Carol Rovane Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University Carol Rovane is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, where she has served as Director of Graduate Studies and Chair of the Philosophy Department, and was recently awarded the Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award. She publishes widely in the areas of metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of action and ethics, and has authored two books: The Bounds of Agency: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics, and The Metaphysics and Ethics of Relativism. An abiding theme of her work concerns the very idea and nature of a point of view. Every form of subjectivity requires some notion of a subjective point of view. But this is not just one thing. For example, the bodily point of view from which we perceive and move is not necessarily the same thing as the phenomenological point of view from which there is something it is like to feel our sensations, or the rational point of view from which we deliberate and act and regard ourselves as possessing freedom. No matter how we conceive a point of view, there are serious and puzzling issues concerning how to construe the subjective in relation to the objective, as well as subjects in relation to one another — or in other words, mind-world relations and mind-mind relations. Participant In: Science and the Big Questions: Roundtable Series on the Physical and Spiritual World, the Brain-Mind Connection, and Human Development and Genetics Through 2015 Past Event The Helix Center is pleased to announce receipt of a grant from the John Templeton Foundation in support of a series of fourteen roundtables addressing big questions in the physical, natural, and biological sciences and the humanities. The topics are: Knowledge and Limitations; The Span of Infinity; Complexity and Emergence; The Search for Immortality; The Sublime Experience; The Meditative State; The… read more » The Realm of Mystery Saturday, October 24, 2015 2:30-4:30 pm Past Event Watch the video » Donald Rumsfeld famously said, “There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” From a philosophical perspective, how do… read more » The Completeness of Physics Saturday, May 12th, 2018, 2:30pm-4:30pm Past Event Watch the video » Science can stake its claim to truth on the evidence of its empirical success accounting for reality. Does it therefore follow, necessarily, that science can lay claim to its universality? Does reality cohere in such a way that we are ultimately seeking a reductionistic account of it in toto, as some would argue is promised… read more »
Science and the Big Questions: Roundtable Series on the Physical and Spiritual World, the Brain-Mind Connection, and Human Development and Genetics Through 2015 Past Event The Helix Center is pleased to announce receipt of a grant from the John Templeton Foundation in support of a series of fourteen roundtables addressing big questions in the physical, natural, and biological sciences and the humanities. The topics are: Knowledge and Limitations; The Span of Infinity; Complexity and Emergence; The Search for Immortality; The Sublime Experience; The Meditative State; The… read more »
The Realm of Mystery Saturday, October 24, 2015 2:30-4:30 pm Past Event Watch the video » Donald Rumsfeld famously said, “There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” From a philosophical perspective, how do… read more »
The Completeness of Physics Saturday, May 12th, 2018, 2:30pm-4:30pm Past Event Watch the video » Science can stake its claim to truth on the evidence of its empirical success accounting for reality. Does it therefore follow, necessarily, that science can lay claim to its universality? Does reality cohere in such a way that we are ultimately seeking a reductionistic account of it in toto, as some would argue is promised… read more »