Practical Reason ("Phronesis") in Martin Luther King’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail”

Guest lecture by Professor Jim Jasinski, University of Pget Sound, Seattle, US.

King’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail” played an important role in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s 1963 Birmingham campaign, and it has continued to circulate as an eloquent defense of nonviolent civil disobedience. This lecture will focus on how King deploys argument, style, and syntax to instantiate basic principles of practical reasoning and embody an Aristotelian phronimos.

Everybody is welcome.

Jim Jasinski is Professor of Communication Studies at University of Puget Sound, Seattle, U.S. and has recently been appointed Adjunct Professor at the Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, Section for Rhetoric.