Roundtables: 2014

For a study by Nathan Szajnberg, Ethiopian/Israeli six-year old children drew pictures of their lives, of their fantasies and fears, hopes and wishes. Their compelling drawings and stories will be the foundation upon which our roundtable participants will bring to bear art historical, linguistic, and psychoanalytic perspectives to explore questions of representation, the developmental issues related to the transition from visual to narrative representation, the universal and the culture-specific dimensions of human experience, and what we can learn about the inner lives of these children and of all of us.… read more »

What is mind? Is it a property attributable to biological functionality alone, and, in particular, arising from the morphology of the mammalian brain and/or the influence of that animal’s body? How far down the evolutionary scale can we apply terms like cognition, consciousness, and intelligence?… read more »

“I have specially in mind that a small but determined group, active in every nation, composed of individuals who, indifferent to social considerations and restraints, regard warfare, the manufacture and sale of arms, simply as an occasion to advance their personal interests and enlarge their personal authority.… read more »

“I have no doubt that the placing side by side of the points of view of a physicist and a psychologist will also prove to be a form of reflection.”

—Wolfgang Pauli

“Since physicists are the only people nowadays who would be able to deal with such a concept successfully, it is from a physicist that I hope to meet with critical understanding, although…the empirical basis seems to lie wholly in the realm of psychic phenomena.”… read more »

An ancient Egyptian hieroglyph at Saqqara declared Merit-Ptah as “the Chief Physician.” 4700 years after her achievement, we ask: How are women in science faring?

It is a well-documented phenomenon that for all STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) subjects, the gender gap widens in the progression from undergraduate study, through graduate and post-doctoral work, up through academic appointment.… read more »

The last 50 years has seen increasing parity of opportunity for, and achievement by, women in the work world as reflected in their increasing numbers in leadership roles in medicine and other sciences, academe, business, and politics. Yet, obstacles to women’s employment and career advancement remain.… read more »

The “Responses” series at the Helix Center involves poets reading aloud each other’s poetry and commenting on those poems they’ve selected. For our first event in this series, we are fortunate to have two marvelous poets as participants: Patrick Rosal and Jean Valentine.… read more »

What do we know about the universe and how do we know it? As John Locke would ask, what are the extent and limitations of human knowledge? Is our understanding of the laws of nature bound by limits on what the mind can grasp, or can formulate linguistically, or are there inherent limitations of physical and mathematical knowledge?… read more »

Throughout history, no other disease entity has exceeded cancer in its evocation of fear, taboo, misconceptions, and metaphors.

In her 1978 book, Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag threw down the gauntlet in her denunciation of metaphor applied to illness, as leading to a false connection between psychological traits and disease, scorning the contemporaneous, popular notion of a “cancer personality,” that “[p]assion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.”… read more »

Perhaps no thing conceived in the mind has enjoyed a greater confluence of cosmological, mathematical, philosophical, psychological, and theological inquiry than the notion of the infinite. The epistemological tension between the concrete and the ideal, between the phenomenological and the ontological, is nowhere clearer in outline yet more obscure in content.… read more »

Psychobiologist Roger Sperry proposed that, “mind and consciousness are dynamic emergent properties of the living brain in action.” This seemingly simple observation raises a host of questions. How do novel entities arise from self-organizing complex systems? If a system itself shows adaptive, self-organizing properties not attributable to its aggregate micro-potentialities—such that at each new level of complexity, new properties arise—can science ever be confidently predictive?… read more »

French Surrealism is probably best known for its paintings–images of floppy watches or men in bowler hats and topcoats falling from the sky. But just as central to the movement was the poetry produced from the beginning by André Breton, Robert Desnos, Benjamin Péret, Louis Aragon, René Char, and a host of others.… read more »

In the Phaedo, Plato asserts that the philosophical life is a preparation for death. Human aspiration, expressed in our science and in our spirituality, nevertheless seeks to transcend the philosophical and biological confines of mortality. How do differences in our awareness of mortality, from developmental death anxieties to the philosopher’s embrace, influence the diverse lives we lead? Can… read more »