From Intercultural Philosophical Dialogue to Life as a Quantum Phenomenon
Cognitive, Artistic and Spiritual Explorations in the Great City
Cambridge
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Selections for 3rd February 2015 from the University of Cambridge central calendar for public talks and conferences and from the site of CRASSH, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Cambridge.
1. Translation and Philosophy (Workshop)
3 February 2016, 14:30 - 16:30
Seminar room SG2, Alison Richard Building
Duncan Large (Academic Director of the British Centre for Literary Translation, University of East Anglia)
Moderator: Nicole Robertson (UCL)
From the enquiry into the nature of meaning within analytical philosophy (Quine 1959; Davidson 1973) to the radical questioning of notions such as authorship and truth in the wake of post-structuralist discourses (Derrida 1982, 1998; de Man 1986; Eco 2004), philosophy has – at various points in history and in different traditions – engaged with translation in numerous ways.
But beyond the explicit discussion of the problems and possibilities of translation, the impact of translation on the transmission of ideas is a fascinating field of enquiry in its own right.
For Derrida, the whole edifice of Western philosophy rests upon the assumption of translatability, namely the belief that meaning can be detached from the forms of any particular language and transferred into a different linguistic code without loss. A project such as Cassin's Dictionary of Untranslatables (2004) foregrounds the extent to which philosophical ideas both call for and resist translation.
Duncan Large is Academic Director of the British Centre for Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. He has published translations from German and French into English, and is joint General Editor of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (Stanford University Press). He has published two monographs, five edited collections and numerous articles on Nietzsche and other topics in modern German literature and thought, comparative literature and translation studies.
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The workshop will offer participants the opportunity to explore in detail the intricate relationship between philosophical ideas and the theory and practice of translation.
Open to all. No registration required
Part of Cambridge Conversations in Translation Research Group Seminar Series
Attraction-
This lecture and workshop series is remarkable in enabling encounter with the very foundations of human thought and expression through the practice and theory of translation.
Philosophy, being an effort to understand meaning and how to live, gains its universal dynamism from its global variety, a variety that can only be accessed by most people through translation across cultures.
This intercultural imperative is vital for global citizenship in the patrimony of human civilization-an imperative this talk will address.
2. Roundtable: Digital Publics and Counterpublics in Africa
Harri Englund (Cambridge), Florence Brisset-Foucault (Paris-Sorbonne), Duncan Omanga (Moi University, Kenya)
Wednesday 03 February 2016, 17:00-18:30
Room S2, Alison Richard Building, Sidgwick Site, 7 West Rd, CB3 9DT.
This roundtable discussion marks the launch of a call for papers for a project on Digital Publics and Counterpublics in Africa (coordinated by George Karekwaivanane, Stephanie Diepeveen and Sharath Srinivasan). Roundtable speakers will reflect on key themes that the project addresses.
Summary of the Call for Papers:
Over the last decade Africa has been experiencing what has commonly been referred to as a 'digital revolution' driven in no small measure by the rapid spread of mobile telephony.
However, scholarly research has struggled to keep pace with these fast changing and diverse developments, as well as their attendant social, political and economic impacts.
This Special Issue, intended for submission to the Journal of Eastern African Studies, takes up this challenge to understand how the rapid spread of digital technology is reshaping social, political and economic life in Eastern and Central Africa.
In particular, it focuses on the range of publics and counterpublics that have been convoked by means of digital media. We invite paper proposals from a range of disciplines, including (but not limited to) politics, media studies, history and anthropology.
If you are interested in contributing to the special issue, please submit your proposed title, with an abstract of 300-500 words to digitalpublics@gmail.com by 29 February 2016.
Further details: https://www.academia.edu/19685195/Digital_Publics_and_Counterpublics_in_Africa_-_Call_for_Papers
This talk is part of the Centre of Governance and Human Rights Events series.
Attraction-
The impact of the digital revolution on Africa implies that Africa is even more than before empowered to enjoy the benefits of the post-industrial age without itself having passed through an industrial age.
What are the implications of this for African development, along with the profound enabling of social power that the information revolution enables in Africa and other continents in which widespread access to information and inter-citizen dialogue is thus enabled for the first time?
This discussion promises to illuminate such and other stirring questions.
3. St Catharine's Political Economy Seminar Series - Speaker:Ann Pettifor
Ann Pettifor World_link
Wednesday 03 February 2016, 18:00-19:30
The Ramsden Room, St Catharine's College.
Talk Title: 'Challenging the Ideology of Austerity'
Talk Overview: Ann Pettifor will discuss the one-sided and one-dimensional aspects of today's dominant economic narrative.
It acts as cover for an ideological objective: a world of liberal finance freed up by de-regulation and capital mobility to exercise despotic power over an illiberal and shrunken state.
Mainstream members of the economics profession have wittingly or unwittingly colluded with the dominant narrative, which derives from the work of classical and neo-classical economists.
Most have a flawed understanding of the nature of credit and money.
To subordinate finance to the wider interests of society, and to restore stability, full employment and sustainability to the global economy, John Maynard Keynes's domestic and international monetary reforms must be revived – especially in Cambridge.
Above all, today's 'Keynesian economics' must be discredited, as a gross misrepresentation of Keynes's economic theory.
There is another reason for reviving Keynes's opposition to liberal finance: climate change.
In his essay on national self-sufficiency he made plain the need for a gradual move towards national self-sufficiency, and towards the recognition that under today's dominant economic model :
"We destroy the beauty of the countryside because the unappropriated splendors of nature have no economic value.
