Underground (Beaufort Books, 2014)
Soul of the World (Princeton University Press, 2014)

Sir Roger Scruton is a writer and philosopher who has published more than forty books ranging in subject matter from aesthetics, art, and music, to conservatism, utopianism, and political philosophy. He is currently Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington D.C., and Visiting Professor at Oxford University and the University of Buckingham. He has taught at Cambridge University, Birkbeck College, Boston University, Stanford University, Princeton University, and many other institutions. He has also been a Visiting Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a research fellow at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the British Academy.

He has regularly written columns and essays for such publications as The New Statesman, The American Spectator, The New Criterion, and The New Atlantis, where he is a contributing editor. He was also the editor of The Salisbury Review from its founding in 1982 until 2001.  His most recent books are Confessions of a Heretic (Notting Hill Editions, 2017), and On Human Nature (Princeton University Press, 2017), which is based on three lectures he gave on the topic of Human Nature, Human Rights, and Human Duties at Princeton University in fall 2013, under the auspices of the James Madison Program.  In 2009 he wrote and narrated an acclaimed hour-long BBC documentary on Why Beauty Matters. Aside from his novels, essays, short stories, he has also composed two operas, The Minister and Violet.

In November 2016, he was knighted in the Queen’s Birthday Honours by the Prince of Wales, for services to philosophy, teaching, and public education. Among his many other honors, he is the 2016 recipient of the Sappho Award from the Danish Free Speech Society, and, in 1998, recipient of the Medal of Merit of the Czech Republic, in recognition for his role in the “underground university” he had helped establish in Czechoslovakia in the last decade of communism. Sir Roger Scruton received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Cambridge University and his law degree from Inner Temple in London, where he is an honorary Master of the Bench. He holds four honorary doctorate degrees. He is married to Sophie Jeffreys and they have two children.

Daniel Cullen is Professor of Political Science at Rhodes College, where he teaches political philosophy and the humanities, and directs the Project for the Study of Liberal Democracy: a program devoted to the critical study of the principles of constitutional government and their philosophic sources. He is Senior Fellow for Constitutional Studies at the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Constitutional Principles and History, and he serves on the Center’s Academic Council. He also serves on the board of the Association for Core Texts Studies and Courses, an international organization devoted to the advancement of liberal education. His writings include Freedom in Rousseau's Political Philosophy, Liberal Democracy and Liberal Education, and essays on Rousseau, Montaigne, democratic theory, liberal education and Sir Roger Scruton’s conservatism. He is currently working on a collection of essays on Scruton’s philosophy. He received his Ph.D. from Boston College.

Alicja Gescinska is a Polish-Belgian philosopher and novelist. She hosts Wanderlust, a philosophical television program for the Belgian public broadcaster Canvas, in which she visits internationally renowned philosophers, writers, artists and scientists to talk about what matters most in life and their lives. She was a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University’s James Madison Program from 2013-2014, and from 2014-2016 taught courses on European politics and the philosophy of freedom at Amherst College. Aside from her academic work, she is the author of the non-fiction book De verovering van de vrijheid (The Conquest of Freedom, 2011) and the novel Een soort van liefde (A Kind of Love, 2016). She is a popular pundit in Belgium and Holland, and a regular contributor to The Brussels Times. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Ghent University in Belgium, and wrote her dissertation on the notions of freedom and personhood in the philosophy of Max Scheler and Karol Wojtyla.

John Haldane is the J. Newton Rayzor, Sr. Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Baylor University and Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and Chair of the Royal Institute of Philosophy in London. He has also held visiting positions at Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Oxford, Georgetown, Pittsburgh and Notre Dame universities. He has given the Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen, the Stantons at Cambridge University, the MacDonalds at Oxford University, and Josephs at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. He is Consultor to the Pontifical Council for Culture, and a member of the Pontifical Academies of Life, and of Thomas Aquinas, all at the Vatican. A proponent of analytical approaches to the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, his books include Atheism and Theism, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Religion, Faithful Reason: Essays Catholic and Philosophical, Reasonable Faith, Practical Philosophy, and Seeking Meaning and Making Sense. He has appeared on many BBC radio and television programs, contributed to the Times and other newspapers, and written widely for commentary, art and religious periodicals. He received his B.A. and his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of London. He holds honorary degrees from Saint Anselm College, New Hampshire, and from the University of Glasgow, Scotland.

Mark Johnston is Henry Putnam University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. He is the author of many influential and widely reprinted articles in ontology, philosophy of mind, cognitive science, philosophical logic and ethics, along with Saving God (Princeton University Press, 2009) and Surviving Death (Princeton University Press, 2010), two works that present a novel form of religious naturalism. Two volumes of his collected papers, Human Beings and The Obscure Object of Hallucination, will soon be forthcoming with Princeton University Press. He is currently working on a book, entitled The Manifest, which explains how the world of lived experience can be very much as it appears to be, despite the discoveries of the physical and biological sciences. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University, where he wrote his dissertation, Particulars and Persistence, under the supervision of Saul Kripke.