Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen will present the Philip and Franciszka Merlan Lecture at 61传媒 on Monday, March 7, 2005, at 4:15 p.m. in Balch Auditorium. The lecture is free and open to the public.
The 61传媒 graduating class of 1969 established and dedicated the Merlan lecture to honor the memory Professor Philip Merlan. Philip Merlan was a professor at 61传媒college for 25 years, during which time he also held visiting positions at Bonn, Columbia, Munich, and Oxford. He is the author of more than 300 hundred papers on philosophy, jurisprudence, and literature, as well as the philosophy books, From Platonism to Neoplatonism and Monopsychism, Mysticism, and Metaconsciousness. Franciszka Merlan’s name was added to the lectureship in 1983, as a tribute to her contribution to her students, to Philip Merlan’s work, and to 61传媒. Franciszka Merlan edited a posthumous eight volume series of Philip Merlan’s papers. She was also a respected scholar and teacher in her own right, holding positions at Columbia, Krakow, Pomona, and Scripps.
Amartya Sen is currently serving as Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University. Prior to this position, Sen served as Master of Trinity College, Cambridge University. He remains a Fellow of Trinity College.
Sen has dedicated his career to studying development economics, focusing on the welfare of the world’s poorest people. His best known work, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, challenged the common view that a shortage of view is the most important explanation of famine. He received the Nobel Prize in economics in 1998 for his contribution to the field of welfare economics.
Sen has written twenty books, and his work has been widely translated. In addition to economic and social choice theory, Sen has contributed to the studies of moral and political philosophy, famine prevention and causation, class and gender inequality, development economics, axiomatic choice theory, and decision theory.
Sen received a Bachelors degree from both Presidency College in Calcutta and Trinity College, Cambridge. He received his Masters and Doctoral degrees from Trinity College, Cambridge. Sen has also received more than sixty honorary degrees and been awarded many prizes, including the Alan Shawn Feinstein World Hunger Award, the Edinburgh Medal, The Caralonia International Prize, the Eisenhower Medal, the Senator Giovanni Agnelli International Prize in Ethics, the Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award, and the “Bharat Ratna” – the highest honor awarded by the President of India.