Tag: Philosophy
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Nation & World
A humanitarian comes home
Harvard Medical School Instructor Stephanie Kayden’s educational life came full circle this semester, when she taught a humanitarian studies course in Emerson Hall, where, as an undergraduate philosophy concentrator she honed her own reasoning skills years ago.
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Nation & World
Exploring Happiness: From Aristotle to Brain Science
Happiness — how do we get it, how do we keep it, and where does it come from? Distinguished visiting fellow Sissela Bok plumbs the theories of philosophers, neuroscientists, and other specialists, and synthesizes her research into a comprehensive overview of the subject.
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Nation & World
Looking ahead
He’s an economist, a researcher, and a physician, and he’s about to become provost. On the day (April 15) that President Drew Faust announced that he would be Harvard’s next provost, Alan M. Garber ’76 sat down with the Gazette to talk about his career, his new role, and facilitating connections across traditional academic boundaries…
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Nation & World
A passion for unloving art
Australian native Maria Gough, the Joseph Pulitzer Jr. Professor of Modern Art at Harvard, studies the Russian and Soviet avant-garde periods because they portray “what the function of the artist is in a revolutionary climate.”
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Nation & World
Putnam awarded Rolf Schock Prize
The 2011 Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy will be awarded on Nov. 2 to Hilary Putnam, Cogan University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University.
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Nation & World
Whistling through the darkness
Authors offer perspective on finding meaning in a secular age, using literature as a lens through which to understand how people found solace in the past.
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Nation & World
Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory
Stanley Cavell, the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value Emeritus, presents an autobiography that details his musical studies before discovering philosophy, and his many, many years at Harvard.
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Nation & World
Thinking like an octopus
A philosophy professor’s summer of diving in Sydney Harbour has gotten him thinking about what octopus intelligence might mean.
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Nation & World
How to get happy
Former Harvard President Derek Bok and his wife Sissela, a Harvard fellow, discussed their recent books on happiness in a discussion at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
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Nation & World
What makes a life significant?
A diverse Harvard panel marks the 1910 death of William James, celebrates his life, and revisits his famous question.
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Nation & World
A Tenth of a Second: A History
When clocks recognized a tenth of a second, the world would never be the same, says Jimena Canales, an associate professor in the history of science who melds technology, philosophy, and science in this heady history.
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Nation & World
Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy
D.N. Rodowick, a professor of visual and environmental studies, edits this collection of writings on Deleuze, a French philosopher and prolific writer on literature, film, and fine art.
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Nation & World
Justice for all
Michael Sandel, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government, has authored a new book unpacking today’s most prevailing political and ethical quandaries.
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Nation & World
Sharing ‘Justice’ with the world
Harvard University has teamed up with WGBH Boston to produce a new television series and interactive Web site that will take viewers inside one of the University’s most popular courses. “Justice” will premiere on public television stations nationwide in mid-September.
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Nation & World
Eck delivers Gifford Lectures
Diana Eck, Fredric Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society and member of the faculty of divinity, recently traveled to Scotland to deliver a series of Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh (April 27-May 7). The lecture series, which was established in 1888 through the endowment of Lord Gifford to four Scottish Universities…
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Nation & World
Locke: More enlightened than we thought
English political philosopher John Locke died nearly a century before the American Revolution, and in his time parliamentary democracy was in its infancy. But his Enlightenment ideas — including the right to life, liberty, and property — went on to inspire American revolutionaries.
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Nation & World
Philosophers expand meaning of ‘space’
Gaston Bachelard, a French philosopher of science, published “The Poetics of Space” in 1958. It was a meditation on the intimate and resonant places that are the cradle of memory — things like a child’s first house, chests, drawers, nests, shells, and corners.
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Nation & World
Tanner lecturer, peacemaker Nusseibeh in search of the improbable
Prior to delivering the first of this year’s Tanner Lectures, political activist Sari Nusseibeh gave the audience a laugh — and a cheat sheet. “My normal attitude in lectures is to doze off when someone is reading them,” he quipped, “so if you do doze off I just want to tell you that my message…
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Nation & World
Are boundaries between ‘the arts’ irrelevant?
What does Harpo Marx’s bicycle horn have to do with Richard Wagner’s epic opera “The Ring of the Nibelung”? Everything, if you ask Daniel Albright, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature. Albright, who studies the intellectual history of comparative arts, is currently at work on a book about the boundaries and overlaps between different artistic media.
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Nation & World
Ethicists, philosophers discuss selling of human organs
In nearly every country in the world, there is a shortage of kidneys for transplantation. In the United States, around 73,000 people are on waiting lists to receive a kidney. Yet 4,000 die every year before the lifesaving organ is available.
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Nation & World
Armstrong: God is hard to get to know
Man’s practical understanding of God, said one religious scholar speaking at Harvard, is “like a goldfish trying to understand a computer. … It will always be beyond us.”
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Nation & World
Harvey Mansfield on politics, the humanities, and science
Harvey Mansfield wants to reintroduce the concept of thumos into political science. As employed by Plato and Aristotle, thumos refers to the “part of the soul that makes us want to insist on our own importance.” Mansfield believes that modern political science has excluded thumos, and as a result has narrowed its understanding of what…
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Nation & World
Noted Islamic scholar Mahdi dies at 81
Muhsin S. Mahdi, the James Richard Jewett Professor of Arabic Emeritus, died July 9 after a long series of illnesses. He was 81.
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Nation & World
Addiction illuminates concept of ‘free will’
Whether humans possess free will or whether their actions are determined by something outside their conscious control is one of the most persistent problems in philosophy.