Archive | Focus on the Humanities

• David O. Morgan
• Professor of History and Religious Studies
• Iran's Mongol Experience
• October 28, 2009 @ 5:30 pm
• Chazen Museum of Art, Room L140 (Elvehjem Building)
• This event is one of the Focus on the Humanities events.

• Iran was invaded by the Mongol armies of Genghis Khan in 1219-23, and again by his grandson in the 1250s. The Mongol kingdom that was set up at that time lasted until the 1330s. The lecture will explore the nature of the Mongol impact on Iran. Was it wholly destructive, as traditionally believed, or are there positive elements that historians, without minimising the death and destruction that the Mongols brought with them, ought also to consider?
   

  David  Morgan is professor of History and Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of Medieval Persia 1040-1797, "History of the Near East" (Longman, 1988) and The Mongols, "Peoples of Europe" (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1986).

  Please join us for a “Humanities Happy Hour” before the lecture, The University Club will open a cash bar from 4pm-5.30 that afternoon.

• Ronald Radano
• Professor of Musicology and Ethnomusicology
• Who Owns Black Music? Reflections on Cultural Property, Ownership, and Value
• March 4, 2009 @ 5:30 pm
• Pyle Center
• This event is one of the Focus on the Humanities events.

• How do we explain the power and significance of black music in American life? Working against common arguments that attribute value to inherent qualities of "blackness" (soul, rhythm, etc.), this paper will suggest that black music's aesthetic and cultural importance depends on the music's tenuous, contradictory status as a form of cultural property that is at once particular to black culture and accessible to the broad expanse of consumer America. This ambiguity of ownership reveals how aesthetic value is inextricably connected to race and economy, revealing what we might call the racial properties (or propertied value) of black music.

• Since joining the faculty in 1990, Ronald Radano has balanced his teaching between the programs in musicology and ethnomusicology and the Department of Afro-American Studies. His primary work is that of an Americanist with special interests in cultural theory, race, globalization, popular music and the history of North American black music. He is author and editor of three books, New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton's Cultural Critique (1993), Music and Racial Imagination (2000; co-edited with Philip V. Bohlman) and Lying up a Nation: Race and Black Music (2003), all published by the University of Chicago Press. Currently, he is principally at work on a new book on black music, cultural ownership and aesthetics while also launching two secondary projects: the first, a study of the global circulation of African-American musical rhythm; the second, a critical meditation on private listening and the crisis of taste. A 1997 Guggenheim Fellow, Professor Radano has held visiting appointments at Harvard and the University of Chicago, as well as research residencies at the Smithsonian Institution, the University of Pennsylvania (as a Rockefeller Fellow), the Institute for Research in the Humanities (Wisconsin), Harvard (W. E. B. Du Bois Institute) and New York University (Institute for African American Affairs). He is co-editor (with Josh Kun) of the new series, "Refiguring American Music," published by Duke University Press. His course offerings include the new "Music and Culture Workshop," which draws together an interdisciplinary assembly of graduate students and faculty pursuing original research.

• John D. Niles
• Frederic G. Cassidy Professor of Humanities, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities
• War and the Containment of Violence in Anglo-Saxon England: A Problem in Mentalities
• February 18, 2009 @ 5:00 pm
• Pyle Center
• This event is one of the Focus on the Humanities events.

• How did the people of England in its earliest recorded period think about war, peace, and the perennial issue of the containment of violence? Approaching this question as a problem in mentalities, this lecture will attempt to come to grips with key terms in the Old English language that were used for conflict and its resolution, taking into account the assumptions that these terms presuppose — assumptions that differ markedly from ones that are generally accepted today.

• John D. Niles is the Frederic G. Cassidy Professor of Humanities in the Department of English at the UW – Madison, where he is also affiliated with the programs in Medieval Studies, Religious Studies, Folklore, and Celtic Studies. Presently the First Vice President of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, he has authored, edited, or co-edited ten books relating to the language and literature of Anglo-Saxon England, among other publications. He has taught at UW – Madison since 2001.

