Organizer/Contact: Peg Brand Weiser (Philosophy Department, University of Oregon: pweiser@uoregon.edu)

Abstract: Set in a “treeless, glamourless, soulless” town of Oran, Algeria, that chronicles self-imposed quarantine from a deadly bubonic plague caused by rats, Albert Camus’s novel entitled, La Peste, was published in 1947. It is a timely and provocative philosophical read in our own time as we experienced three years of deadly Covid-19 in a pandemic that raged world-wide killing over 6 million people: over 1.1 million in the United States alone. Peg Brand Weiser leads a multidisciplinary discussion with 5 authors of essays in the 2023 Oxford University Press publication entitled, Camus’s The Plague: Philosophical Perspectives, with additional comments from the series editor. 

Speakers:

• Cynthia Freeland:  Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Houston; author of “Horror and Natural Evil in The Plague”
• Kathleen Higgins: Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin; author of “Grief and Human Connection in The Plague”
• Jane Schultz: Professor of English, History, and Medical Humanities at Indiana University in Indianapolis; author of “Present in Effacement: The Place of Women in Camus’s The Plague and Ours”
• Peg Brand Weiser: Courtesy Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon and Emerita Associate Professor of Philosophy and Gender Studies at Indiana University; author of “Introduction: The Relevance of Camus’s The Plague” and “Modern Death, Decent Death, and Heroic Solidarity”
• Stephen Kellman: Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio; author of “The Plague and the Present Moment”
• Edward Weiser: Courtesy Professor of Practice at the University of Oregon and board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist and gynecologic oncologist; author of “Examining the Narrative Devolution of the Physician in Camus’s The Plague”
• Richard Eldridge: series editor of Oxford Studies in Philosophy and Literature, and Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Swarthmore College

Access: All are invited. Please register using the Zoom link below.

Register required in advance for this meeting:

https://arizona.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZwkd-igrjotGtMXub8szhZWIGejQD1hx6pZ