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Fall 2006 Core Humanities Lecture Series
Special Core Humanities Lecture
Sandra Luft - Monday, October 23rd 4:00-5:15p WRB 2024
"The Mythic Origins of Modern and Postmodern"
In this talk, Professor Luft discusses the historic relations between theory and practice, knowing and making, in the context of two myths of origin in the West: that of Plato's Timaeus, the demiurgic imposition of order on matter, essentially a mimetic process, and the originary conception of creation ex nihilo in Genesis, which identifies creativity with the power of language and knowing with the hermeneutic reading of that language. As the Timaean model comes to the fore in the modern conception of practice as applied theory, the postmodern, the paper argues, secularizes the conception of originary language in Genesis.
Professor Luft is Professor of Humanities at San Francisco State University. Her teaching and research interests center on the modern European history of ideas (sixteenth to twentieth centuries), and on Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico, who delimited knowledge to what humans had made, their own historical-cultural world. Her book, Vico's Uncanny Humanism: Reading the "New Science" between Modern and Postmodern, was published by Cornell University Press, 2003. Recently, her teaching has focused on contemporary postmodern literature, particularly the works of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida, as well as the writings of Hannah Arendt.
Tom Nickles - Monday, October 16th 4:00-5:15p WRB 2024 "Biological Evolution as a Problem Solver: Nature vs. Human Intelligent Design"
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Valerie Weinstein - Tuesday, November 14th 4:00-5:15p OSN 102 "Triumph of the Body and the Will: The Remarkable Career and Longevity of Leni Riefenstahl" |
Jen Hill - Monday, December 4th 4:00-5:15p WRB 2024
The Anglo-Argentine-American naturalist, ornithologist, and author W. H. Hudson’s bestselling novel Green Mansions documents the love affair between a cosmopolitan political refugee and Rima, the half-bird, half-human “jungle girl.” This talk examines desire, geography, and the animal/human divide in the novel in order to examine the text’s arguments about political change and its complex expression of human yearning for an unmediated merging with nature. |
This lecture continues the treatment of Darwinian themes begun last year. It explores the idea of nature (biological evolution) as a problem solver. This idea is useful in several ways, e.g., for understanding how biological mechanisms function, for characterizing biological science (say, in relation to physics), and for reverse-engineering purposes. It can also help us understand human problem solving and creative innovation, especially in contrast to the human intelligent design model of innovative problem solving. Examining these two extreme positions on problem solving challenges the human design model as usually articulated and suggests that ‘nature as a problem solver’ is more than a metaphor. Yet treating nature as a problem solver is also problematic—in a way that challenges the application of the problem solving model even to human “problem solving,” whether creative or not.
Leni Riefenstahl began her career as a dancer and star of mountain films, became notorious for the propaganda features she directed during the Third Reich, and released her final film in 2002, on her 100th birthday. Despite Riefenstahl’s impressive accomplishments as an artist, a woman, and an elder, her reputation was forever tainted by her film of the Nuremberg Nazi Party rally, Triumph of the Will (1935), and she was ostracized for decades by the German public. Spanning many decades and historical changes, Riefenstahl’s work – condemned by many as fascist –glorifies the human body and its accomplishments – in dance, sports, combat, and aging. This talk will examine Riefenstahl’s representations of the human body and their relationships to fascism, to Riefenstahl’s own physical vitality, and to her problematic public image, and ask to what extent Riefenstahl’s celebrations of the body and her remarkable life and career can be separated from her political past.
"Imperial Romance: W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions"
