carLo GinzburG casuisTry, For and aGainsT: PascaL`s ProVinciaLes

The Tanner Lectures on
Human Values ����
The purpose of the Tanner Lectures is the advancement
of scholarly and scientific learning in the field of human
values. That purpose embraces the entire range of moral,
artistic, intellectual, and spiritual values, both individual and
social—the full register of values pertinent to the human
condition, interest, behavior, and aspiration.
The Tanner Lectures on Human Values is a nonprofit
corporation administered at the University of Utah. The
Lectures are funded by an endowment and other gifts
received by the University of Utah from Obert Clark Tanner
and Grace Adams Tanner.
carlo Ginzburg
Sponsored by the Office of the President and the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard.
T h e T a n n e r L e c t u r e s o n H u m a n Va l u e s
Casuistry,
For and
Against:
Pascal’s
Provinciales
and Their
Aftermath
Carlo Ginzburg has been Professor of Modern
History at the University of Bologna (1978-1988); Franklin D.
Murphy Professor of Italian Renaissance Studies at UCLA
(1988-2006); and Professor of History of European Cultures at
the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa (2006-2010).
His many fellowships include Villa I Tatti (Settignano, Firenze),
the Warburg Institute (London), the Davis Center for Historical
Studies (Princeton), the Institute for Advanced Studies (Princeton), the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities
(Los Angeles), and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He has
been directeur d’études associé at EHESS, Paris, Critical Inquiry
Professor at the University of Chicago, Lauro De Bosis Professor
at Harvard University, and Visiting Professor at the Courtauld
Institute.
His books, translated into more than twenty languages,
include The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Italian edition 1966;
English translation 1983), The Cheese and the Worms: The
Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Italian edition 1976;
English translation 1980), The Enigma of Piero della Francesca:
“Casuistry, For
and Against:
Pascal’s
Provinciales and
Their Aftermath”
Carlo Ginzburg
Lectures
Lecture 1
“Casuistry and Irony:
Some Reflections
on Pascal’s
Provinciales”
Wednesday
April 15, 2015 | 4 pm
Room 105, Emerson Hall
Introductions
Drew G. Faust
Robert Darnton
Respondent
Robert Maryks
Lecture 2
“Irony, Geometry,
Casuistry:
Two Case Studies”
Thursday
April 16, 2015 | 4 pm
Room 105, Emerson Hall
Introduction
Ann Blair
Respondent
Lowell Gallagher
Seminar
Friday
April 17, 2015 | 10 am
Room 110, Barker Center
A d d i t i o n al
Pa r t i c i p a n t s
Mark Jordan
For more
information go to
mahindrahumanities.
fas.harvard.edu
Seating is limited.
Free and open
to the public.
Frances Kamm
moderator
Ann Blair
The Baptism, The Arezzo Cycle, The Flagellation (Italian
edition 1981; English translation 1985), Clues, Myths, and the
Historical Method (Italian edition 1986; English translation
1989), Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’s Sabbath (Italian
edition 1989; English translation 1990), History, Rhetoric, and
Proof (1999), The Judge and the Historian: Marginal Notes on
a Late-Twentieth-Century Miscarriage of Justice (Italian edition
1991; English translation 1999), Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections
on Distance (Italian edition 1998; English translation 2001),
No Island is an Island: Four Glances at English Literature in
a World Perspective (2000), Threads and Traces: True, False,
Fictive (Italian edition 2006; English translation 2012), Miedo,
reverencia, terror: Cinco ensayos de iconografía política
(2014; Italian edition, forthcoming).
He received the Aby Warburg Prize (1992), the HumboldtForschungs Prize (2007), and the Balzan Prize for the History
of Europe, 1400-1700 (2010). Pa r t i c i pa n t s
Ann Blair is Henry Charles Lea
Professor of History at Harvard
University, where she specializes
in the cultural and intellectual
history of early modern Europe
(16th-17th centuries), with
an emphasis on France. Her
interests include the history of
the book and of reading, the
history of the disciplines and of
scholarship, and the history of
interactions between science
and religion. Her publications
include The Theater of Nature:
Jean Bodin and Renaissance
Science (1997), and Too Much
To Know: Managing Scholarly
Information before the Modern
Age (2010). She is currently
working on a book version of
the Rosenbach Lectures she
delivered at the University of
Pennsylvania in 2014 on
amanuenses and authorship
in early modern Europe. She
has received fellowships from
many sources, including the
National Endowment for the
Humanities, the MacArthur
Foundation, the Mellon
Foundation, the Guggenheim
Foundation, and the Radcliffe
Institute for Advanced Study.
