Francis Bacon Lecture 2023

Prof  Zofia Stemplowska (Oxford) "Just Attention for the Dead"

Some people get a lot of attention and some very little while alive. This popularity contest continues after we die. Current debates about commemoration focus on the problem of who is worthy of public commemoration and who is not. This matters, but knowing if someone or something is worthy of commemoration does not solve the problem of the scarcity of our commemorative attention. Prof Stemplowska will argue that whom we commemorate is a question of justice and will focus in particular on the public commemorative attention that the living owe as a duty to the dead.

This public lecture is sponsored by the Royal Institute of Philosophy