2015 Roy Wood Sellars Lecture (3/26): Robert Pippin, "Psychology Degree Zero? On the Representation of Action in the Films of the Dardenne Brothers"

Robert Pippin, Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago

 

Thursday, March 26, 7 pm in The Forum (ELC 272)  

 

Over the last twenty years, the Belgian team of Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne have made some of the most powerful and most praised films in world cinema. Their most celebrated is the 2002 film, The Son (Le flls), which will be the main focus of this discussion. In all the major films, the Dardenne brothers try to represent, literally to photograph, the mindedness (the intentions and motivations) of certain characters,  who are required to make a very difficult decision. But they proceed under two unmistakable assumptions: that there is often something very difficult to understand, even mysterious, about such motivations, decisions, and reactions by others; and that the social context within which these decisions must be made is novel, a product of free trade zones, migrant labor, the Common Market, and globalized capitalism, all creating a new context for labor and power, the social, and especially psychological, implications of which are not yet fully clear. The thesis to be explored: these films should be considered distinct forms of philosophical thought, not merely illustrative of philosophical problems.  

Robert B. Pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of numerous books and articles on German idealism and later German philosophy: Kant's Theory of Form (Yale, 1982); Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge, 1989); Modernism as a Philosophical Problem (Blackwell, 1991); Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations (Cambridge, 1997), The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath (Cambridge 2005), Hegel's Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life (Cambridge, 2008), Nietzsche, Psychology and First Philosophy (Chicago, 2010), Hegel on Self-Consciousness: Desire and Death in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Princeton, 2011), After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism (Chicago, 2014) and Interanimations: Receiving Modern German Philosophy (Chicago, 2015). He has also published several books on literature and film, including Henry James and Modern Moral Life (Cambridge, 2000), Hollywood Westerns and American Myth: The Importance of Howard Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy (Yale, 2010), and Fatalism in American Film Noir: Some Cinematic Philosophy (Virginia, 2012), and on issues in political philosophy, theories of self-consciousness, the nature of conceptual change, and the problem of freedom. He was twice an Alexander von Humboldt fellow, is a winner of the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award in the Humanities, and was recently a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a member of the American Philosophical Society.

Lunch Chat (3/19): Philosophy and Genocide

with Dr. Lissa Skitolsky (Associate Professor, Susquehanna University)

Thursday, March 19th at noon in the International Commons (151 Coleman Hall)

Dr. Lissa Skitolsky (Associate Professor, Susquehanna University) will explain how philosophers have contributed to the field of genocide studies, as well as share her own current research on the genocidal wounds inflicted by mass incarceration in the United States. This research makes use of certain rap songs as testimony about the experiences of African-Americans who are targeted by police and then subject to psychological and physical suffering while incarcerated. Skitolsky will illustrate her thesis by playing a few rap songs that illustrate how the entire Black community suffers when individuals are given excessively long sentences and subject to violence while ‘wards of the state.’

Lunch Chat (2/10): Masculinities

with Professor Harry Brod (University of Northern Iowa)

Tuesday, February 10th at noon in the International Commons (151 Coleman Hall).  

Photo Credit: Dickinson College/Carl Socolow

What does it mean to theorize about men and masculinities at the deepest levels? If I say to you that we are going to discuss gender, and what you hear is that we are going to discuss women, that’s not the voice of feminism, that’s the voice of patriarchy, for it leaves women as “marked” but men as unremarkable and uninterrogated, thereby leaving patriarchy intact because its foundations remain hidden or obscured. How can philosophy rise to the challenge of examining its gendered foundations and their ethical implications?

This discussion will examine what philosophies have to say about masculinities, the challenges of men becoming profeminist allies for gender justice, gendered aspects of the practice of philosophy itself, as in the question of why men dominate philosophy classrooms, and related issues in the history and present practice of philosophy.

The Oldest Living Things in the World

The Samek Art Museum at Bucknell will be exhibiting the work of Rachel Sussman, an artist who has been traveling the world, photographing very old organisms (minimum age 2,000 years!) through March 22nd. The photographs themselves are understated; it's their subject matter and what it can do for our thinking about deep time and environmental value that is significant.

Sussman will give a gallery talk on Wednesday, January 21st at 6PM, moderated by Professor Duane Griffin (Geography), in the Gallery Theater (3rd floor of the Langone Center, adjacent to the Museum).

Check out her project webpage and her TED talk from a few years ago. Hope to see you there.