Three prominent philosophers will
discuss the nature of consciousness during the annual Spencer-Leavitt Lecture
Series, Wednesday, April 30, through Friday, May 2, sponsored by the Department
of Philosophy. The following lectures are scheduled:
— Daniel C. Dennett – Wednesday, April
30, at 7:30 to 9 p.m., in the College's
Reamer Campus Center Auditorium. His topic is, “Explaining the 'Magic' of
Consciousness.”
— Edward S. Casey – Thursday, May
1, at 7:30 to 9 p.m., in the Reamer
Campus Center
Auditorium. His topic is, “Emotional Consciousness.”
— The Dzogchen Ponlop, Rinpoche – Friday,
May 2, at 7:30 to 9 p.m., in the College's
F.W. Olin
Center Auditorium. His topic is,
“Coarse and Subtle Levels of Consciousness.”
Dennett is university professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of
Philosophy, and director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts
University. He holds a doctorate
from Oxford and has taught at Tufts
since 1971. He is the author of more than 100 scholarly articles. His first
book, Content and Consciousness, was
published in 1969 and his most recent, Kinds
of Minds, came out in 1996.
Casey is professor and chair at SUNY-Stony Brook, where he has
taught since 1977. He served as executive co-director of the Society for
Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy and currently is on the executive
committee for the American Philosophical Association. In the past decade, Casey
published three books on the importance of place in human experience.
The Dzogchen Ponlop, Rinpoche is a Tibetan Buddhist lama trained in
the Nyingma and Kagyu traditions. He teaches Buddhist philosophy at western and
Tibetan institutions. Rinpoche is the founder of the Nitartha Institute in Canada
and director of the Kamalashila Institute in Germany.
His most recent book is Penetrating
Wisdom.