Spring 2011 | Public lectures and events | Video

Contributor(s): Robert Rowland Smith | From Plato through Monty Python to Terry Eagleton and beyond, the question of the meaning of life has been a source of both mystery and mirth. In this lecture, based on his new book Driving with Plato, Robert Rowland Smith breaks life down into its milestones from cradle to grave: what does it mean not just to be born and to die, but to learn to talk, to lose your virginity or have a mid-life crisis? Robert Rowland Smith began his career as a Prize Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford before becoming a partner in a management consultancy. He now consults independently, has a column on moral dilemmas in the Sunday Times and contributes to BBC television and radio. His last book was Breakfast with Socrates, recently translated into sixteen languages.

Contributor(s): Enrique Peñalosa | Enrique Peñalosa, former Mayor of Bogotá and one of the world's most challenging urban thinkers, describes the urgent need for governments to create socially inclusive and well-designed transport systems, public spaces and cities. Addressing mobility, public space, equity, quality of life and social inclusion, Peñalosa will propose that inequality and exclusion are the main causes of the problems that affect cities in developing countries, particularly issues relating to mobility and sustainability. Enrique Peñalosa was mayor of Bogotá, 1998-2001, and now acts as a consultant on urban vision. His advisory work concentrates on sustainability, mobility, equity, public space and quality of life.

Contributor(s): Stephen Kinzer | American and European policies toward the Middle East have produced a region immersed in violence, terror, anger and oppression. Yet although new and terrifying threats are emerging from the region, new opportunities also present themselves. To seize on them, the West needs to change policies that were shaped for the Cold War. Kinzer offers ideas for a new approach to the world's most turbulent region. Stephen Kinzer is the author of Reset Middle East(I.B.Tauris), All the Shah's Men and Overthrow among others. An award-winning foreign correspondent, he served as The New York Times bureau chief in Turkey. He teaches international relations at Boston University, contributes to The New York Review of Books and writes a world affairs column for The Guardian.

Contributor(s): Professor Luis Garicano | Spain is widely considered the weak link in the Euro construction. We examine the validity of this assumption by analysing the origins and evolution of the current crisis and the growth perspectives of Spain. Luis Garicano is a Professor of Economics and Strategy at the LSE's departments of Management and Economics. Through the Madrid based FEDEA foundation, he has been involved in efforts to promote structural reforms in the Spanish Economy. In particular he has co-authored proposals to reform the labor markets, housing markets, and the pension and health systems, as well as a recent study with McKinsey on the Growth perspectives for the Spanish economy. He co-edits the most widely read economics blog in Spanish, NadaesGratis.

Contributor(s): Dr Alex Voorhoeve | Individual lives have a unity that the lives of separate individuals do not. This truism has radical, and not fully appreciated, implications for distributive ethics. Alex Voorhoeve is senior lecturer in philosophy at LSE's Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method.