Info:
Observer Effects: Conversations on Art & Science is FREE and open to the public. To reserve a seat please call the box office 518.276.3921
A limited number of dinners will be available for purchase at 6 PM to enjoy as part of the talk. Normal cafe service will also be available.
Observer Effects: Conversations on Art & Science
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone
Movement and Mirror Neurons: A Challenging and Choice Conversation
Dancer, choreographer, and philosopher Maxine Sheets-Johnstone will lead a discussion over dinner on the primacy of movement in perception and our fundamental understanding of aliveness. A topic rarely acknowledged in the history of western philosophy and science, Sheets-Johnstone will examine how our understanding of space and time is fundamentally conditioned by our experience of movement.
"What moves straightaway captures our attention; it is consistently at the focal point over what is not moving. This focal tethering to movement is no less first-nature to other creatures than it is to ourselves. We are all attuned to the animate over the inanimate; we are alive to movement from the start. Indeed, animation is at the core of every creature’s engagement with the world because it is in and through movement that the life of every creature—to borrow Husserl’s phrase from the first epigraph—'acquires reality.'"
— Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement
Curator: Emily Berçir Zimmerman
FREE + Open to the Public
A limited number of complimentary light dinners will be served at 6 PM to enjoy as part of the talk. Wine and refreshments will also be available as part of our paid cafe service.
Bio:
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone is an independent scholar affiliated with the University of Oregon’s Department of Philosophy where she taught periodically in the 1990s. She received a BA in French and comparative literature from the University of California at Berkeley, an MA in dance, and a PhD in dance and philosophy from the University of Wisconsin. Her graduate work also includes an incomplete second doctorate in evolutionary biology. Her work includes The Phenomenology of Dance (University of Wisconsin, 1966), The Roots of Thinking (Temple, 1990), The Roots of Power: Animate Form and Gendered Bodies (Open Court, 1994), and The Roots of Morality (Penn State, 2008), as well as The Primacy of Movement (John Benjamins, 1999), Illuminating Dance: Philosophical Explorations (Bucknell, 1985), and The Corporeal Turn: An Interdisciplinary Reader (Imprint Academic, 2009). The Roots of Power was nominated by the late anthropologist and humanist Ashley Montagu for an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Putting Movement Into Your Life: A Beyond Fitness Primer was published in 2010, and an expanded second edition of The Primacy of Movement (first published in 1999) is forthcoming in June 2011. In Spring 2007 she was a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Durham University, UK, for her continuing research on xenophobia.
More information:
Observer Effects: Conversations on Art & Science Series Dates/Times:
Jean-Pierre Luminet—March 2, 2011
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone—May 4, 2011