• Chancellor Carolyn ‘Biddy’ Martin
• Humanities in the Public
• February 11, 2009 @ 5:00 pm
• Chazen Museum of Art, Room L160
• This event is one of the Focus on the Humanities events.
• In this talk, UW-Madison Chancellor Carolyn “Biddy” Martin will discuss how aspects of the humanities have been viewed outside the university over the past couple of decades and reflect upon how it might be possible to communicate the value of humanities scholarship to a larger audience. As provost at Cornell University from 2000-2008, Martin served as the president’s first deputy officer and reported to the president as Cornell’s chief educational officer and chief operating officer. She was responsible for overseeing all academic programs, with the exception of those programs reporting to the provost for medical affairs in New York City. Martin received her Ph.D. in German literature from UW-Madison in 1985. That same year, she joined Cornell’s faculty full time as an assistant professor of German studies and women’s studies. In 1991, she was promoted to associate professor in the Department of German Studies, with a joint appointment in the Women’s Studies Program. She served as chair of the Department of German Studies from 1994-1997, and in 1997 was promoted to full professor in the department. In 1996, she was named senior associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences. Martin was appointed as provost at Cornell University effective July 1, 2000.
Watch the video of this event

• Velcheru Narayana Rao
• Krishnadevaraya Professor of Languages and Cultures of Asia, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities
• Imagined Biographies and Unwritten Readings:Authors and Texts in India's Literatures
• December 3, 2008 @ 5:00 pm
• Pyle Center
• This event is one of the Focus on the Humanities events.
• Ever since the impact of the Western ideas of texts and authors through colonial education, there has been a major, but uncritically accepted notion in India that authors, individually identifiable preferably with a place and a date of birth write texts, which form the basis of literary history. Postmodern concepts of text and author significantly unsettled these notions, but not much work was done to go back to the indigenous concepts of authors and texts in India. This presentation aims at presenting evidence from precolonial literary cultures of India to argue for an Indian theory of texts and authors.
• Professor Narayana Rao is the author of several books on Telugu Literature and South Indian history. His publications include Girls for Sale: Kanyasulkam. A Play from colonial India(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), God On the Hill: Temple songs from Tirupati, With David Shulman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005)Textures of Time : Writing History in South India co-authored with Sanjay Subrahmanyam and David Shulman, ( New York: The Other Press, 2003), and Hibiscus on the Lake: Twentieth Century Telugu Poetry from India, (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003).

• Judith Leavitt
• Rupple Bascom and Ruth Bleier Professor of Medical History, History of Science, and Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
• Make Room for Daddy: Men and Childbirth in Mid-Twentieth Century America
• November 19, 2008 @ 5:00 pm
• Pyle Center
• This event is one of the Focus on the Humanities events.
• In this talk I examine how expectant fathers fared during American hospitalized childbirth in the middle years of the twentieth century. I argue that men are crucial to understanding this period in the history of childbirth. Fathers-to-be found their place in hospital childbirth in four chronologically sequential spaces - the waiting room, the labor room, the delivery room, and the birthing room - and these significantly shaped and held the men's experiences and influence the organization of this talk. These rooms - the geography of labor and delivery - illustrate the expanding scope as well as the limits and boundaries of the men's participation at different points in time. In addition to the changing spaces in which men's activity took place and the changing meanings of those spaces, the talk follows two thematic developments: growing lay power, and class and race privilege.
• Judith Walzer Leavitt, Ph.D., is the Rupple Bascom and Ruth Bleier Professor of Medical History, History of Science, and Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she has taught since 1975. She has written or edited seven books, including The Healthiest City: Milwaukee and the Politics of Health Reform; Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America 1750-1950; and Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public's Health.

• Lee Palmer Wandel
• Professor of History, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities
• Catechisms and the Construction of Religion in the Reformation
• November 5, 2008 @ 5:00 pm
• Pyle Center
• This event is one of the Focus on the Humanities events.
• In the sixteenth century, the world as Europeans knew it spun apart. Christian divided from Christian, sundering families, towns, and kingdoms. In the wake of that loss, individual pastors wrote catechisms, seeking to teach their readers through the new medium of print an understanding of “religion” that would be portable in the harrowing displacements of expulsion and exile, intimate in a world of increasing surveillance, and inseparable from one’s person. That understanding of religion has shaped western conceptions of “religion” to this day.
• Professor Lee Wandel is a Senior Fellow at the UW-Madison Institute for Research in the Humanities and Professor of History, Religious Studies, and Visual Culture. Her work explores the intersection of theology and culture, visual and material. She has written on changing perceptions of the poor, iconoclasm, and, most recently, the eucharist in the Reformation.

