Evening Lecture: Dr. Ana Siljak

Lecture Title

"Starting Small: Personalism and the Revival of Humanism"

In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan admits: “The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.” What if this impoverished view of the human sits at the root of our current crisis of liberalism and humanism, leaving us defenseless against the growing power of AI and social and political extremism? The philosophy of personalism, articulated by philosophers such as Nikolai Berdyaev, asks us to engage with modernity by reexamining what it means to be human, but not from the heights of history, science, or “expertise.” For personalists, the least significant human person was, in Berdyaev’s words, more important than “the state, the nation, and all of human history.” Personalism thus demands that we start small, interrogating what it means to care for each individual person’s uniqueness, dignity, and rights. To paraphrase Gary Saul Morson, humanism…