Should we Love Everyone? | Professor Meghan Sullivan, James Gregory Lecture

Meghan Sullivan is the Wilsey Family Collegiate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. She serves as Director of the NDIAS, a university-wide research institute based in Notre Dame Research. The NDIAS promotes issue-engaged, inclusive, and interdisciplinary study of questions that affect our ability to lead valuable, meaningful lives. Each year, the NDIAS convenes a diverse group of faculty fellows, graduate students, and undergraduate scholars to participate in a focused residential research community, with topics organized by an annual theme.

Sullivan’s research tends to focus on philosophical problems concerning time, modality, rational planning, value theory, and religious belief (and sometimes all five at once). She has published work in many leading philosophy journals, including Nous, Ethics and Philosophical Studies. Her first book — Time Biases — came out with Oxford University Press in summer 2018. Time Biases develops a theory of diachronic rationality, personal identity and reason-based planning. She is now writing a book on the role love plays in grounding moral, political and religious reasoning. It is tentatively entitled Agapism: Moral Responsibility and Our Inner Lives. And with Paul Blaschko, she has just finished a book on virtue ethics based on the hit God and the Good Life project. It is called The Good Life Method and was released nationwide through Penguin Press in January 2022.

Sullivan is deeply interested in the ways philosophy contributes to the good life and the best methods for promoting philosophical thought. Since 2017, Sullivan and the GGL team at ND have raised over $1.3M to support projects for research, teaching, and digital outreach in publicly engaged philosophy. Sullivan served as the Principal Investigator for the Mellon Foundation’s Philosophy as a Way of Life grant (2018-2022). The Chronicle of Higher Ed covered one of Sullivan’s major teaching initiatives.