Faith Sommerfield Memorial Lecture: Living Well, Dying Well
On behalf of the Columbia University School of Professional Studies Program in Bioethics and the Completed Life Initiative, we would like to cordially invite you to attend the 2nd Annual Faith Sommerfield Memorial Lecture on Thursday, September 26th, 2024 at 6:15pm.
This Memorial Lecture series commemorates the late Ms. Faith Sommerfield’s lifelong interest in autonomy and end-of-life care, specifically regarding the notion of how all individuals might live a completed life. In 2019, Ms. Sommerfield founded the Completed Life Initiative, a New York City non-profit dedicated to pondering these important questions. Professor Peter Singer established the theme of “Living Well, Dying Well” for the inaugural 2023 lecture.
Our lecture this year honors Professor Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek from Łódź, Poland. Professor de Lazari-Radek’s professional expertise is on utilitarianism and notions of what it means to live well. She has also developed a personal perspective towards dying well and the completed life, specifically writing and speaking about her fight against breast cancer last year.
Speaker Bio:
Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek (1975- ) is a professor in the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Łódź, Poland. For the last 20 years she has studied the subject of well-being, happiness and pleasure. Philosophically, she argues for the maximization of pleasure and diminishing of pain among as many beings as possible. She believes she is on a mission to help others to live a good and enjoyable life based on philosophical, psychological and neurobiological research.
Her main research interest focuses on the thought of a late Victorian philosopher, Henry Sidgwick. Together with Peter Singer she wrote two books: The Point of View of the Universe (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Utilitarianism – A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press 2017) and edited J.S. Mill’s Utilitarianism (Norton, 2021). In May 2024 Routledge published her The Philosophy of Pleasure, the first introductory text of this kind on the subject of pleasure.
In addition to her academic work, she is keen to convey philosophical ideas to a popular audience, and has written for popular magazines on how to live a good life. Since May 2024 together with Peter Singer, she runs a podcast called Lives Well Lived, in which remarkable guests talk about what it is to have a good life. So far, they have interviewed, among others: Daniel Kahneman, Yuval Harari, Jane Goodall, Judy Collins, Neil de Grasse Tyson and Ingrid Newkirk.
For event-related questions, please contact spsalumni@columbia.edu.
