Kant for Dinner
Test-driving the influential 18th-century German philosopher’s ideas in modern times.
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Research and scholarship in the college comes in a variety of forms, some
of them quite unexpected and inventive. Just ask the students from Dr. Ryan Patrick Hanley’s undergraduate seminar course on Immanuel Kant, who attended a dinner with their professor in 2015 where they began an academic journey that brought the ideas of the influential 18th-century German philosopher vividly to life.
Kant envisioned the dinner party as an ideal forum for engaging people from differing perspectives on timely topics; he even laid down specific rules for fostering respectful but lively discussion around the table. Not long after the class dinner at a traditional Milwaukee German restaurant where they first put these rules into practice, two students from that seminar — Charles Dobbs, Arts ’15, and Anthony Lanz, Arts ’13, Grad ’17 — signed on to work closely with Hanley to give Kant’s guidelines a more public test-drive. So was born the Kantian Dinner Initiative, a series of public dinner parties, each limited to nine guests per Kant’s instructions, nine strangers, in this case.
Mentored by Hanley, Mellon Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Lanz and Dobbs helped write a successful grant proposal to the Wisconsin Humanities Council. Then came extensive collaborative troubleshooting: making restaurant arrangements, advertising citywide for participants, and using Kant’s cues to direct the conversation at the dinners (reminding guests of their trust-building vows to be respectful and keep what’s said confidential, for instance).
The initiative proved to be an amazing learning experience. “Doing research for this initiative took school to the next level. It was a reminder that it’s not just all about papers and grades,” says Lanz. “It showed that there’s a lot of pleasure to be found in thinking about concepts more critically.”
“There was no guidebook; we had to figure it out together,” says Hanley. “It was a wonderful opportunity to show students that the ideas we study have a life beyond the seminar room. Kant is this dense, difficult Prussian philosopher from 250 years ago, but he offers lessons that are important for our times.”
— By Jennifer Anderson and Steve Filmanowicz
This section is part of “The Discoverers,” a multi-part story on undergraduate research opportunities in Marquette’s Klingler College of Arts and Sciences. Read the next chapter or return to the introduction.
