“From His Mouth Cometh Knowledge and Understanding”: On Knowledge and Institutions: Third Annual Spring Symposium
Speakers
Speakers
James HankinsHarvard UniversityJames Hankins specializes in Renaissance intellectual history. His main research interests are in the history of Renaissance political thought, history of philosophy, and history of the classical tradition. He is the founder and general editor of the I Tatti Renaissance Library (Harvard University Press) and Associate Editor of the Catalogus Translationum and Commentatorium (Union Academique Internationale). He is the author of Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy (Harvard University Press 2019) and Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy: The Virtuous Republic of Francesco Patrizi of Siena (Harvard University Press 2023), as well as the forthcoming The Golden Thread: The Ancient World and Christendom (with Alan Guelzo) (Encounter Books 2025).
Yuval LevinAmerican Enterprise InstituteYuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he also holds the Beth and Ravenel Curry Chair in Public Policy. The founder and editor of National Affairs, he is also a senior editor at The New Atlantis, a contributing editor at National Review, and a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times. He is the author of several books on political theory and public policy, including American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation–and Could Again (Basic Books 2024), The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in an Age of Individualism (Basic Books 2016), and The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Payne, and the Birth of Right and Left (Basic Books 2013).
Justice Caleb StegallKansas Supreme CourtA Lawrence, Kansas, native residing in rural Jefferson County, Justice Stegall has served on the Kansas Supreme Court since 2014, following his appointment to the Kansas Court of Appeals earlier that year. His legal career includes roles as Kansas Governor Sam Brownback’s chief counsel, Jefferson County attorney, and managing partner at Stegall & Associates. He has taught appellate advocacy at the University of Kansas Law School. His current Supreme Court term runs from January 2023 to January 2029.
About the Event
“All men, by nature, desire to know.” So did Aristotle introduce his mighty “Metaphysics.” Knowledge is a natural human good, desirable for its own sake. And human beings fulfill or achieve the natural good of knowledge through a variety of enduring institutions. Institutions are a society’s knowledge repositories, incubators, and transmitters.
But American institutions all suffer from a deepening crisis of trust. Many outside them doubt that they contribute anything true or valuable. Many inside them reject the knowledge with which they have historically been entrusted and would replace it with other functions and projects. The collapsing trust in our institutions is, in fact, part of a broader skepticism, if not an outright rejection, of the knowledge that these institutions have produced, preserved, and handed down across millennia.
This conference examines the nature and value of institutional knowledge. The speakers will examine several institutions—such as courts and constitutions, universities, the press, and churches—that are arenas within which knowledge and its associated human virtues have been developed and transmitted over time, and reflect on the breakdown of these storehouses of knowledge and what may replace them.
All events will be in the Colombus School of Law.
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Hourly Schedule
- 1:00pm
- Welcome
- 1:15pm - 2:15pm
- What Do Institutions Know?
Speakers:
Yuval Levin
- 2:15pm - 2:30pm
- Coffee Break
- 2:30pm - 3:30pm
- Knowledge for Its Own Sake and Higher Education
Speakers:
James Hankins
- 3:30pm - 3:45pm
- Coffee Break
- 3:45pm - 4:45pm
- Stare Decisis: For Suckers or Sages?
Speakers:
Justice Caleb Stegall
- 5:10pm
- Mass in the Mirror of Justice Chapel
- 6:00pm - 7:00pm
- Cocktails
- 7:00pm - 8:30pm
- Banquet and After Dinner Discussion
