Conference at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, June 2, 2017
Professor and philosopher Martha Craven Nussbaum (University of Chicago), gave a speech about “Aging: Stigma and Discrimination” opening the Helsinki Collegium Conference “Aging Thoughtfully: Challenges and Insights”.
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To age is to experience, to gain wisdom, to love and to lose, to experience both friendship and loneliness. Aging is many other things. It might be about regretting, worrying, and needing; or volunteering, comprehending, guiding, rediscovering, and forgiving and, no doubt, forgetting. For the financially fortunate, it can be about retiring and bequesting and, in turn, about saving and spending in the preceding years. Many of these tendencies or preoccupations are shared by people who do not yet think of themselves as aging. But these young friends, relatives, and colleagues are often eager for their experienced elders to pass on some useful insights. This quest, to find the good, or even just the wisdom, in the wrinkles, is at least as old as Cicero, whose work is as relevant in our fast-changing world as it was two thousand years ago… read more