Bucknell Philosophy Colloquium: "Make It Funky: Soul and Style"

"Make It Funky: Soul and Style"

Paul Taylor (Associate Professor of Philosophy Head of African American Studies at the Pennsylvania State University) 

Thursday, April 25 at 4:30 pm

Willard Smith Library, 125 Vaughan Lit.

"Make It Funky: Soul and Style" uses contemporary research on musical experience to explore one of the familiar themes from the black aesthetic tradition. Racialized blackness has typically been bound up with peculiar ideas about rhythm, musical responsiveness, and dance. I will consider this complex of ideas and assumptions by reading the experience of funk music through some contemporary research in neuroscience and musicology. My aim will be to identify the best story about how this music moves us, and to explain how we can think of music that moves us in this way as black music while still avoiding problematic forms of essentialism.    

Please join us for this last talk in the Spring 2013 Bucknell Philosophy Colloquium Series.  Refreshments will be provided!

Lecture at Bloomsburg University: "The Philosophical Importance of Monty Python"

Gary Hardcastle (Bloomsburg University)

Thursday, April 18th at 7PM in MCHS 2303

Lecture: "Make it Funky: Soul and Style"

Paul Taylor (Penn State) 
April 25th at 4:30 in Willard Smith Library

Abstract: References to the Black aesthetic typically raise worries about invidious essentialism - about a system of norms for producing or evaluating artworks that takes its cues from a troubling racial metaphysics. As it happens, though, careful reflection on the traditions of work that pre-theoretically seem to count as instances of black aesthetics reveal something less essentialist than, as Stuart Hall puts it, 'conjunctural.' Seen in this way, 'black aesthetics' names a diverse and sprawling set of practices, principles, events, and objects that, despite differences in style, political ideology, ethnic origin, and much else, tend to take up similar questions and work through them using similar conceptual resources. Focusing on black aesthetics as a conjunctural enterprise reveals the degree to which a few familiar themes have organized the theory and practice of black expressive culture across time, space, and philosophical orientation.

"Make It Funky: Soul and Style" uses contemporary research on musical experience to explore one of the familiar themes from the black aesthetic tradition. Racialized blackness has typically been bound up with peculiar ideas about rhythm, musical responsiveness, and dance. I will consider this complex of ideas and assumptions by reading the experience of funk music through some contemporary research in neuroscience and musicology. My aim will be to identify the best story about how this music moves us, and to explain how we can think of music that moves us in this way as black music while still avoiding problematic forms of essentialism.

Lecture: "Outsider Art/Outsider Theory"

Jonathan P. Eburne, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and English, Penn State
April 11, 5–6PM
Traditional Reading Room, Bertrand Library

Outsider Art/Outsider Theory takes up the tendentious category of the outsider to examine the production and reception of errant, unfashionable, or otherwise unreasonable thinking throughout the twentieth century. Throughout the past century, thought systems such as paranoia, schizophrenia, and delusional, as well as the various incarnations of mysticism, new age holism, hermeticism, and pseudoscience, have, with some justification, been excluded from the sphere of truth-production. Yet such forms of unreason have just as often been taken up as cast aside by other intellectuals, who recognize them as something other than curiosities or aberrations of thought. Such heterodox systems, and the tangled corpus of thinkers bound up with them, have fueled new directions in critical thinking and offered paradigms for frustrated or persecuted intellectuals. Much as the notion of l’art brut (or outsider art) acknowledges forms of artistic creativity once considered negligible or merely the source-material for truly great artists, my notion of outsider theory seeks to enrich the fields of intellectual and critical inquiry we know as theory by devoting serious attention to marginal thought.

Lecture at Bloomsburg University: "Are You an A**hole?"

This is actually a fascinating (if somewhat unconventional and potentially . . . awkward) question that pushes on our standard theories of ethics. If you can get yourself to Bloomsburg (about a 40 minute drive), we imagine that it would be well worth your time.

Professor James will also be speaking the next day (Friday, April 12) on "Fortune and Fairness in Global Economic Life" at 4PM in Bakeless 202.

George Yancy Lecture on Racial Embodiment

After George Yancy's lunch chat, he will be giving the Chi Phi Biff Hoffman Lecture at 7PM on Thursday, April 4th in the Gallery Theater.

 (Sponsored by the Brothers of Chi Phi Fraternity and the Associate Provost for Diversity)