At a time when there is talk of "fake news" and "alternative facts", the question arises as to the role and status of truth in democracy. In conversation with the historian Sophia Rosenfeld (UPenn), Alexander Görlach discussed truth and probability, science and faith in liberal democracy.
Organized with generous support by the Kurt Forrest Foundation
Photos by Anna Watts
Biographies
Sophia Rosenfeld is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches European and American intellectual and cultural history with a special emphasis on the Enlightenment, the trans-Atlantic Age of Revolutions, and the legacy of the eighteenth century for modern democracy. She is the author of A Revolution in Language: The Problem of Signs in Late Eighteenth-Century France (Stanford, 2001); Common Sense: A Political History (Harvard, 2011), which won the Mark Lynton History Prize and the Society for the History of the Early American Republic Book Prize; and Democracy and Truth: A Short History (Penn Press, 2019). Her articles and essays have appeared in leading scholarly journals, including the American Historical Review, the Journal of Modern History, French Historical Studies, and the William and Mary Quarterly, as well as such outlets as The Washington Post, Dissent, and, frequently, The Nation. From 2013 to 2017, she co-edited the journal Modern Intellectual History. In 2022, A Cultural History of Ideas, a 6 volume book series covering antiquity to the present for which she was co-general editor with Peter Struck (Penn, Classical Studies), appeared with Bloomsbury and won the Association of American Publishers’ award for best reference work in the humanities. Her writing has been translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, and Chinese.
Photo: Hong Kiu Cheng
Alexander Görlach is an adjunct professor to NYU Gallatin School where he teaches democratic theory. Prior to that he had various positions as visiting scholar and as fellow at Harvard University in the United States, and Cambridge University and Oxford University in the United Kingdom. He is a senior fellow to the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in New York and a senior advisor to the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles. Alexander holds a ThD in comparative religion and a PhD in linguistics. His academic interests include democratic theory, politics and religion, and theories of secularism, pluralism and cosmopolitanism. In the academic year 2017-18 he was a visiting scholar at National Taiwan University and City University Hongkong. Since then he focuses on the rise of China and what it means for the democracies in East Asia. Alexander Görlach is an honorary professor of ethics and theology at Leuphana University in Lüneburg, Germany. Alexander Görlach is the founder of the debate-magazine The European, that he also ran as its editor in chief from 2009 to 2015. Today he serves as an op-ed contributor to the New York Times, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and the South China Morning Post. He is a columnist to the business magazine Wirtschaftswoche, Deutsche Welle and Focus Online. He is a frequent commentator on German News Channel WeLT TV.
VENUE ACCESSIBILITY
Unfortunately, 1014 Fifth Avenue is in the process of being refurbished, and is not fully accessible in its current state. We apologize to our guests and kindly ask you to contact j.isaacs@1014.nyc if you need further information or assistance. We will do our best to enable everyone to join us.