She has served as Director
of Undergraduate Studies
and was awarded a Harvard
College Professorship in 2009
in recognition of her dedication
to undergraduate teaching and,
in 2014, the Everett Mendelsohn
Excellence in Mentoring Award
from the Graduate School of
Arts and Sciences.
Robert Darnton was educated
at Harvard University (AB 1960)
and Oxford University (BPhil 1962,
DPhil 1964), where he was a
Rhodes Scholar. After a brief
stint as a reporter for The New
York Times, he became a junior
fellow in the Society of Fellows
at Harvard. He taught at Princeton from 1968 until 2007, when
he became Carl H. Pforzheimer
University Professor and Director
of the University Library at
Harvard. His outside activities
include service as a trustee of
the New York Public Library
and the Oxford University
Press (USA); terms as president of the American Historical
Association and the International
Society of Eighteenth-Century
Studies; and the campaign to
create the Digital Public Library
of America. Among his honors
are a MacArthur Prize Fellowship, a National Book Critics
Circle Award, election to the
French Legion of Honor, the
National Humanities Medal
conferred by President Obama
in February 2012, and the
Del Duca World Prize in the
Humanities awarded by the
Institut de France in 2013. His
books include The Business of
Enlightenment: A Publishing
History of the Encyclopédie
(1979), The Great Cat Massacre
and Other Episodes in French
Cultural History (1984), Berlin
Journal, 1989-1990 (1991),
The Forbidden Best-Sellers of
Prerevolutionary France (1995),
The Case for Books (2009), The
Devil in the Holy Water, or The
Art of Slander in France
from Louis XIV to Napoleon
(2010), Poetry and the Police:
Communication Networks
in Eighteenth-Century Paris
(2010), and Censors at Work:
How States Shaped Literature (2014).
Drew G. Faust is the 28th
President of Harvard University
and the Lincoln Professor of
History in Harvard’s Faculty
of Arts and Sciences.
As president of Harvard,
Faust has expanded financial
aid to improve access to
Harvard College for students
of all economic backgrounds
and advocated for increased
federal funding for scientific
research. She has broadened
the University’s international
reach, raised the profile of the
arts on campus, embraced
sustainability, launched edX
(the online learning partnership
with MIT), and promoted
collaboration across academic
disciplines and administrative
units as she guided the University through a period of
significant financial challenges.
She is the author of six
books, including This Republic
of Suffering: Death and the
American Civil War (2008),
for which she won the 2009
Bancroft Prize, the New-York
Historical Society’s 2009
American History Book Prize,
and which was recognized by
The New York Times as one of
the “Ten Best Books of 2008.”
It is the basis for a 2012
Emmy-nominated episode of
the PBS American Experience
documentaries titled “Death
and the Civil War,” directed
by Ric Burns.
Lowell Gallagher is Associate
Professor of English at UCLA
and member of the UCLA
Center for Medieval and
Renaissance Studies. He is
author of Medusa’s Gaze:
Casuistry and Conscience in
the Renaissance (1991), editor
of Redrawing the Map of Early
Modern English Catholicism
(2012), co-editor (with
Frederick S. Roden and
Patricia Juliana Smith) of
Catholic Figures, Queer
Narratives (2007), and coeditor (with Shankar Raman) of
Knowing Shakespeare: Senses,
Embodiment, and Cognition
(2010). He has also published
numerous articles examining
the relation between sacramental theology, ethics, gender,
and rhetorical figuration,
principally in early modern
English Catholic poetic and
devotional cultures but also in
Shakespeare and, further afield,
in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury operatic expressions of
sacrificial violence (from bel
canto technique to the works
of Francis Poulenc). He is
currently completing a book on
the figural history and ethical
provocations of Lot’s wife in
patristic and early modern
texts, twentieth-century visual
arts and narrative fiction, and
Continental philosophy.