• Kirin Narayan
• Professor of Anthropology, UW-Madison
• Twin Muses: Ethnography and Fiction
• April 30, 2008 @ 5:00 pm
• Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium
• This event is one of the Focus on the Humanities events.
• Ethnography finds its identity in uneasy relationship to other practices of describing the world through writing. As ethnography emerged as a distinctive writing practice for anthropologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, travel writing, missionary accounts, scientific monographs, and realist novels provided important counterpoints. Yet from as early as 1890, certain ethnographers have found some insights best expressed through fiction. Today, the practice of ethnography has spread across many disciplines, and the cultural perspectives gleaned through ethnography continue to occasionally spill into fiction. I explore the work of anthropologists who have openly moved between ethnography and fiction to address larger issues of scholarly representation, readability, and the use of suspense. Kirin Narayan is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin--Madison. She is author of Storytellers, Saints and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching (which won the 1990 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing and was Co-winner of the 1990 Elsie Clews Parsons Prize for Folklore); Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon: Himalayan Foothill Folktales (in collaboration with Urmila Devi Sood); Love Stars and All That (a novel); and My Family and Other Saints (a memoir).

• David Loewenstein
• Marjorie and Lorin Tiefenthaler Professor of English, UW-Madison
• Heresy, Persecution, and Fear in Early Modern English
• March 12, 2008 @ 5:00 pm
• Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium
• This event is one of the Focus on the Humanities events.
• How did perceptions and fears of heresy and heretics fuel bitter cultural conflicts, religious persecution and instability, and powerful anxieties during the early modern period? This talk will focus on religious fear and the literary imagination, and the multiple ways they intersected in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. It will use the example of the great English martyrologist John Foxe (1516-87) to explore issues of religious demonization, hatred, fear, and polarization, as well as the violent consequences of religious extremism.

• Claudia Card
• Emma Goldman Professor of Philosophy, UW-Madison
• Evil and Inexcusable Wrongs
• January 30, 2008 @ 5:00 pm
• Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium
• This event is one of the Focus on the Humanities events.
• Two background concerns guide my construction of the theory of evils that I call "the atrocity paradigm" or "the atrocity theory." One is to specify what distinguishes evils from less serious wrongs. The other is to avoid demonizing perpetrators. The atrocity theory attempts both by taking the focus off perpetrator culpability and putting it more on harms done to victims. Applying the theory to torture, terrorism, and genocide in my current project, I have been led to revisions that threaten to compromise those two background concerns. I am now defending (1) the theory that evils are reasonably foreseeable intolerable harms produced by not just culpable but inexcusable wrongdoing and (2) the view that evils need not be extraordinary. One challenge is to show that this theory does not demonize perpetrators. The other is to show that this view still distinguishes evils from less serious wrongs.

• Thongchai Winichakul
• Professor of History, UW-Madison
• Moments of Silence: The Unforgetting of the 1976 Massacre in Bangkok
• November 28, 2007 @ 5:00 pm
• Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium
• This event is one of the Focus on the Humanities events.
• Thongchai Winichakul joined UW faculty in 1991 and is currently Professor of Southeast Asian history. His book, Siam Mapped: a history of the geo-body of a nation, was awarded the Harry Benda Prize by the Association for Asian Studies in 1995 and the Grand Prize for the Asia Pacific Book Award from the Asian Affairs Research Council, Japan, in 2004. He has received several awards including the Guggenheim and the SSRC Fellowship, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003. Born and educated in Bangkok before doing his graduate degrees in Sydney, Australia, Thongchai witnessed the 1976 massacre, which is the subject of his lecture, while he was a college student.