We are capable of shutting off the sun and the stars because they do not pay a dividend."
The link between unfettered finance, credit and excessive consumption must be broken, Ann Pettifor will argue, if we are to build a sustainable economy – for both ours, and our grandchildren's generation.
Speaker Ann Pettifor is a director of the think-tank Policy research in Macroeconomics (PRIME).
In September 2015 she was appointed as a member of Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Economic Advisory Committee, along with Mariana Mazzucato, Joseph Stiglitz, Thomas Piketty, Anastasia Nesvetailova and Danny Blanchflower.
Her background is in sovereign debt – particularly those of low-income countries.
More recently she has analysed, and written extensively on both the private and public debts of Anglo-American economies.
She was one of the leaders of the Jubilee 2000 campaign, which led to the writing off of $100 billion (in nominal terms) of debt owed by 35 of the poorest countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia.
In 2005 she helped the Nigerian Debt Management Office clear $30bn of debt owed to the Paris Club of creditors.
Ann Pettifor was one of the few people to correctly predict (in 2003 and 2006) the global debt-deflationary crisis of 2007.
She is an honorary research fellow at City Political Economy Research Centre, City University London: and is Chair of the Advisory Board at Goldsmiths College's Political Economy Research Centre, London.
She has an honorary doctorate from the University of Newcastle and is a senior fellow of the New Economics Foundation (NEF) in London.
She is the author of Just Money – How Society Can Break the Despotic Power of Finance (Commonwealth Publishing 2014) and The Coming First World Debt (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and was the editor of NEF 's Real World Economic Outlook – The Legacy of Globalisation: Debt and Deflation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). She co-authored the Green New Deal Group's transformational economic programme The Green New deal (2008) and The Cuts Won't Work (2009) and, with Professor Victoria Chick, she co-authored PRIME 's radical analysis of 100 years of UK public debt and its impact, The Economic Consequences of Mr Osborn (2011).
All are welcome to attend. The seminar series is supported by the Cambridge Journal of Economics and the Economics and Policy Group at the Judge Business School.
This talk is part of the St Catharine's Political Economy Seminar Series series.
Attraction- The capitalist economy is one of the most powerful systems of social and economic growth known to history but is fraught with grave imbalances centred in the concentration of wealth in small percentage of the global population as well as the denudation of nature to fund economic growth, as various nations struggle fir various reasons to adjust to this system.
Is an ideal economic system possible, one that will facilitate maximum creativity and productivity for all, while sustaining the well being of nature?
This talk is another march in the struggle to answer these questions, most vital after the abuses represented by the earlier idealism of the communist model and the struggle of welfare states like the UK to sustain their welfarist systems.
4. I'd map that! Perspectives on the power of mapping from linguistics to physics.
Duncan Johnstone (Peterhouse) & Dr. Aaron Ralby (Linguisticator)
Wednesday 03 February 2016, 18:00-19:00
Nightingale Room, Peterhouse.
If you have a question about this talk, please contact Duncan Johnstone.
Drawing on experiences mapping the structure of materials (Duncan) and numerous languages (Aaron, www.linguisticator.com) we present an interdisciplinary perspective on mapping as a concept and approach.
We will also demonstrate what these mapping approaches allow us to accomplish including; developing memory systems, understanding physical properties, and helping non-verbal autistic children to learn to speak.
The presentation will take approximately 40mins, followed by questions and discussion.
Refreshments will be served from 7pm and the presentation will be followed by formal hall for those who would like to attend.
Those wishing to attend from outside Peterhouse should contact the organisers in advance.
This talk is part of the Peterhouse Graduate Seminars series.
Attraction-
Very promising talk in terms of unifying various disciplines through the practice of mapping- which may be seen as creating a visual or ideational model demonstrating the structure of a phenomenon.
Mapping is priceless in understanding the universe and its constituents and this talk promises to demonstrate the use and value of mapping as a practice that can be transposed across disciplines.
5. Life on the Edge: Why Life Needs Quantum Mechanics
Professor Johnjoe McFadden
Wednesday 03 February 2016, 21:00-22:00
Nihon Room, Pembroke College.
Life is the most extraordinary phenomenon in the known universe; but how does it work?
It is remarkable that in this age of cloning and even synthetic biology, nobody has ever made anything living entirely out of dead material.
Life remains the only way to make life.
Are we missing a vital ingredient in its creation?
In this talk I will shift the focus of understanding life from cells or biomolecules to the fundamental particles that drive life's dynamics.
From this new perspective, life makes more sense as its missing ingredient is revealed to be quantum mechanics and the strange phenomena that lie at the heart of this most mysterious of sciences.
Ground-breaking experiments show that photosynthesis relies on particles existing in many places at once; whilst other research demonstrates that inside enzymes, those workhorses of life that make every molecule within our cells, particles vanish from one point in space and instantly materialize in another. Birds appear to navigate around the globe by harnessing spooky quantum connections; and the scent of a rose may waft up from the quantum realm.
Even our genes are quantum-coded. I will conclude that life, uniquely, navigates a narrow strait between the world we know and the strange and counterintuitive realm of quantum mechanics. Life lives on the quantum edge.
This talk is part of the Stokes Society, Pembroke College series.
Attraction-
Stokes Society always has striking talks at the frontiers of science.
This talk is remarkable in correlating the biology of life, life being the preeminent creative force known to humanity, and quantum mechanics, an approach to science that is transforming understanding of the universe in ways that would only have been admissible in fiction before the 20th century.
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