Frances M. Kamm is Littauer
Professor of Philosophy and
Public Policy at the Harvard
Kennedy School and Professor
of Philosophy in the
Department of Philosophy at
Harvard University. She is the
author of Creation and
Abortion (1992), Morality,
Mortality, vols. 1 and 2 (1993,
1996), Intricate Ethics (2007),
Ethics for Enemies: Terror,
Torture, and War (2011), The
Moral Target: Aiming at Right
Conduct in War and Other
Conflicts (2012), and Bioethical
Prescriptions (2013), among
other books. She has also
published many articles on
normative ethical theory and
practical ethics. Professor
Kamm has held ACLS, AAUW,
NEH, and Guggenheim
fellowships and has been a
Fellow of the Program in Ethics
and the Professions at the
Kennedy School, the Center for
Human Values at Princeton,
and the Center for Advanced
Study at Stanford. She gave
the 2013 Tanner Lectures in
Human Values at University of
California at Berkeley. She is a
Fellow of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Mark D. Jordan is Mellon
Professor of Christian Thought
at Harvard Divinity School
and Professor of Studies of
Women, Gender, and Sexuality
in the Faculty of Arts and
Sciences at Harvard University.
He teaches courses on the
Western traditions of Christian
theology, the relations of
religion to modern art and
literature, and the current
prospects for ethical persuasion.
In years past, Jordan was
appointed to various departments and institutes at Notre
Dame, Emory, and Washington
University in St. Louis. His
most recent books are Convulsing Bodies: Religion and
Resistance in Foucault (2015)
and Teaching Bodies: Moral
Formation in the Summa of
Thomas Aquinas (forthcoming).
Robert Aleksander Maryks’s
major area of research and
teaching is the history of the
Society of Jesus. He has
published on various aspects
of the history of the Jesuits,
including Saint Cicero and the
Jesuits (2008), The Jesuit
Order as a Synagogue of
Jews (2009), Pouring Jewish
Water into Fascist Wine (2011), “The Tragic Couple”:
Encounters Between Jews
and Jesuits (2013; co-edited
with James Bernauer), A
Companion to Ignatius of
Loyola (2014), and Jesuit
Survival and Restoration (coedited with Jonathan Wright,
2015). He is Director of the
Institute of Jesuit Sources and
Associate Director of the
Institute for Advanced Jesuit
Studies at Boston College,
Editor-in-Chief of the Journal
of Jesuit Studies and of the
book series Jesuit Studies,
and General Editor of The
New Sommervogel: Jesuit
Library Online (Brill/Institute
for Advanced Jesuit Studies
at Boston College, 2014).
TRUSTEES
& c o n s u lt a n t s
Vice Chancellor Sir Leszek and
Lady Gwenllian Borysiewicz
University of Cambridge
Stephen Tanner Irish
Director, O. C. Tanner Board
of Directors
David A. and Teri L. Petersen
CEO, O. C. Tanner Company
Chancellor Nicholas Dirks and
Janaki Bakhle
University of California, Berkeley
Mark Matheson and
Jennifer Falk
Director, Tanner Lectures
Principal Nick Brown and
Roosa Leimu-Brown
Linacre College, Oxford
H A R VA RD
President Christopher Eisgruber
and Lori Martin
Princeton University
President Drew G. Faust and
Charles E. Rosenberg
Harvard University
T A NNER COMM I TTEE
Homi K. Bhabha, Chair
Anne F. Rothenberg Professor
of the Humanities
Charles Fried
Beneficial Professor of Law
Vice Chancellor Andrew and
Jennifer Hamilton
University of Oxford
Stephen Greenblatt
John Cogan University
Professor of the Humanities
President John L. and
Andrea Hennessy
Stanford University
Steven E. Hyman
Professor of Neurobiology at
Harvard Medical School
Principal David Ibbetson
Clare Hall, Cambridge
Arthur Kleinman
Esther and Sidney Rabb
Professor of Anthropology
Presdient David and
Sandi Pershing
University of Utah
President Peter Salovey and
Marta Moret
Yale University
President Mark Schlissel and
Monica Schwebs
University of Michigan
Rt. Reverend Carolyn Tanner
Irish (Ret.) and Reverend
Frederick Quinn
Chair, O. C. Tanner Board of
Directors
Lawrence Lessig
Roy L. Furman Professor of Law
Elaine Scarry
Walter M. Cabot Professor
of Aesthetics and the General
Theory of Value
Alison Simmons
Samuel H. Wolcott Professor
of Philosophy
Elizabeth Spelke
Marshall L. Berkman Professor
of Psychology