EVENTS AND COLLOQUIA
Sponsored by the Philosophy Department
and Alumni of Lewis & Clark College
(Philosophy Colloquia at Willamette University)
November 13, Friday, 3:30-5:00, Howard Hall 202
How the Medievals Opened the Door to Modernity
Plato and the Atomists offer starkly opposed visions of how things around us come to have their patterns and structures: eternal forms vs eternal randomness. Aristotle stands with Plato for the primacy of form. But Plato's successors, the Neoplatonists, introduce a new kind of creative formlessness, which inspires the great medieval syntheses of Avicenna and Aquinas. In reaction to them, later medievals rethink God's relation to the world in a way that emphasizes will and power over either pattern or chance. This new option gets secularized into modern notions of self and community capable of creating their own laws and patterns.
November 20, Friday, 3:30-5:00, Howard Hall 202
Extended Consciousness
I defend a version of Clark & Chalmers' extended mind thesis, specifically as it applies to visual consciousness. After sketching a theoretically neural account of the distinction between causal and constitutive forms of dependence, I'll present empirical evidence and discuss how this evidence warrants the claim that many of the visual experiences we enjoy throughout the course of our lives are not confined to any brain. Rather, our conscious visual states constitutively depend on what happens in regions that are sometimes bigger than a body and always longer than an instant.
December 4, Friday, 3:30-5:00, Howard Hall 202
Cinematic Distractions
I argue that films, unlike other artforms, are particularly vulnerable to a phenomenon I call "cinematic distractions." By "cinematic distractions" I mean several related factors dealing with foreknowledge of the actors in the film, attitudes about the director, physical comfort or discomfort while watching the film, and a host of other features that distract viewers from the pure experience of watching a film. I argue that the experience of watching a film is one that is subject to a variety of factors that are non-aesthetic and yet influential. I believe these distractions lead to the formation of judgments that are based, at least in part, on the distractions themselves rather than the raw elements of the film. Thus, the experience of film-going is one that sometimes may involve a kind of non sequitur where judgments made about a film are based upon information that is not actually pertinent to the merit of the film itself.
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Department of Philosophy
Lewis & Clark College
0615 SW Palatine Hill Road
Portland, OR 97219-7899
USA
503-768-7480 (office)
503-768-7359 (fax)
Updated on 6 November 2009
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