Richard Poirier, a Los Angeles resident, music industry financial executive, writer and philosopher, has been selected by the University of Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture to chair a colloquium session on "20th Century Ethics" at this year's annual conference titled "Modernity: Yearning for the Infinite," Nov. 30 through Dec. 2 in South Bend, Ind.

Presentations by academic philosophers in Poirier's "20th Century Ethics" session include "On Keeping Things Complicated: Ethics after Modernity" by Darin Davis of Baylor University; "Objective Ethics and the Dynamics of Desire" by Benjamin Huff of Randolph-Macon College; and "'Is' and 'Ought' Revisited: Moral Realism and the Fact-Value Distinction" by Robert J. Matava of University of St. Andrews (Scotland).

"In recent years," director David Solomon explains, "the meaning of the modern has come to be at the heart of many of the deepest and most divisive debates within ethics, politics, the arts and religion. While continuing to recognize the great achievements of modernity, especially the rise of the natural sciences and liberal political regimes with their rejection of oppressive social and political structures, many have come to believe that the modern has also brought with it human problems of new and frightening sorts: cultural and moral fragmentation, anomie in personal lives, crimes against humanity of unprecedented scale and ferocity, and the domination of human life by new technologies that seem impossible for us to control."

Poirier cites the use of police surveillance cameras at parks and intersections as well as Prop 83's new requirement to use GPS monitors for life on certain categories of human beings as examples of society's inability to control today's available technologies. Based on these troubling trends we can speculate what the future may hold.

The aim of the seventh annual fall conference is to bring together a large number of respected scholars representing all the main academic fields, from Catholic, non-Catholic, and secular institutions, to provide spirited discussions of the underlying causes and ramifications of the intellectual epoch we have come to call modernity; of the relationship between the main theses of modernity in the last century; and the impact of modernity upon work in philosophy, theology, law, literature, the arts, as well as other fields of intellectual inquiry and endeavor.

There are thirty-eight sessions over the three day conference that address topics ranging from "The Crisis of Modern Law and Legal Theory" to "Theological Challenges of Modernity" to "Kantian Themes in Modernity" to "Literature and Modernity" and "Modernity and the Limits of Freedom."

The conference key note speaker is world renowned philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre whose presentation is entitled "Modernity's Self-Subversion."

Richard Poirier has a political and philosophical commentary blog on the Bakersfield.com website in which some of his commentaries may be viewed including a one page abstract he wrote for this conference entitled "Modernity and the Rise of Individualism."