2013-2014

From the Tigris to the Tiber: A Case of Babylonian ‘Astro-Medicine’ in Pliny the Elder

A Baker-Nord Cosponsored Event

This talk will present and compare two texts — a puzzling late Babylonian Kalendertext written on a cuneiform tablet in Uruk by a scholar named Iqisa (late fourth century BCE), and a passage from the Natural History of Pliny the Elder (first century CE) concerning fever therapies.

Mountain Visions: Modernism and Dystopia in the Alps

A Baker-Nord Cosponsored Event

Talk 1: “Modernist Motion on the Mountainside: Alpine Skiing and Central European Culture, 1900-39 Andrew Denning, History, University of British Columbia

A Deeper, Older O: The Oral (Sex) Tradition (in Poetry)

A Baker-Nord Cosponsored Event

A part of the Baker Nord Poetics Working-Group’s Spring 2014 programming, poet Jennifer Moxley will lead a discussion of her essay “A Deeper, Older O: The Oral (Sex) Tradition (in Poetry).”

Immigration, Inc.

Journalist & author Jeffrey Kaye discusses the economic forces that promote and encourage immigration. The public in the U.S. and other industrialized countries tend to view the politically-charged topic through a legal lens, often seeing migration as a matter of personal choice. Kaye examines the policies of businesses and governments in both rich and poor nations to show how globalization and economic policies have helped create patterns of international migration.

Slave Flight, Slave Torture, and the State: Nineteenth-Century French Guiana

A Humanities Related Event

Miranda Spieler is an historian of France and the French overseas empire whose work explores the relationship between law and violence. She received her AB in History and Literature from Harvard College and her Ph.D. in History from Columbia University. After completing her doctorate in 2005, she joined the History Department at the University of Arizona, where she became an Associate Professor in 2011. Her book, “Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana” (Harvard 2012), was awarded the J. Russell Major Prize and the Geroge L.

Neither Here Nor There: A translation workshop on French philosophy from the Caribbean

A Humanities Related Event

Faculty and students are invited to join Dr. Seloua Luste Boublina in discussing texts that straddle cultural, linguistic, psychological, and even musical genres by philosophers Frantz Fanon and Lewis Gordon.

Monty Python and Philosophy

disagreement, Thompson will lead a fun discussion on the oeuvres of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, e.g., “Dead Parrot” (Episode 8), “Argument Clinic” (Episode 29), and their movie “The Meaning of Life”, along with selections from Hardcastle and Reich’s (2006) “Monty Python and Philosophy: Nudge Nudge, Think Think”. An informal lunch will be provided.

About the speaker

Frank Thompson

Cold Case?: Postcolonial Philosophy in France

A Humanities Related Event

When postcolonial studies arose in the English-speaking world, India was the paradigm case. But what does postcolonial mean in the French-speaking world, whose primary case is Algeria? After the 2005 riots, the problems in the former French colonies look like a cold case, despite the recent birth of postcolonial studies in France. At first, this work was done by historians and sociologists. But what about the philosophical field, where subjectivation is an important as objectivity?

Morally Arbitrary Economic Advantage

In this lecture, Frank Thompson, Lecturer and Research Investigator at the University of Michigan, will offer an introductory analysis of the notion of morally arbitrary advantage, focusing on morally arbitrary economic advantage (and disadvantage). This analysis is developed in the framework of the canonical general competitive equilibrium model of neoclassical economic theory.

Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story: A Book Discussion

Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story by Jim Holt (Liveright 2012) takes up the history and contemporary thinking about what is arguably the most profound question of all in physics and its philosophy. Thompson will lead a discussion of Holt’s accessible, thought-provoking, occasionally funny, and quite well-written explication of this very difficult problem. An informal lunch will be provided.