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Exciting news! Canadian philosopher, poet, essayist, musician, and author of new release Alkibiades’ Love, Dr Jan Zwicky will deliver the University of King’s College 4th annual Alex Fountain Memorial Lecture.
The lecture is Feb 26 at 7:30 PM in the Alumni Hall. Event info >
Zwicky’s lecture is entitled “What Meaning Is and Why It Matters”. From the University of King’s website:
What is meaning? We tend to associate it first and foremost with language and information. But attention to the experience of meaning shows the situation is more complex. The experience of meaning involves the perception or comprehension of integrated wholes that are more than mere sums of parts. These integrated wholes can often be named without much difficulty, but our ability to discern them erodes under the press of demands to describe and analyze them. Such demands, however, are basic to 21st-century technocratic culture: articulate description and analysis are regarded as essential to intelligence. The consequence is that we, as members of this culture, are unable to take seriously our own experience of many complex integrated wholes: rivers, for example, forests, landscapes, nonhuman cultures of all kinds. Understanding what meaning is thus becomes a crucial political act if we are to appreciate ways the world actually is.
This annual lecture is a prestigious event. Previous lecturers have included The Right Honourable Michaëlle Jean, Dr. Charles Taylor, and Michael Ondaatje.
The Alex Fountain Memorial Lecturer is chosen each year by the student body of King’s. Students begin a nomination process at the beginning of the winter semester. A long list of twenty is narrowed to a short list of ten by student election. The short list is then prioritized by a student committee which includes the programme directors and the president. More info >
**The lecture tomorrow is FREE and will be followed by a short Q&A. **
Alkibiades, a central character in Plato’s Symposium, claims that philosophy touches him to the quick. When Socrates speaks, he’s often moved to tears and realizes he must change his life. In Alkibiades’ Love, Jan Zwicky demonstrates that this image of philosophy is not anachronistic, but remains the living heart of the discipline. Philosophy can indeed matter to our lives, but for it to do so, we must reconceive the methods that, since the Enlightenment, have dominated its self-image in the West.
In these meticulously researched essays, Zwicky argues that analytic and poststructuralist philosophy are not simply fashions in academic discourse, but are manifestations of the technocracy which they sustain and promote. The alternative she develops, by showing it in action, is lyric philosophy – an integrated mode of understanding whose foundations lie in the way we comprehend music and metaphor. Written in lucid and powerful prose, Alkibiades’ Love will interest a broad readership, from students of ancient Greek philosophy to ecologists seeking a coherent foundation for their work. Zwicky offers deep and original readings of Freud, Plato, and Simone Weil, and resuscitates Max Wertheimer’s work, linking it to our comprehension of mathematics, metaphor, and ecological structures.
Zwicky, an internationally recognized poet and independent scholar, has been hailed as one of the most important and original thinkers of our time. She has held appointments at numerous universities including Princeton, the University of Alberta, and the University of Victoria.
Alkibiades’ Love illuminates and extends her groundbreaking work while providing an accessible introduction for those coming to her thought for the first time.
To learn more about Alkibiades’ Love, click here.
For media requests, please contact publicist Jacqui Davis.
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