Roundtable events.
Philosophy meets mathematics meets neuroscience in this roundtable investigating how cutting-edge mathematical models are elucidating the computational rules encoding brain functions and the implications for a deeper understanding of mind.
Free and open to the public.… read more »
A foundational work on emotion and music, Leonard Meyer’s 1956 treatise,Emotion and Meaning in Music, describes competing philosophical positions regarding musical meaning. It might rest exclusively within the context of the work itself; or refer to the extra-musical world of concepts, actions, emotional states, and character; or stem from an intellectual perception of the formalist qualities of the work; or find its foundations in an emotional response to musical relationships.… 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 »
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 »
Is science nearing an answer to the question of how and why consciousness and self-consciousness come about? In attempting to resolve the mystery of sentience, what roles do physics, psychology, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience play? How do various philosophical and religious traditions contribute to our inquiries into this obvious and everyday universal experience?… read more »
Donald Rumsfeld famously said, “There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”… read more »
Though human ingenuity may make various inventions…it will never devise any inventions more beautiful, nor more simple, nor more to the purpose than Nature does; because in her inventions nothing is wanting, and nothing is superfluous…
– Leonardo da Vinci, The Da Vinci Notebooks, Vol.
The question of what the world in which we live consists of is as old as mankind itself. In philosophical jargon, this is the question of the ontological basis of reality. With the growing success of physics and other sciences, the idea of one fundamental ontology, that of particles and fields, became dominant as a physicalist version of ontology.… read more »
What is human life without emotion? Could the “dawn of humankind” even be imagined without emotion exerting its effects right there from the start? And across the millennia emotion has forever been at the heart of most matters. Human history has been shaped by emotion and reshaped by attitudes toward emotion; a powerful human force philosophers and theologians confront and reckon with again and again throughout history and in every culture.… read more »