NEW INITIATIVE FOR 2006-2007: SAWYER SEMINAR

Sawyer Seminar at the University of Chicago
The Problem of Non-Discursive Thought from Goethe to Wittgenstein

Opening Conference

Swift Hall, 1025 East 58th Street
October 6-8, 2006
10:00 a.m. - 6:30 p.m.

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The conference is the opening event of a year-long Sawyer Seminar at the University of Chicago, which investigates the problem of non-discursive thought as it arose in German philosophy, literature, and science in reaction to Kant. We will explore both early formulations of the problem in Goethe, Hegel, and other post-Kantians, and later reincarnations of it in the work of Wittgenstein, Benjamin, and some of their contemporaries.

Schedule

Friday, October 6
10:00 Opening Remarks
10:30 Eckart Förster (Johns Hopkins), “Intuitive Understanding in Plato’s Phaedrus”
2:00 Hannah Ginsborg (Berkeley), “Aesthetic Judgment and Perceptual Normativity”
4:30 Joseph Vogl (Weimar), “Goethe on Colors”

Saturday, October 7
10:00 Terry Pinkard (Georgetown), “Hegelian Life Forms”
2:00 Joel Snyder (Chicago), “Francis Galton and Etienne-Jules Marey: Photographing Genres and Laws of Nature”
4:30 Eli Friedlander (Tel Aviv), “The Measure of the Contingent: Walter Benjamin’s Dialectical Image”

Sunday, October 8
10:00 John McDowell (Pittsburgh), “Conceptual Capacities and Perception”
2:00 Robert Pippin (Chicago), “Ordinary Self-Knowledge in James’s What Maisie Knew”
4:30 Michael Thompson (Pittsburgh), “Practical Knowledge”

All events take place at Swift Hall.