Session 2

Join two faculty members from the Department of Cinema and Media Studies as they present a shot analysis from the work of director Fritz Lang and screen a student produced piece. You will gain valuable insight regarding the interplay of theory and practice in the construction of film. Judy Hoffman, Professor of Practice in Cinema and Media Studies, and Tom Gunning, the Edwin A. and Betty L.

Socrates said that “philosophy begins in wonder.” What is this experience of wonder and why is it so important for philosophy or, more generally, the love of wisdom? Starting with Aristotle, many philosophers have thought of philosophical wonder as a sort of puzzlement that prompts us to seek out new, better understandings of ourselves and our world. From this point of view, although philosophy begins in wonder, it seeks to overcome it. Understanding dispels puzzlement and with it our wonder. Plato had a quite different view.

Featuring eight artists, Suicide Narcissus is a group exhibition meant to serve as a contemporary vanitas. Maybe the Mayans weren't referring to an event but a mindset. Although the world did not end in 2012, climate change has forced us to think about our fate as a species, to confront the thought of our extinction wondering if we are an exception. Clearly, the grand evolutionary scheme of things tells us no. Human history relative to natural history amounts to a mere speck in time. The earth was here long before us, and it will be here long after us.

Wings are prevalent in a wide range of Renaissance representations, from figures (angels, winged cherubs, and mythological gods) to animals (eagles, griffins, and winged horses). The multiple iconographies of wings during this period drew on allegorical, cosmological, and religious symbols inherited from both Christian and ancient Near Eastern mythologies.

Faculty members Jessica Stockholder, Laura Letinsky, William Pope.L, and Geoff Oppenheimer will open their doors and share some of their working process with you. Join in a conversation with the artists about their work.

This talk focuses on the form of comics and what it means to bear witness to war through this handmade word-and-image medium. Inspired by the traumas of WWII and also the war in Vietnam, the form of comics emerged across the globe as a documentary medium in the 1970s. This presentation charts this development through attention to field-establishing work by Japanese cartoonist Keiji Nakazawa, a Hiroshima survivor, and American cartoonist Art Spiegelman, whose parents survived Poland’s death camps.

Aristotle (384-322 BC) was the founder of the discipline of logic. Gottlob Frege (1848-1925) was one of the founders of modern mathematical logic. Aristotle's "Prior Analytics" and Frege's "Concept-Script" are among the most influential texts in the history of logic. While they differ in many respects, there are some significant similarities in their treatment of deductive inference. Both of them take a distinctively formal approach to deductive inference.

A merchant in fourteenth-century Naples has to relieve himself at night in an alley, a woodcarver in fifteenth-century Florence decides to ignore a dinner invitation, the poet Petrarch finally arrives in Rome for the first time, and a Roman servant returning to his native city can’t remember where his mistress’ palace used to be. What do all these characters have in common? They are all hopelessly lost. Pre-modern city-dwellers in Italy constructed their sense of self by linking their fates to the structures and people with which they lived.

The Russian government has made a high-stakes gamble that Sochi, more familiar as a sub-tropical resort, can host the 2014 Winter Olympics. But this new Olympic city is being built over the top of another, one that expressed even greater imagination and ambition. In the Soviet period, Sochi was a socialist resort where workers could temporarily experience the idyllic life that was promised in the communist future.