Roundtables: 2024

Fractured: Covid 19 – Memento Mori vs. Memento Vivere; “COVID-19 Betrays America’s Cult of Curdled Optimism”;  This Exquisite Loneliness; The Lonely Stories; 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed; The Quarantine Tapes; these titles were all attempts by our panelists to endure and make sense of the Pandemic.  … read more »

What are the effects of media today? What exactly is “social” about social media? How do media shape reality? Are developments in AI changing media as we understand communications technologies? Sixty years ago, the Canadian Professor of English and Media, Marshall McLuhan published the unexpectedly popular volume Understanding Media (1964), which would go on to establish a vocabulary addressing these questions — a vocabulary and set of ideas that scholars continue to grapple with to this day.… read more »

“Now the touch only is common to all animals.”  Agrippa

The very notion of sentience, with its root in feeling, cannot be understood without some reference to sensation. And sensation itself has at its bare core a “something” we feel. The response to that feeling is the mark of life: “quickening” upon touch is how we distinguish the animate from the inanimate. … read more »

Where life begins to distinguish the edible, the nutritious, the appealing, from the insipid, the poisonous, and the disgusting; this is where taste and discernment come into being. From a bag of Cheetos to Michelin 3-star fare we cover a lot of ground, yet financial means alone fails to account fully for the popularity of both ends of this culinary spectrum.… read more »

As the first sense to engage the world “remotely”, beyond the boundary of an organism’s body, olfaction delivers news from “over there”. But whereas it adumbrates a space beyond, what kind of space, what sort of world does it proffer? Smell engages the world as a series of pathways laid out on gradients.… read more »

Vibration sense is one component of touch. Refinements of this sense, and in some animals the emission of vibration – typically from the vocal cords – has evolved to echolocation, to clicks, grunts, roars and to speech. 

The vibration of one special membrane, the ear drum, creates that wonderful interface that enables us to appreciate and locate sounds in 3-dimensional space and to discern what the source of that sound is.… read more »

“The Aleph was probably two to three centimeters in diameter, but universal space was contained inside it . . .” – JL Borges

Our eyes move. They rove and they direct attention. Indeed, vision and our ability to focus attention more generally are intimately intertwined.… read more »

Panpsychism is the lightly subscribed philosophical position that consciousness is a property of all matter, large and small, simple and complex, alive and inert. According to panpsychism mind is everywhere. 

Eliminativism is the view that consciousness, at least what most of us consider our mind’s eye access to reality (phenomenal consciousness), exists quite literally nowhere, not even in our brains.… read more »

“So here it is at last, the distinguished thing”

So Henry James described his intimation of death. His brother, William, was grittier, but no less poetic in calling it the “worm at the core” that frightens and fascinates us.  

Thoughts of aging and death have inspired some of our most beautiful poetry: “Upon those boughs which shake against the cold/Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,” wrote William Shakespeare.… read more »