Dear Colleagues and Students,
Prof. Ed Casey is one of the most respected living philosophers in N. America, and reputed to be a most energizing speaker. This promises to be one of the livelier talks of the year, and motivation for a topological approach to things, perhaps. Do tell your friends, and come to the top floor of the Hexagram space in the EV building at Concordia.
Philosophy Colloquium Talk
Co-sponsored by the Canada Research Chair in New Media, and Topological Media Lab
Edward S. Casey
Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Stony Brook University
Friday, Oct 15, 4-6 pm, EV 11.705, 1515 St. Catherine W., corner of Guy
"On Not Putting Too Fine an Edge on Things"
Abstract:
Philosophers, taking their lead from natural and social scientists, pride themselves on achieving clarity and exactitude. This aim is indisputably valid and has been indisputable to the accomplishment of many of the enduring achievements in philosophy – for instance, Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Peirce’s semiotics, Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica. At the same time, the virtues of vagueness have been increasingly pursued ever since William James (inspired by certain strains in Peirce himself) proclaimed “the value of the vague” in his Principles of Psychology (1890). Since then, others have followed suite, however diversely: notably Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Timothy Williamson. In this talk, I consider the merits of the vague in philosophy by a concerted exploration of the edges of things and topics: those extremities where the exact gives place to the less than precisely designatable and discussable. I maintain that, far from being a defect or lack, the very imprecision has positive values of its own to which we should attend more closely.