Chautauqua Lecture Series: Jennifer Frey

Published on April 07, 2021

The EKU Chautauqua Lecture Series continues on April 8 with Professor Jennifer Frey's "What is the Purpose of Life? Classical and Contemporary Answers." 

This week's lecture is the Ron Messerich Lecture in Philosophy and Religion, and is sponsored by the Department of History, Philosophy and Religious Studies and the Honors Program

The lecture begins at 7:30 p.m. and can be found at YouTube Streaming Link: https://youtu.be/x3jV1Y6uYgo

Jennifer Frey teaches philosophy at the University of South Carolina, specializing in virtue ethics and action theory. Prior to joining the faculty at South Carolina, she was a Collegiate Assistant Professor of Humanities at the University of Chicago and a member of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts and an affiliated faculty in the philosophy department. Frey earned a B.A. in Philosophy and Medieval Studies with a Classics minor at Indiana University and completed her Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, where she worked under the direction of Michael Thompson and John McDowell.

Dr. Frey’s research lies at the intersection of philosophy of action, ethics, and meta-ethics. She is the co-editor (with Candace Vogler) of the book, Self-Transcendence and Virtue, published by Routledge in 2018. She writes for The Virtue Blog on which she also hosts a popular philosophy and literature podcast called “Sacred and Profane Love.”

She has broader research interests in the history of ethics, especially in the medieval and early modern periods. The philosophers who have most positively influenced her work are the three A’s: Aristotle, Aquinas and Anscombe. She admits in spite of better judgment that she is also obsessed with Kant.