Margaret Walker to Hold Cardinal L Mercier Chair

Margaret Walker, Ph.D., professor of philosophy, will occupy the Cardinal Mercier Chair for the academic year 2001-02 at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium. “It will be an honor and a pleasure to hold the Cardinal Mercier Chair of Philosophy,” said Walker. “I’m delighted that I have been asked to make feminist ethics the subject of my inaugural lecture, to speak to profound developments in our tradition of moral thinking.” An educator and a catalyst of the 19th-century revival of St. Thomas Aquinas’ philosophy, Mercier founded the Superior Institute of Philosophy at Louvain in 1894, with the support of Pope Leo XIII. Since 1951, the Cardinal Mercier Chair has been endowed at Louvain to support lectures by visiting philosophers. “It is a great honor for Fordham that Dr. Walker has been invited to occupy the Cardinal Mercier Chair,” said the Rev. Jeffrey von Arx, S.J., dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill. “This is a most distinguished chair at a great European university and the invitation is a tribute both to Dr. Walker and to the quality of Fordham’s outstanding Department of Philosophy.” Walker has been a member of the Fordham faculty since 1974. Last month, she was a visiting scholar at Arizona State University’s new Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics, where she gave presentations to the faculty, the philosophy department, the College of Public Programs and students in the honors program.