Janette Dinishak’s work explores how Wittgenstein’s concept “noticing an aspect” can provide a frame for capturing and understanding commonly neglected phenomena that are characteristic of autistic experience. She also traces the inter-relations between scientific, cultural, and first-person perspectives on autism and how these perspectives interact in shaping our understanding of autism. Janette Dinishak is Visiting […]

Between 1752 and 1754 the only library to survive from the Roman world complete with its books was discovered in a grand villa in the seaside town of Herculaneum. The talk will serve as an introduction to this remarkable discovery and the treatment of its books, from the 18th to the 20th centuries. David Blank […]

Ronaldo V. Wilson is the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man (University of Pittsburgh, 2008), winner of the 2007 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem Books, 2009), winner of the Thom Gunn Award and the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry in […]

In her new translation of Marco Polo’s Travels, Sharon Kinoshita reorients a text typically read as a western narrative of first contact, by returning it to its original context, the midpoint of the century chronicled in Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony, and to its original title, The Description of the World. Sharon Kinoshita is Professor of […]

Biological facts can neither determine nor justify the racial categories identified in our ordinary social discourse. Claims to the contrary confuse our ability to find biological correlates to populations with our social reasons for picking out and maintaining those categories over time. Using recent arguments surrounding "race" and medicine as an example, I argue that […]

Where does the gap in gapping -- e.g. Some had ordered mussels, and others swordfish -- come from? The traditional answer is deletion (Ross 1970, Hankamer 1979, among others). Johnson (2009) presents a formidable challenge to this view. He argues that gapping cannot arise through deletion because gapping has several unique properties that distinguish it […]

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Lynn Hejinian is currently at work on a book-length essay, tentatively titled The Positions of the Sun, and exploring practical as well as conceptual possibilities for avant-garde and quotidian practices under conditions of late (or perhaps, now, triumphant) capitalism. Lyn Hejinian is professor of English at UC Berkeley. She is a poet and critic. She […]

Dr. Jan Boxill is Director of the Parr Center for Ethics, Chair of the Faculty, and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. The Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture is a lively forum for the discussion and exploration of ethics-related challenges in human endeavors. Presented annually by the […]

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