Upcoming Events

In this talk, Professor Paseau will describe some of his work on inference both within mathematics and more generally. Inferences can be usefully divided into deductive or non-deductive. Formal logic studies deductive inference, with the obvious question here being: which formal logic correctly captures it? His view, defended in his recent monograph One True Logic (Oxford UP, coauthored with Owen Griffiths), is that any such logic must be highly infinite. In this Inference Project event, he shall explain what this means and sketch some arguments for it.

The other side of the coin is non-deductive inference. This is much harder to capture precisely, but many interesting and important things can still be said about it. Professor Paseau will present some of his ideas about non-deductive reasoning in mathematics and explain why, contrary to current and traditional thinking, it can be a source not just of justified belief but also knowledge. 

What links the two halves of the talk? The idea that inference, both deductive and non-deductive, is more permissive than often imagined.

Alexander Paseau read Mathematics (BA,1996) followed by a year of Philosophy (Part II) at Trinity College, Cambridge. After taking the BPhil in Philosophy at Oxford (1999), he returned to Cambridge for his PhD, supervised by Alex Oliver. He spent 2001 as a visiting graduate student at Princeton, working with Paul Benacerraf and David Lewis. After three years of a Research Fellowship at Jesus College, Cambridge, he came to Oxford in 2005, where he is now a professor and a fellow of Wadham College. Paseau has been an associate editor of the journal Mind and has held research fellowships from the Mind Association and the Leverhulme Trust, as well as visiting appointments at the Sydney Centre for the Foundations of Science, King’s College London, and the Institut d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences et des techniques in Paris.

Register in advance for this webinar
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To celebrate Michael Roemer’s career, Films at the Whitney and Treasures from the Yale Film Archive are teaming up to present a new 35mm print of Michael’s lesser-known, but no-less-masterful feature film The Plot Against Harry. Jonathan Rosenbaum, who listed it among his 1,000 Personal Favorite Films, writes: “Shot in black and white in 1969, but neither completed nor shown until 1989, this delightful, offbeat comedy about a sad-eyed, small-time New York numbers racketeer named Harry Plotnick (Martin Priest) who has just emerged from prison after many years, was written and directed by Michael Roemer, whose only well-known previous feature was the skillful Nothing but a Man (1964), about the experiences of a black couple living in Alabama. Finding that life has passed him by, Harry gamely tries to buy his way into middle-class respectability, even though his wife despises him and he’s a total stranger to his kids. In the course of conducting business, he passes through a picaresque succession of locations and noisy events — bar mitzvah, fashion show, dog-training session, and an endless stream of parties — yet the movie’s pace is leisurely, the humor quiet and affectionate in striking contrast to the brassy world he moves through. Beautifully shot (by coproducer Robert M. Young, a director in his own right) and cast with a wonderful bunch of unknowns (who include Ben Lang, Maxine Woods, Henry Nemo, Jacques Taylor, Jean Leslie, Ellen Herbert, and Sandra Kazan), this is both a lovely piece of filmmaking and an exquisitely detailed portrait of a milieu and period, sealed as if in a time capsule.” 81 minutes.

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2022 Tanner Lecture on Artificial Intelligence and Human Values

Fei-Fei Li of Stanford University will deliver the 2022 Tanner Lecture on Human Values and Artificial Intelligence this fall at the Whitney Humanities Center. The lecture, “What We See and What We Value: AI with a Human Perspective,” presents a series of AI projects—from work on ambient intelligence in healthcare to household robots—to examine the relationship between visual and artificial intelligence. Visual intelligence has been a cornerstone of animal intelligence; enabling machines to see is hence a critical step toward building intelligent machines. Yet developing algorithms that allow computers to see what humans see—¬and what ¬they don’t see—raises important social and ethical questions.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li is the Sequoia Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and Denning Co-Director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI). During her 2017–2018 sabbatical, Dr. Li was a vice president at Google and chief scientist of Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning at Google Cloud. She co-founded the national nonprofit AI4ALL, which trains K-12 students from underprivileged communities to become future leaders in AI. Dr. Li also serves on the National AI Research Resource Task Force commissioned by Congress and the White House and is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li’s talk is one of seven Tanner Lectures on Artificial Intelligence and Human Values, which is a special series of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values are funded by an endowment received by the University of Utah from Obert Clark Tanner and Grace Adams Tanner. Established in 1976, the Tanner Lectures seek to advance and reflect upon scholarly and scientific learning relating to human values. The lectures, which are permanently sponsored at nine institutions, including Yale, are free and open to the public.

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The international breakthrough film (1988) of anime director Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke). It solidified Studio Ghibli’s position as the top animation studio in the world and served as the distilled quintessence of the Ghibli house style, which commands millions of ardent fans around the world. Two sisters move to the country with their father to be closer to their hospitalized mother, where they discover that the surrounding trees are inhabited by Totoros, magical spirits of the forest. Whether you’re seeing it for the first or the hundredth time, Totoro is a lush, vibrant, and gorgeous coming-of-age-in-the-times-of-fantasia film that begs to be experienced on the big screen. It was hailed as one of the greatest films of all time by no less an authority than Akira Kurosawa, for whom it was a favorite. Presented on a double bill with Isao Takahata’s Only Yesterday. 86 minutes.

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Join us for a three-part film series celebrating Nigerian cinema in honor of the special exhibition of sculptures by Nigerian artist Moshood Olúṣọmọ Bámigbóyè on view this fall in the Yale University Art Gallery. To commemorate Bámigbóyè’s 50-year career, the films focus on themes of migration, identity, and the legacy of historic artworks and tradition in Nigerian society.

The Figurine: Araromire (2009, 2 hours), directed by Kunle Afolayan
Kunle Afolayan directs and stars in this psychological thriller, which draws on his own Igbomina-Yorùbá heritage to examine the enduring power of traditional religious objects in Nigeria today. In a shrine that seems to be abandoned, two friends discover a wooden sculpture and decide to take it home. They soon learn that the shrine is dedicated to the orisa Araomire who bestows seven years of good luck on the thieves with dark consequences for the seven years that follow.

Sponsored by Yale University Art Gallery and Whitney Humanities Center
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