Duke's Center for Philosophy, Arts, and Literature

 

Lectures 2011-2012

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September 22nd, 2011 - Wittgenstein in France: A Seminar with Sandra Laugier (See Photos from the Event Here)

Pierre Hadot (1922-2010), professor of ancient philosophy at the Collège de France, published, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, some of the earliest work on Wittgenstein to appear in French. Hadot’s thought is intimately related to Wittgenstein’s. Wittgenstein specialists have for the most part overlooked Hadot’s work on the philosopher from the 1960s; conversely, Hadot could not appear in all his originality to readers who were unaware of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. However, in working out a general model of ancient philosophy as an ethics, a praxis of discourse and an activity of self-perfection, Hadot opened Wittgenstein interpretation to new, original readings. Hadot conceived of philosophy as an activity rather than a body of doctrines and found in Wittgenstein a fruitful point of departure for ethical reflection. Hadot’s understanding of philosophy as a spiritual exercise — articulated through his reading of ancient philosophy but also the American transcendentalists Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson — will find an echo in Wittgenstinian thinkers such as Stanley Cavell and Cora Diamond. Fifty years after Hadot discovered and introduced Wittgenstein to France, the time has come to make manifest the radical relevance of his early work and the meaning of his discovery of the limits of language and its ordinary character, indeed to show how Hadot’s definition of spiritual exercise offers a new point of access to Wittgenstein and to the perfectionist dimension of his work.

 

November 29th, 2011 - Alice Crary Lecture

The Garage at Smith Warehouse, Bay 4, 1st Floor, C105, Reception 4:30pm and Lecture 5:00pm

 

February 23rd, 2012 - Literature, Narrative and the Shape of a Life: A Lecture by Joshua Landy

Professor Joshua Landy from Stanford will give a talk called Literature, Narrative and the Shape of a Life. Professor Landy is currently a Fellow of the National Humanities Center, and one of the convenors of the Literature and Philosophy major at Stanford. Event details to follow.

The Garage at Smith Warehouse, Bay 4, 1st Floor, C105, Reception 5:00pm and Lecture 5:30pm

 

April 5th, 2012 - Philosophy, Literature and Film: Two Lectures by James Conant and Cora Diamond

Two lectures by the distinguished philosophers Cora Diamond (University of Virginia, Charlottesville) and James Conant (University of Chicago).

Cora Diamond – “Murdoch off the Map: or Taking Empiricism back from the Empiricists”
Iris Murdoch’s approach to ethics is utterly different from the approach in contemporary philosophy-- and my talk focuses on one of these differences. Following Murdoch, I discuss how philosophy can draw on experience in ways philosophers are often blind to. Another main topic of the talk is ‘how we learn stuff from literature and the humanities’. I draw from Wittgenstein in developing the idea of things it is good to think with.

James Conant - "The Ontology of the Cinematographic Image"
The talk will attempt to distinguish the more determinate category of the movie from the less determinate category of the "mere" film and delineate some of the constitutive features of the aesthetic medium of the movie. Thus the guiding question will be: What is a movie? This will require that we investigate some of the conditions and modes of visual presentation that make it possible for a viewer of a motion picture drama to become absorbed in what is experienced as an independent fictional narrative world. This will involve exploring questions such as the following: What is the difference between an objective and a subjective camera shot? How is a subjective camera shot attached to or associated with the point of view of someone in the world of a movie? What is an objective camera shot? (Is it, as some say, a point of view on the world of a movie that is no one's point of view -- a view from nowhere? What could that mean?) Is it possible to construct a fictional narrative movie world entirely out of subjective camera shots? Along the way, some attention will be given to some specific aesthetic questions (e.g., what does it mean to say a painting or a film is "realistic"), as well as more general philosophical issues such as the following: What is a point of view? What is a subjective (as opposed to an objective) point of view?