Donald Bren Professor of Biological Sciences, Professor of Philosophy, Logic, and the Philosophy of Science, University of California-Irvine
Darwin's Most Significant Discovery: Design without Designer
September 26, 2006 @ 7:30 pm
1800 Engineering Hall
This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.
A leading evolutionary biologist and a national and international science advisor, Francisco Ayala has been in the thick of public debates on evolution. His writing concerns the interface between religion and science, epistemology, ethics, and the philosophy of biology.
Francisco Ayala is being presented as part of the "Science and Humanities Creativity Forum" in partnership the Wisconsin Initiative for Science Literacy (WISL). Funded in part through the generous support of the Anonymous Fund.
Francisco Ayala
Donald Bren Professor of Biological Sciences, Professor of Philosophy, Logic, and the Philosophy of Science, University of California-Irvine
From Biology to Ethics: The Biological Foundations of Morality
September 27, 2006 @ 7:30 pm
1800 Engineering Hall
This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.
Philip Kitcher
John Dewey Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University
Science, Religion, and the Difficulties of Democracy
October 19, 2006 @ 7:30 pm
Chazen Museum of Art, Room L160
This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.
The controversy about teaching Darwin's theory of evolution to schoolchildren is a symptom of much deeper difficulties about standards for public knowledge and the role of religious values in public policy. Philip Kitcher will examine how these problems arise, why they make democracy so difficult for multi-cultural societies, and ways in which they might be addressed.
Philip Kitcher is a renowned philosopher of science and mathematics. His current research concerns the ethical and political constraints on scientific research, the evolution of altruism and morality, and the apparent conflict between science and religion. He is the author of books on the scientific case against creationism, The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge; Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature (1985); The Lives to Come: The Genetic Revolution and Human Possibilities (1997); Science, Truth, and Democracy (2001); and In Mendel's Mirror: Philosophical Reflections on Biology (2003). Most recently, he co-authored Finding an Ending: Reflections on Wagner's Ring (2004).
Melvyn P. Leffler
Stettinius Professor of American History, and former Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, University of Virginia
George W. Bush and American Foreign Policy: What's New? What's Old?
October 26, 2006 @ 7:30 pm
Chazen Museum of Art, Room L160
This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.
Melvyn Leffler will place the Bush foreign policy in historical perspective and illuminate the considerable continuities that exist between his goals, tactics, and rhetoric and those of his predecessors. If that is the case, why is there so much controversy? To understand the answer to this question, he will examine how fear, power, and culture shape American diplomacy.
A distinguished historian of the Cold War, Melvyn Leffler has written extensively about the economic and strategic dimensions of American foreign policy in the 20th century, including in his prize-winning book, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (1992). Leffler will illuminate the considerable continuities that exist between the Bush foreign policy, goals, tactics, and rhetoric and those of his predecessors, and will suggest that the reasons that it has caused so much controversy lie in the ways that fear, power, and culture shape American diplomacy.
Melvyn Leffler's visit is co-sponsored by the UW-Madison's Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy (WAGE).
Etienne Balibar
Distinguished Professor of French & Italian, and Comparative Literature, University of California-Irvine; and Emeritus Professor of Political Philosophy, Université de Paris X, Nanterre
Politics as War, War as Politics
March 1, 2007 @ 7:30 pm
Chazen Museum of Art, Room L160
This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.
It has been claimed that we had entered an era of “new wars” in which the traditional “Clausewitzian” axioms, relying on a strict monopoly of legitimate violence for States bound by International Law, did no longer hold. The Lecture will suggest a return to the classical texts and elaborate a more dialectical view of their relevance to our present.
Etienne Balibar is a distinguished political philosopher. A co-author with Louis Althusser, Pierre Macherey, and others, of the landmark book of French Marxism Reading Capital (1965, translated into English in 1970), he is one of the leading thinkers in the Marxian tradition today. His current research focuses on issues of citizenship, racism and subjectification, and the question of Europe. His works include Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy before and after Marx (1993); Race, Nation, Class (with Immanuel Wallerstein) (1994), We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (2004), and Extreme Violence and the Problem of Civility (forthcoming). His lecture will take up the claim that we have entered an era of "new wars" in which the traditional "Clausewitzian" axioms, relying on a strict monopoly of legitimate violence for States bound by International Law, no longer hold. How can we achieve a more dialectical view, Balibar asks, of the relevance to our present of the classical doctrines of the "laws of war"?
Robert Bagley
Professor of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University
An Underground Palace in Ancient China: The Tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng
April 19, 2007 @ 7:30 pm
Chazen Museum of Art, Room L160
This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.
Robert Bagley is a distinguished scholar in the field of Chinese Neolithic and Bronze Age art and archaeology. In this lecture he will describe the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng, who died in 433 BC, probably the most astonishing discovery ever made in Chinese archaeology. Containing no less than ten metric tons of bronze artifacts, it was furnished with weapons and armor, ritual offerings of food and drink presented in bronze vessels, a wealth of luxury goods, and most remarkable of all, two distinct musical ensembles with a total of 30 instruments-winds and strings, drums, stone chimes, and a tuned set of 65 bronze bells. In death the Marquis was accompanied by 21 young women, probably concubines and musicians, in a coffin of wood and bronze that weighs 7000 pounds. Bagley will describe the burial and its contents, focusing particularly on the musical instruments, which show a technological and musical sophistication unsuspected before the discovery of this tomb and unparalleled anywhere else in the ancient world.
Judith Butler
Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley
Said, Levinas, and the Paradoxes of Universalism
May 3, 2007 @ 7:30 pm
Chazen Museum of Art, Room L160
This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.
Judith Butler is a pre-eminent American feminist philosopher and cultural theorist. Her books include Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990); Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (1993); The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (1997); Excitable Speech (1997); Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (2000); Hegemony, Contingency, Universality (with Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek, 2000). In 2004, she published a collection of writings on war's impact on language and thought titled Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning. Her most recent book, Giving an Account of Oneself (2005), considers the partial opacity of the subject, and the relation between critique and ethical reflection. She is currently working on essays pertaining to Jewish philosophy, focusing on pre-Zionist criticisms of state violence. She continues to write on cultural and literary theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminism, and sexual politics.