• Russ Castronovo
• Jean Wall Bennet Professor of English and American Studies, UW-Madison
• Esperanto of the Eye: Democracy, Aesthetics, and Moving Pictures
• September 26, 2007 @ 5:00 pm
• Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium
• This event is one of the Focus on the Humanities events.
• This talk explores the failed promise of motion pictures as universal art. Heralded as the "Esperanto of the eye," film echoes turn-of-the-century movements to create an international language, an idea that anarchists and socialists as well as businessmen and diplomats found enticing. But the example of Chaplin and early academic studies of film spectatorship invites the following question: does the utopian prospect of international language and global understanding also echo the language of commodity culture? Russ Castronovo is Jean Wall Bennett Professor of English and American Studies. His research explores the relationship between literature and politics. His books include Fathering the Nation: American Genealogies of Slavery and Freedom (1995), Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States (2001), and Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era (2007).

• Jost Hermand
• William F. Vilas Research Professor Emeritus of German, UW-Madison
• Was German Fascism a Utopia?
• March 21, 2007 @ 5:00 pm
• Chazen Museum of Art, Room L160
• This event is one of the Focus on the Humanities events.
• Jost Hermand earned his Ph.D. in 1955 from the University of Marburg, Germany. He has been teaching at the UW since 1955, has been a Vilas Research Professor since 1967, and retired in 2004. He is honorary professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. Relevant publications include: Deutsche Kulturgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts (2006), A Hitler Youth in Poland: The Nazi Children's Evacuation Program in World War II (1997), Old Dreams of a New Reich: Volkish Utopias and National Socialism (1992).

• Heather Dubrow
• Tighe-Evans & John Bascom Professor of English, UW-Madison
• 'Lend me your ears': The Audiences of Lyric Poetry
• November 15, 2006 @ 5:00 pm
• Chazen Museum of Art, Room L160
• This event is one of the Focus on the Humanities events.
• Who is addressed in a lyric poem? And how and why? Answers to those questions illuminate issues ranging from the power politics of our daily conversations to the distinctive characteristics and tensions of Shakespeare's era.
• Heather Dubrow's recent publications include two chapbooks of poetry, and Shakespeare and Domestic Loss: Forms of Deprivation, Mourning, and Recuperation (1999); Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and its Counterdiscourses (1995); and Happier Eden: the Politics of Marriage in the Stuart Epithalamium (1990). She has also just finished a new book on lyric poetry.

• Florencia E. Mallon
• Julieta Kirkwood Professor of History, UW-Madison
• Postcolonialism and the Chilean Frontier: The Ránquil Massacre Reconsidered, 1880-1934
• September 13, 2006 @ 5:00 pm
• Chazen Museum of Art, Room L160
• This event is one of the Focus on the Humanities events.
• In 1934, rumors of a major indigenous uprising, fuelled by Communist Party claims that the rebellion aimed to establish an independent Mapuche indigenous republic, prompted a major repressive campaign and massacre by the Chilean military police along the border with Argentina. Mallon will explore the claims made by the different actors involved, as well as subsequent historical interpretations of the event, which has long been considered a foundation for the Chilean left and the Chilean peasant movement.
• Florencia E. Mallon is the author of Courage Tastes of Blood: The Mapuche Indigenous Community of Nicolás Ailío and the Chilean State, 1906-2000 (2005); Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (1995); The Defense of Community in Peru's Central Highlands: Peasant Struggle and Capitalist Transition, 1860-1940 (1983); and is the editor and translator of Rosa Isolde Reuque Paillalef, When a Flower is Reborn: The Life and Times of a Mapuche Feminist (2002).

• David Sorkin
• Professor of History and Director of the Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin-Madison
• How Secular Was the Enlightenment? Six Faces of Reasonable Belief, 1689-1789
• March 22, 2006
• Chazen Museum of Art, Room L160
• This event is one of the Focus on the Humanities events.
• Focusing on the myth of a secular Enlightenment, David Sorkin will re-examine the relationship of the Enlightenment to religion, departing from the conventional approach that considers the attitude of canonical Enlightenment thinkers (Locke and Hume, Voltaire and Diderot, Lessing and Kant) to religion, by instead asking how thinkers in the major religious traditions (Anglicanism, Lutheranism, Calvinism, Catholicism, Judaism) dealt with the science (Newton) and philosophy of the Enlightenment (ideas of reason, natural religion, toleration). It will argue that if we wish to continue to see the Enlightenment as the fount of modern culture, then we must recognize that it was inextricably linked to religious belief. David Sorkin is the author of The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780-1840 (1987), Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (1996) and The Berlin Haskalah and German Religious Thought (2000). He is associate editor of The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies (2002) and is co-editor of two other volumes. He has received grants from the British Academy, the NEH, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has been a visiting professor or fellow at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris); the Max Planck Institut für Geschichte (Göttingen); and All Souls College, Oxford. Funded through the generous support of the Anonymous Fund and in cooperation with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Institute for Research in the Humanities.

