Videos

Ian Phillips, Johns Hopkins University

Perception, Action, and Experience: Retying the Golden Braid

Intuitively, our mental life involves, as Andy Clark evocatively puts it, “a seamless unfolding of perception, action and experience: a golden braid in which each element twines intimately with the rest.” Cognitive...

James McAuley, columnist for The Washington Post

Jewish Survival and Holocaust Memory: Salo Baron and the Twentieth Century

This talk will examine the life and thought of Salo Baron, one of the great twentieth-century historians who was among the first to bring Jewish Studies to the American university. The talk will trace Baron’s...

David Chalmers, New York University

The Meta-Problem of Consciousness

The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining how physical systems give rise to subjective experience. The hard problem typically contrasts with the easy problems of explaining behavior. However,...

Joshua Tenenbaum, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

What Kind of Computation Is Cognition?

Recent successes in artificial intelligence have been largely driven by neural networks and other sophisticated machine learning tools for pattern recognition and function approximation. But human intelligence is ...

Juliette Cherbuliez, University of Minnesota

Medea: A Manifesto

Despite the propensity by philosophers and political theorists for mining Greek tragedy in search of models of effective moral action, few have explored Medea as a salutary icon of positive action. In this talk, I...

Lori Gruen, Wesleyan University

Carceral Logics: An Abolitionist Critique

Mass incarceration is supported and sustained by carceral logics. In this lecture Professor Gruen will describe two types of carceral logics, discuss how they operate, and discuss reasons to abolish them.

Lori...

Eric Karpeles, writer, translator, and painter

Józef Czapski: Facing the Void

Polish painter and writer Józef Czapski lived into his ninety-seventh year, embodying the complex contradictions of the entire twentieth century. Having been witness to both Russian Revolutions of 1917 as well as the...

Namwali Serpell, Harvard University

Race Off: The Fantasy of Race Transformation

Namwali Serpell is the author of The Old Drift, which won the Windham-Campbell Prize in Fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Fiction, the L.A. Times’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction,...

Khalil Muhammad, Harvard Kennedy School

The Origins and Durability of Anti-Black Racial Criminalization in the United States

This lecture historicizes the use of racial crime statistics as a technology of social difference to justify new white supremacist ideas as well as innovative forms of state violence, segregation, and discrimination...

Anne Applebaum, journalist, prize-winning historian, and staff writer for The Atlantic

The Gulag: What We Know Now and Why It Matters

The Soviet Gulag system was established in 1918 after the Russian Revolution, expanded under Stalin across the 1930s and into the war years, and did not reach its height until the early 1950s. Some 18 million people...