On our Front Table this week, map paths to and through "the good life," from a biography of a religious progressive to philosophical counsel on the art of the dinner party. Find the following titles and more at semcoop.com
Choosing Freedom: A Kantian Guide to Life (Oxford University Press)
Karen Stohr
Immanuel Kant is well known as one of the towering figures of Western philosophical history, but he is less well known for his...
On our Front Table this week, measure the line between theory and practice, from radically formal experiments in criticism to intimate snapshots of the first COVID-19 lockdown. Find the following titles and more at semcoop.com
God: An Anatomy (Penguin Random House)
Francesca Stavrakopoulou
Much of theology and religion teach us that the God of the Bible was without a body, only revealing himself in the Old Testament in words mysteriously uttered through his prophets, and in the New Testament in the body of Christ. The portrayal of God as corporeal and masculine is seen as merely metaphorical, figurative, or poetic. But, in this...
On March 7th, The Institute on the Formation of Knowledge will present "Reducing Gun Violence with Behavioral Science" as part of the Cultures & Knowledge Workshop Series. This workshop will be presented by Max Kapustin.
REGISTER HERE
About the discussion: Gun violence is a uniquely American problem, a major cause of...
On our Front Table this week, take a deep dive into bottomless questions: from philosophies of the digital sphere to considerations of presence in the void. Find the following titles and more at semcoop.com
Nothing: A Philosophical History (Oxford University Press)
Roy Sorensen
The absence of something might seem to indicate a null or a void, an emptiness as ineffectual as a shadow. In fact, 'nothing' is one of the most powerful ideas the human mind has ever conceived...
On our Front Table this week sift through chaos and encounter first principles, from the cinema of mayhem to the foundations of reality. Find the following titles and more at semcoop.com.
David Thomson
Audiences swell with the scale of disaster; humans have always been drawn to the rumors of our own demise. In this searching treatment, noted film historian David Thomson examines iconic disasters, both real and fictional, exposing the slippage between what occurs and what we observe. With...
On February 28th, The Institute on the Formation of Knowledge will present "Utopian Vectors: Machine Reading Utopian Literature" as part of the Cultures & Knowledge Workshop Series. This workshop will be presented by Bhargav Srinivasa Desikan, Ariana Gass, Patrick Jagoda, and Clara del Junco.
REGISTER HERE
About the discussion: Word embeddings are machine learning algorithms which quantify meaning by assigning a vector to each word or document in a corpus based its context. Tech companies like Google...
On our Front Table this week, find scholarly investigations that break ground and bounds, from a pioneering work of comparative archeology to an intellectual history of animal-human relations. Find the following titles and more at semcoop.com.
The Art of Solitude (Yale University Press)
Stephen Batchelor
When world renowned Buddhist writer Stephen Batchelor turned sixty, he took a sabbatical from his teaching and turned his attention to solitude, a practice integral to the meditative traditions he has long studied and taught. He...
On February 7th, The Institute on the Formation of Knowledge will present "The Truth of Biology: Science and France's Liberal Turn" as part of the Cultures & Knowledge Workshop Series. This workshop will be presented by Isabel Gabel.
REGISTER HERE
About the presenter: Isabel Gabel, a Postdoctoral Researcher and Instructor at the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge presents "The Truth of Biology: Science and France's Liberal Turn". In her talk, Gabel argues that the contemporary conflation of scientific authority with robust liberalism...
Connected History: Essays and Arguments (Verso)
Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Sanjay Subrahmanyam is the...
Silence and Silences is a meditation on the infinite search for meanings in silence from Wallis Wilde-Menozzi, author of The Other Side of the Tiber and Mother Tongue. In this Selected Bibliography, Wilde-Menozzi shares and reflects on the books that informed her exploration of silence.
Wallis Wilde-Menozzi: There is a great deal of silence in my inner writing life, and a great number of strong opinions in my outer one. Getting at silence by using words seemed a contradiction; I often longed for a solution like John Cage’s, when musicians performed his composition of silence for four minutes and thirty-three soundless seconds. Or like Tilley Olsen’s, defining it from a...