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Baylor University professor Mary P. Nichols delivers Tocqueville lecture Feb. 27


Last updated February 11, 2019

By News administrator

Mary P. Nichols, author and Professor Emerita, Department of Political Science at Baylor University, will speak on the campus of Furman University Wednesday, Feb. 27, at 5 p.m. in Johns Hall 101.

Her talk, “Friendship in Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’,” is free and open to the public. The lecture is the fourth in the five-part Tocqueville Lecture Series “Love, Friendship and Politics.”

Mary Nichols

Mary P. Nichols delivers “Friendship in Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’” Feb. 27.

Nichols served as professor of political science at Baylor from 2004 to 2017, was chair of the department 2004 to 2010, and held the role of graduate program director 2010 to 2012.

She is author of numerous books including “Thucydides and the Pursuit of Freedom” (Cornell University Press, 2015), and “Socrates on Friendship and Community: Reflections on Plato’s Symposium, Phaedrus, and Lysis” (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and “Reconstructing Woody: Art, Love, and Life in the Films of Woody Allen” (Rowman & Littlefield, 1992).

Nichols has published articles in The American Political Science Review, The Review of Politics, and Perspectives on Political Science, and also serves on the editorial boards of these journals.

She is a senior fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization (New York) and has taught at Fordham University, the University of Delaware and St. John’s College Annapolis.

Nichols holds a doctorate from the University of Chicago, a master’s from Kansas University and a bachelor’s from Tulane University.

The concluding Tocqueville Series lecture is set for Wednesday, April 10, at 5 p.m. in Watkins Room, Trone Student Center, where David Bromwich, Professor of English at Yale University, will present “Power, Passion, and Mark Antony.”

For more information, contact Paige Blankenship in the Furman Department of Politics and International Affairs at 864-294-3547 and paige.blankenship@furman.edu. Or visit www.furman.edu/tocqueville.

About the Tocqueville Program
The Tocqueville Program is an intellectual community devoted to seeking clarity about the moral and philosophic questions at the heart of political life. The program hosts curricular and extracurricular activities designed to help students and faculty to engage seriously with the most powerful arguments behind diverse and competing religious, political and ethical points of view.

The program is named for Alexis de Tocqueville, a 19th-century French author, statesman and traveler who developed a “new science of politics” focused on the study of the modern democratic soul. On the contested, partisan questions of his time, Tocqueville “undertook to see, not differently, but further than the parties.” The Tocqueville Program aims to follow his example.

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