This week the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship is proud to welcome its guest speaker for the Spring Semester, Dr. Eric Mack. Dr. Mack (Ph.D., University of Rochester) is professor of philosophy at Tulane University and a faculty member of Tulane’s Murphy Institute of Political Economy. He has written extensively on the philosophical foundations of individual rights, property rights, markets, and toleration. He is currently working on a book on the political philosophy of John Locke.

Professor Mack will be speaking Friday, April 25th, at 3:00 pm in Scarborough 4, in connection with Professor Klein’s Business and Economic Ethics course. He will give a talk on the political philosopher Robert Nozick’s theory of entitlement, and the propensity of liberty to upset social patterns. Professor Mack’s talk is open to anyone and everyone interested.

Please contact us if you have any questions or would like more information.

The Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship is proud to announce its guest speakers for the Fall semester:

September 19th—Dr. David Schweickart

September 26th—Dr. David Kelley

October 31st—Dr. Alexei Marcoux

Each speaker has a different expertise and opinion about Capitalism’s strengths and weaknesses.

Dr. Schweickart is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. He will be speaking on “Marx’s Democratic Critique of Capitalism and Its Implications for a Democratic Socialism.” Dr. Schweickart holds Ph.D. degrees in both mathematics and philosophy. He is the author of Against Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, 1993) and After Capitalism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002).

Dr. David Kelley (Ph.D., Princeton University) is a former professor of philosophy at Vassar College and is currently Senior Fellow at the Atlas Society in Washington, D.C. Dr. Kelley will be speaking on Ayn Rand’s moral defense of capitalism. Dr. Kelley is the author of The Evidence of the Senses, The Art of Reasoning, and The Contested Legacy of Ayn Rand.

Dr. Alexei Marcoux (Ph.D., Bowling Green State University) is Associate Professor of Business Ethics at Loyola University Chicago and a policy advisor for the Heartland Institute. He will be speaking on the social philosophy of Friedrich A. Hayek, the 1974 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Each talk will be held in Scarborough 4 at 6 PM, in connection with Professors Hicks and Rezazadeh’s Capitalism in the Modern World course.

We are hoping for a lively and controversial semester, and we welcome you to join us for any of the talks you are interested in.

In the meantime, please contact us at if you have any questions or would like more information.

Robert Bradley, Ph.D., visited the center and Rockford College on March 28, 2007 and gave a presentation to an audience of about 115 students, professors, and interested members of the greater Rockford community. Dr. Bradley was a longtime employee of Enron, the collapsed corporate giant. During the company’s last years he served as speech writer and regulatory advisor for Ken Lay, Enron’s CEO, who was convicted in May 2006 on multiple counts of fraud and conspiracy. Bradley is now president of the Institute for Energy Research (IER) in Houston, Texas, and is completing his sixth book, Political Capitalism: Insull, Enron, and Beyond. His previous books have been on energy history and policy. The theme of Dr. Bradley’s talk was how philosophy—not only business economics and political economy—is key to unraveling the Ken Lay Paradox to understand the rise and fall of Enron.