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    “There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.”

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    Thursday, Thursday, October 10 – Friday, October 11
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    “I've begun so late, really only in recent years, to truly love the world ... Out of gratitude, I want to call my book on political theories Amor Mundi.”

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    —Hannah Arendt
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Main Image for Courage to Be

Courage to Be

An academic program that explores the philosophical and religious
foundations of moral and spiritual courage.

"Decision is a risk rooted in the courage of being free." — Paul Tillich

Meet the CTB Fellows


What We Do

The program hosts guest lectures, sponsors new research, and fosters curricular innovations that ask: Why it is that some people have the spiritual courage to act conscientiously, where others abandon themselves to mass movements?
The Project includes: 

  • Fellowships for young scholars working in philosophy, theology, and psychology
  • Lectures by internationally renowned experts in diverse fields
  • A new series of courses at Bard College titled The Practice of Courage

What We Do

The program asks: how can we encourage moral action in a bureaucratic age? And how can we nurture an inner-sense of spiritual inflexibility at a time when private and inner life are besieged by distraction and conformism? The courage to tell the truth and resist evil is especially difficult in modern, bureaucratic societies where responsibility is divided, dispersed, and displaced. Bureaucracy is the “rule of nobody,” Hannah Arendt argued, by which she meant that bureaucracies allow individuals to blame the “system” and superiors while maintaining the fiction that an individual is simply doing his or her own job. In a world increasingly governed by sprawling bureaucratic organizations, individual responsibility is dulled and moral innocence is a calculated pose.

Putting Courage at the Centre: Gandhi on Civility, Society and Self-Knowledge
 

A Courage to Be Dinner and Lecture
 

This talk was delivered by Uday Mehta in the Kline Faculty Dining Room at Bard College on Monday, March 30, 2015

More Videos

The Courage to Refuse
 

A Courage to Be Dinner and Lecture
 

Eyal Press gave this talk in the Kline Faculty Dining Room at Bard College, on Monday, February 16th, 2015

More Videos

College Seminar

While we tend to value courage—Hannah Arendt even called it the highest political virtue—historically the concept has veered from the noble to the dangerous. From Antigone to suicide bombers, courage has been construed as heroic and/or dangerously solipsistic. This series of seminars asks the question: What is the practice of courageous action in the 21st century? Students are required to attend three evening lectures on Mondays from 6-8. There will also be dinner discussions with guest speakers and students from other sections of the College Seminar.

See the courses
 

Hannah Arendt on Courage

Hannah Arendt on Courage

"Whoever entered the political realm had first to be ready to risk his life, and too great a love for life obstructed freedom, was a sure sign of slavishness. Courage therefore became the political virtue par excellence, and only those men who possessed it could be admitted to a fellowship that was political in content and purpose and thereby transcended the mere togetherness imposed on all—slaves, barbarians, and Greeks alike—through the urgencies of life."
— The Human Condition

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