In Por una repolitización del mundo. Las vidas descartables
como desafío del siglo xxi (Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2018),
Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn
Professor in the School of Social Science, examines who today has
the right to a decent...
The History Working Group is a Member-led initiative that
mobilized in early 2017 in response to President Trump’s executive
orders banning travel and immigration from seven predominantly
Muslim countries. The group produced a series of articles
for...
In recent months, the Institute for Advanced Study has issued
public statements in response to the original and revised executive
orders that restrict travel from predominantly Muslim countries.
The orders, currently suspended, cause us great...
The Institute for Advanced Study came into being at the most inauspicious of times. Founded in the early years of the Great Depression, it took shape during the buildup to the Second World War and under the growing shadow of authoritarian regimes. Its first Director Abraham Flexner published his manifesto on the “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge” in October 1939, barely a month after the outbreak of hostilities in Europe. Surely this was a daunting moment to defend “the fearless and irresponsible thinker” and advocate for the free expression of knowledge and curiosity.
In November 1954, Albert
Einstein wrote a letter to a magazine in which he declared
that, were he a young man again, he would not try to become a
scientist: “I would rather choose to be a plumber or a peddler in
the hope to find that modest degree...
To Albert Einstein, she was
“the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far
produced since the higher education of women began.” More
straightforward in his praise, Einstein’s fellow Professor at the
Institute for Advanced Study, Hermann...
In recent years, the trafficking of women and children into the
sex sector has become the focus of a steady spate of media
coverage, the subject of abundant policy interventions, and the
target of local, national, and transnational activist...
Philosophers have always been interested in moral questions, but
social scientists have generally been more reluctant to discuss
morals and moralities. This is indeed a paradox since the
questioning of the moral dimension of human life and social...
The security of a nation and the safety of its population
versus the protection of constitutional liberties and human rights
is a quandary that arose in the aftermath of 9/11, but it is not
novel to the twenty-first century. Discrimination between...