Mark Kingwell
Philosopher, critic, and public intellectual Mark Kingwell is Professor of Philosophy and Fellow of Trinity College at the University of Toronto. He has lectured widely to academic and popular audiences throughout North America, Europe, Australia, and the Middle East. Since his first book, A Civil Tongue, won the 1995 Spitz Prize in political theory, he has authored or co-authored eighteen books of political, cultural and aesthetic theory, including the national bestsellers Better Living (1998), The World We Want (2000), Concrete Reveries (2008), and Glenn Gould (2009). In addition to many scholarly articles, his writing has appeared in more than 40 mainstream publications, among them Harper’s, Adbusters, the New York Times, the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, Utne Reader, the Globe and Mail, the National Post, the Toronto Star, and Queen’s Quarterly. His most recent books are the companion essay collections Unruly Voices (2012) and Measure Yourself Against the Earth (2015).
Professor Kingwell has held visiting posts at Cambridge University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and the City University of New York, where he was Weissman Distinguished Visiting Professor of Humanities. Between 2001 and 2004 he was chair of the Institute for Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum; he has also been, since 2001, a contributing editor of Harper’s. He is the recipient of two National Magazine Awards and two Best Canadian Essays selections; in 2000 he was made honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree by the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design. Professor Kingwell serves on the advisory boards for Amnesty International Canada, PEN Canada, and the Walrus Foundation. When not engaged in academic philosophy, he likes to think while walking, fishing, watching baseball, cooking, and mixing cocktails.
Jonathan Haidt
Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist whose research examines the foundations of morality and the psychological and moral roots of disagreement in American politics and religion. Haidt is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis, the New York Times bestseller The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, and co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind. In The Righteous Mind, Haidt “shows why liberals, conservatives, and libertarians have such different intuitions about right and wrong, and he shows why each side is actually right about many of its central concerns. In this subtle yet accessible book, Haidt gives you the key to understanding the miracle of human cooperation, as well as the curse of our eternal divisions and conflicts.”