• Stephen Lucas
• Professor of Communication Arts, Evjue-Bascom Professor in the Humanities, UW-Madison
• Words That Changed American History: Oratory, Politics, and Democracy in the Twentieth Century
• February 1, 2006
• Chazen Museum of Art, Room L160
• This event is one of the Focus on the Humanities events.
• Drawing on his new book Words of a Century: The Top 100 American Speeches, 1900-1999 (2006, Oxford University Press), Professor Lucas will explore the artistry and impact of path-breaking public addresses by Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Barbara Jordan, Ronald Reagan, Barbara Bush, and Hillary Clinton. The lecture will include historic video footage of each speaker in action. An expert on American political discourse from the Declaration of Independence to the present, Stephen Lucas was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, has won numerous awards for his scholarship and teaching, is a frequent guest on news and public affairs programs, and has spoken to enthusiastic audiences around the globe. His books include Portents of Rebellion: Rhetoric and Revolution in Philadelphia, 1765-1776, The Art of Public Speaking, and The Quotable George Washington.

• Michael Shank
• Professor, History of Science and Integrated Liberal Studies, UW-Madison
• Preparing Copernicus: Regiomontanus' 15th-Century Critique of Astronomy
• March 9, 2005 @ 5:00 pm
• Chazen Museum of Art, Room L160
• This event is one of the Focus on the Humanities events.
• In our usual image of the Italian pioneer of astronomy, Nicolas Copernicus (1473-1543), his groundbreaking notion of a sun-centered universe pops onto the scene like of a bolt out of the blue against a static medieval background. Recent work on the history of fifteenth-century astronomy is showing that Copernicus owed much more to his predecessors than we suspected, especially to Johannes Regiomontanus (1436-1476). In this lecture, Shank draws on an unstudied St. Petersburg manuscript to emphasize the growing role of this University of Vienna astronomer in "setting up" Copernicus and understanding his outlook.
• Michael Shank is a historian of the physical sciences before 1700, with a focus on late medieval natural philosophy and astronomy, and particularly the work of Johannes Regiomontanus (1436-1476). His related interests include science and the medieval university and science and early printing, and his publications include The Scientific Enterprise in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Readings from Isis (University of Chicago Press, 2000).

• David Bordwell
• Jacques Ledoux Professor of Film Studies (Emeritus), UW-Madison
• Small Worlds and Network Narratives: New Models of Hollywood Storytelling
• February 2, 2005 @ 5:00 pm
• Banquet Room, University Club
• This event is one of the Focus on the Humanities events.
• Internationally recognized film scholar David Bordwell turns to the theme of film and its relationship to academia, while weaving in reflections on the ways in which empirical inquiry remains critical in a theory-driven world. Where does the study of film “fit” into the traditions of academic research? What aspects of film studies challenge the traditions of the academy?
• David Bordwell taught at the University of Wisconsin for over 30 years until his recent retirement. With a broad theoretical and historical grasp of film, Bordwell is best known for his book, Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment (Harvard University Press, 2000), which responded to the popularity in the west of Hong Kong action cinema. In addition to a continually growing list of articles and reviews, Bordwell’s books also include On the History of Film Style (Harvard University Press, 1997), and Film History: An Introduction (McGraw-Hill, 1994). His books have been translated into several languages and are used as textbooks on campuses throughout the world. He maintains a content-rich website, David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema at www.davidbordwell.net

