Lecture by Nobel Prize Winner Amartya Sen
29 September 2010
Professor Amartya Sen (Harvard University), Nobel Prize Winner in Economics in 1998, will give a Lecture on "Justice and the Global World" at the Goethe-University Frankfurt on Thursday, October 7th, 2010. The event will be jointly hosted by the Cluster of Excellence "Normative Orders" and by the Centre for Advanced Studies "Justitia Amplificata: Rethinking Justice - Applied and Global."
Sen’s work, which embraces economics as well as philosophy, engages both with issues pertinent to welfare economics and with the debate on the nature of justice. His most important contributions concern a seminal investigation into the political causes of famines as well as the development of the capability approach, according to which poverty and welfare should be measured by looking at people’s real freedoms and capacities, rather than at a country’s GDP. The capability approach has established itself as the underlying conceptual framework for the Human Development Index (used by the UN to measure poverty and development worldwide).
In his new book, "The Idea of Justice" (Harvard University Press 2009, published in German by Beck Verlag in 2010), Sen argues that a theory of justice should be concerned primarily with the reduction of gross and concrete injustices, rather than with putting forward an ideal for a perfectly just society.
The lecture will start at 18.15 (18.00 cum tempore) in Campus Westend, Lecture Room 3, in the Hörsaalzentrum building. All interested parties are warmly invited to attend.
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