Notice Board

Dr. John von Heyking presents Loneliness, Scientific Authority, and Platonic Couches

Tuesday, March 25, 2025
7-9 p.m.
Sandman Signature Lethbridge Lodge

Appetizers and a cash bar
Everyone welcome. No registration required.

In this talk, von Heyking will discuss the 2023 United States Surgeon General Advisory on loneliness to examine broader questions regarding scientific authority, liberal democracy, political bonds, including friendship, and the role of the university in promoting them. The Advisory illustrates how overreliance on scientific authority to establish what is true about us leads to bizarre conclusions due to neglect of broader questions about personhood, friendship, and self-government. He will suggest ways fields beyond the physical sciences, including my field of political philosophy, can supplement and round out how we think about human flourishing and community.

John von Heyking is a professor of political science at the University of Lethbridge, where he teaches political philosophy. He is the author of Comprehensive Judgment and Absolute Selflessness: Winston Churchill on Politics as Friendship (2018), The Form of Politics: Aristotle and Plato on Friendship (2016), and Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World (2001). He has coedited numerous volumes, including two volumes of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin and, most recently, Friendship Studies: Politics and Practices Across Cultures (2024). He has published scholarly articles on topics including liberal and civic education, friendship, personhood, resistance to totalitarianism, cosmopolitanism, empire, Islamic political thought, punishment, and religious liberty. His scholarly essays and articles have appeared in numerous volumes and journals, including Cambridge Journal of China Studies, Review of Politics, History of Political Thought, Supreme Court Law Review, Perspectives on Political Science, Political Science Reviewer, History of Human Sciences, International Political Anthropology, and the University of British Columbia Law Review. His popular writing has been published by Finest Hour, Voegelinview, American Oxonian, Globe and Mail, Calgary Herald, C2C: Canada's Journal of Ideas, Troy Media, and Convivium.