Food for Thought: The Philosophy of Food

Food for 

Thought: 
The Philosophy of Food
Discussion Facilitated
 by Philosophy Major
 Gabi Hitel, '18 
Thursday, November 10, 2016 12-1 PM
Willard Smith Library, Vaughan Literature Building, Room 125

Are you what you eat? Should we all be vegans? How do we understand our relationship with food? Come join us for a conversation on the philosophical understanding of food! 

All are welcome and encouraged to join! 

We hope to see you there for our last Food for Thought of the semester! 

Lunch will be provided.

The Philosophy Club, Bucknell Chapter of Phi Sigma Tau, and Dept. of Philosophy

Lunch Chat (3/10): Science Fiction

Thursday (3/10) at noon in the International Commons (151 Coleman Hall)

Life and Artificial Life: Who's who? Should it matter?

What can Science-Fiction, as a genre of story-telling in various forms tell us about the world — about  the structure of society, what we can know, who we are, how we should behave, and so on? Two weeks ago, the Campus Theatre held a special event around the philosophical and scientific context of Ridley Scott's sci-fi classic film "Blade Runner" — a film that helps us consider many philosophical issues, e.g., about the nature of the self, the possibility of artificial intelligence, "us versus them" thinking, and so on. It's likely that you can think of innumerable other science fiction films and books that raise other challenging questions. . . .

But how is it that fiction can help us answer such questions? After all, fiction represents a departure from reality. What is it about it that we find useful? In this lunch chat, we'll welcome Professor Felipe Perrone from the Computer Science Department (and organizer of the "Blade Runner" event) as our guest to help us think through some of these issues — in particular concerning science fiction connected with artificial intelligence and novel technologies.

Professor Perrone

Professor Perrone is the Robert L. Rooke Chair of the Historical and Societal Context of Engineering and an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Bucknell. He is currently teaching a new new course concerning "interplay between science fiction and computing technologies".

Please join us for what promises to be a lively and informal discussion. As usual, pizza and salad will be served. Hope to see you there.

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.