• Lynn Keller
• Martha Renk Meier Bascom Professor of Poetry, UW-Madison
• Uncommon Languages: Invention and Innovation in Contemporary American Poetry by Women
• November 17, 2004 @ 5:00 pm
• Chazen Museum of Art, Room L160
• This event is one of the Focus on the Humanities events.
• In the1980s, American poetry was Balkanized, and experimentalism was closely identified with the divisive movement known as “Language Writing.” Today, territorial borders are far less clear, the scene is more complicated, and poetic invention takes a variety of forms. Focusing on women writers who have felt impelled to unsettle conventions, graft uncommon forms of language, or push the boundaries of intelligibility, Lynne Keller will consider the meaning of innovation in poetry today. What, if anything, is “new” in American poetry at the opening of the 21st-century, and how, if at all, is current innovation inflected by gender?
• Lynn Keller is the author of Re-making it New: Contemporary American Poetry and the Modernist Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 1987); Forms of Expansion: Recent Long Poems by Women (University of Chicago Press, 1997), and numerous articles on recent work by poets in the United States. She co-edited with Cristanne Miller the essay collection Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory (University of Michigan Press, 1994), and is currently coediting Contemporary North American Poetry for the UW Press. She has been a member of the UW-Madison faculty since 1981, the year she earned her PhD from the University of Chicago.

• Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney
• William F. Vilas Professor of Anthropology, UW-Madison
• The Crooked Timber of Cherry: The Militarization of Aesthetics
• October 20, 2004 @ 5:00 pm
• Chazen Museum of Art, Room L160
• This event is one of the Focus on the Humanities events.
• During World War II, the emperor told his soldiers that their destiny was to “fall like beautiful cherry petals” for their homeland. In Japanese cultural and social practice, the cherry blossom plays many roles: signifying rebirth and sexuality, it has also been militarized by Japanese leaders, who turned it into a ‘master trope’ for sacrifice in war. Through slides and the diaries of Kamikaze pilots, Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney explores this under-examined aspect of Japanese culture, placing it into the broader comparative context of the aesthetics of fascism.
• Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney has served as Professor of Anthropology at the UW-Madison since 1967, and has been a William F. Vilas Research Professor since 1988. Her books include Nejimagerareta Sakura: Biishiki to Gunkokushugi [The Crooked Timber of Cherry: Aesthetics and Militarization] (Iwanami Shoten, 2003); Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History (University of Chicago Press, 2002); and Rice as Self: Japanese Identities Through Time (Princeton University Press, 1993).

• Elliott Sober
• Professor of Philosophy & William F. Vilas Professor, UW-Madison
• The Logic of the Design Argument
• September 8, 2004 @ 5:00 pm
• Chazen Museum of Art, Room L160
• This event is one of the Focus on the Humanities events.
• The argument for intelligent design claims that the existence of God can be inferred from the fact that organisms are well adapted to their environments. While it is often considered a reaction to evolution, intelligent design was influential even before the release of The Origin of Species in 1859. In the first lecture of the new Focus series, Elliott Sober examines the strongest version of the intelligent design argument, and then explain that argument's fatal flaw.
• Elliott Sober has taught at University of Wisconsin Madison since 1974, and currently holds the posts of Hans Reichenbach Professor of Philosophy and William F. Vilas Research Professor. His books include From a Biological Point of View: Essays in Evolutionary Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1994), and Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior (Harvard University Press, 1998). He is currently president of the Philosophy of Science Association and is a past president of the American Philosophical Association.

• John Searle
• Professor of Philosophy, University of California - Berkeley
• The Future of Philosophy
• March 20, 2001 @ 7:30 pm
• Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium
• This event is one of the Focus on the Humanities events.
• Searle has written for a wide audience on questions concerning the humanities, higher education, and the so-called "culture wars," for the New York Review of Books and other venues. Searle is the Mills Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Language, University of California at Berkeley, where he has taught since 1959. He attended the UW - Madison from 1949 - 52. He was president of the Wisconsin Student Association and during his junior year he won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. He received a B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. from Oxford and an honorary degree, Doctor of Humane Letters, from UW - Madison in 1994. He is highly regarded for his accomplishments in the philosophy of language and philosophy of the mind and also noted for his work in cognitive science and psychology. His books include Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (1969); The Campus War (1971); Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (1979); Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983); Minds, Brains and Science (1984); The Foundations of Illocutionary Logic (with Daniel Vanderveken, 1985); The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992); The Construction of Social Reality (1995); The Mystery of Consciousness (1997); and Mind, Language and Society, Philosophy in the Real World (1998).

Calendar Support
Archive Contact

University Club Building, 3rd Floor, 432 East Campus Mall, Madison WI 53706 | 608-263-3412 | info@humanities.wisc.edu