Philosophy Professor to Deliver Rodino Lecture at Holy Cross

WORCESTER, Mass. – Christopher A. Dustin, associate professor and chair of philosophy, will give this year’s Richard Rodino Lecture on the Aims of the Liberal Arts on March 20 at 4 p.m. in Rehm Library at the College of the Holy Cross. The talk, titled “ ‘All the Branches and None of the Roots’: On the Sources of a Liberal Education, ” is free and open to the public.

The title and theme of this lecture are inspired by an exchange between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. For years after his graduation, Thoreau had little good to say about his own undergraduate education at Harvard. When Emerson once remarked that, after all, Harvard did teach all the branches of learning, Thoreau replied, “yes, indeed, all the branches and none of the roots.” Following Thoreau, Dustin suggests that a truly “liberal” education must not only cover the various branches of learning, but must also penetrate to the roots that give them life. By exploring this metaphor of branches and roots, Dustin hopes to reflect on what academics at Holy Cross mean when talking about “critical examination of fundamental religious and philosophical questions” as “integral” to the life of the mind. In Thoreau’s sense, such questions point not to a set of methodological foundations, or core disciplines, but to a source that animates all of our disciplines — that is, a sense of wonder that is inspired by life itself.

A member of the Holy Cross faculty since 1991 and chair of the department since 2000, Dustin earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University, where he completed a dissertation on “Ethics and the Possibility of Objectivity.” He received the College’s Distinguished Teacher Award in 2004. Next academic year, Dustin begins a three-year term as director of the First-Year Program.

Interested in ancient philosophy, moral philosophy, and the philosophy of art and architecture, he teaches several introductory and intermediate philosophy courses, as well as advanced seminars on Plato, Aristotle, Heidegger and Thoreau.

Dustin has published and lectured widely on a variety of topics, including objectivity in ethics and aesthetics, the role of emotions in Aristotle’s ethical thought, poetry and education in Plato, freedom and reason in architectural modernism, and classical architecture and tragedy. He is the co-author, with visual arts professor Joanna E. Ziegler, of Practicing Mortality: Art, Philosophy, and Contemplative Seeing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

The annual Rodino Lecture series is devoted to the memory of Richard Rodino, formerly of the English department at Holy Cross. He played a central role in launching the College’s First-Year Program. It is sponsored by the Office of the Dean and the First-Year Program.