Each semester the College of Arts and Sciences at UVM selects a faculty member to receive the Dean's Lecture Award. This award honors a colleague who is an outstanding teacher-scholar, an individual who is an acclaimed scholar or artist in his/her profession, and who has demonstrated an unusual ability to share that excellence with students. We view this as a celebration of the high quality of our faculty.

Richard Sugarman, Professor of Religion and Director of the Integrated Humanities Program, is the Fall 2006 recipient of the Dean's Lecture Award. The Spring 2007 recipient is Alison Brody, Associate Professor of Biology. You are cordially invited to join us for both lectures. Professor Sugarman will present his lecture on Tuesday, October 24, at 5 pm in Memorial Lounge. The program will begin with short tributes to Dr. Sugarman, after which he will present his lecture: "Time and Transcendence." A reception will follow. A formal announcement of Professor Sugarman's lecture is included below; details of Dr. Brody's lecture will be transmitted at a later date.

Professor Richard Sugarman
Fall 2006 Dean's Lecture
Tuesday, October 24 at 5:00 pm
Memorial Lounge, Waterman
Time and Transcendence
Time is the most frequently used noun in the English language. Augustine remarked in the fourth century, "I know what time is until someone asks me." This question has even greater urgency in the twenty-first century. How can we possibly reconcile the competing demands made upon us in what has been called our "nanosecond culture?" Why is it that at the very same moment in history that we have accelerating access to information that our sense of our own experience appears to be diminishing? We speak of reserving quality time for one another. What does this imply about the rest of time? Professor Sugarman will discuss some of the ways in which time has been measured and understood, focusing on recent discoveries about lived time from a phenomenological point of view. He will argue that the relation between time and transcendence has implications for our understanding of interpersonal as well as religious life. He will make special reference to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, where the time of others takes precedence over our own and where ethics is argued to be "first philosophy."

Biography
Richard Sugarman came to the University of Vermont in 1970. He holds a Ph.D. from Boston University (1976), and an M.A. and B.A. from Yale (1969, 1966). Professor Sugarman's fields are phenomenology, philosophy of religion, and Jewish philosophy. His publications include Rancor Against Time: The Phenomenology of Ressentiment (Felix Meiner, 1980), and (with R.T. Simone) Reclaiming the Humanities: The Roots of Self-Knowledge in the Greek and Biblical Worlds (Univ. Press of America, 1986). In 2006, he edited, with his long time colleague Roger Duncan, The Promise of Phenomenology: Posthumous Papers of John Wild (Lexington Books, 2006). Professor Sugarman has published extensively on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, and has lectured at Harvard, Oxford, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the McGill Law School. He also serves as Director of the Integrated Humanities Program for first-year students, and was a recipient of the Kroepsch-Maurice Award for Excellence in Teaching.