Maks Del Mar, Professor of Legal Theory and Legal Humanities, will deliver a lecture in the University of Helsinki's Legal History lecture series. This year, the series is on the theme 'Identities and Legal Histories.
Image by Jeremy Kyejo from Pixabay
The talk is on 29 April, and will be also streamed live (Helsinki Legal History Series: Maksymilian Del Mar 29.04.2024 | Law, Identity and the European Narratives | University of Helsinki).
Professor Del Mar's lecture is entitled 'Beyond Belief and Deeper than Argument: Character and Intellectual Historiography'. It explores the value of character for writing intellectual history, and in particular the history of philosophy and politics. The lecture 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 lecture 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.
Professor Del Mar's lecture draws on his research on the philosophical and political life of Neil MacCormick.