“I have specially in mind that a small but determined group, active in every nation, composed of individuals who, indifferent to social considerations and restraints, regard warfare, the manufacture and sale of arms, simply as an occasion to advance their personal interests and enlarge their personal authority.… read more »

What is mind? Is it a property attributable to biological functionality alone, and, in particular, arising from the morphology of the mammalian brain and/or the influence of that animal’s body? How far down the evolutionary scale can we apply terms like cognition, consciousness, and intelligence?… read more »

For a study by Nathan Szajnberg, Ethiopian/Israeli six-year old children drew pictures of their lives, of their fantasies and fears, hopes and wishes. Their compelling drawings and stories will be the foundation upon which our roundtable participants will bring to bear art historical, linguistic, and psychoanalytic perspectives to explore questions of representation, the developmental issues related to the transition from visual to narrative representation, the universal and the culture-specific dimensions of human experience, and what we can learn about the inner lives of these children and of all of us.… read more »

The internet makes possible the unprecedented sharing of, access to, and data manipulation of, individual and social information with far reaching implications for personal privacy, healthcare, citizenship and national security, and for the definitions of personhood, institutional power and information itself. In this roundtable, we aim to explore contemporary notions of privacy, relationships between individuals and between individuals and institutions that arise through data exchange.… read more »

This two-day symposium explores Warburg’s ideas and their adumbrations, e.g., his preoccupations with – and intuitions about – memory, both in relation to different forms of artistic creation and in anticipation of concepts related to neuroplasticity and neuroesthetics; the significance and fluency of the image – its elliptical and metaphoric functions – and of affect for the phenomena and qualia of chronology and memory, in concert with contemporary understanding of the dynamic unconscious; and the interdisciplinary mode of thought – the philosophical and art historical, cosmographic and historical – at the heart of Warburg’s atlas.… read more »

This two-day symposium explores Warburg’s ideas and their adumbrations, e.g., his preoccupations with – and intuitions about – memory, both in relation to different forms of artistic creation and in anticipation of concepts related to neuroplasticity and neuroesthetics; the significance and fluency of the image – its elliptical and metaphoric functions – and of affect for the phenomena and qualia of chronology and memory, in concert with contemporary understanding of the dynamic unconscious; and the interdisciplinary mode of thought – the philosophical and art historical, cosmographic and historical – at the heart of Warburg’s atlas.… read more »