This roundtable will examine our curiosity about endings and how ideas about the ends of consciousness, life, civilization, and the universe inform one another.
We follow up our inquiry into beginnings by posing complementary questions about endings: why are we curious about endings, whether that of the cosmos or our own? What can we discover from each other's curiosity about endings? What are the organizational properties necessary to call something an ending? How might conceptualizations of the end of consciousness, life, civilization, and the universe at large inform one another?
All Helix Center events are free and open to the public, including this one!
Roundtables are streamed live our website and the recording remains available after the event events.
This is a past event that happened on May 19th, 2012 at 2:30pm.
Participants
Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English, Yale University
James Berger is Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Yale University. He received his B.A. from Columbia University, his M.A. from Teachers College, Columbia University, and his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. His interests include twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature, literary theory, disability studies, neuroscience and literature, and apocalyptic literature and film, the...
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Associate Professor, Bar-Ilan University
William Kolbrener is Associate Professor of English at Bar-Ilan University. He received his B.A. from Columbia College, his M.A. from University College, Oxford, and his Ph.D. from Columbia University. He has written in major scholarly journals in literature, history, theology, psychoanalysis, and cultural criticism, on Jewish topics in Commentary, Azure,JQR, the AJS Review, Tradition and many other Jewish publications, and the Washington...
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Professor of Biology, Earth & Environmental Studies, New York University
Michael Rampino is Professor of Biology with the Earth and Environmental Science Program at New York University and is a Research Consultant at NASA, Goddard Institute for Space Studies. He received his B.A. from Hunter College of the City University of New York and his Ph.D. in Geological Sciences from Columbia University. A highly regarded teacher...
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Albert Einstein Professor in Science and Director, Princeton Center for Theoretical Science, Princeton University
Paul J. Steinhardt is the Albert Einstein Professor in Science and Director of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science at Princeton University, where he is also on the faculty of both the Department of Physics and the Department of Astrophysical Sciences. He received his B.S. in Physics from Caltech, and his M.A. and Ph.D., both in...
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Michael Rampino’s research supporting the link between cyclical comet showers and mass extinctions is featured in the November 2015 The Atlantic article, “The Chilling Regularity of Mass Extinctions”: http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/11/the-next-mass-extinction/413884/