Event Title

Borges and the Quantum Field: A Novelist and a Philosopher Confront the 21st Century

Presenter Information

Carolyn Cooke, CIISFollow
Brian Thomas Swimme, CIISFollow

Location

Namaste Hall

Start Date

21-4-2017 12:00 PM

End Date

21-4-2017 1:00 PM

Description

Two CIIS faculty discuss and connect Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Library of Babel” to their own work as thinkers and writers in the 21st Century. The talk is adapted from their new cross-departmental course MFA 8888: Philosophy and the Novel. Following the half-hour presentation, Cooke and Swimme invite conversation and share strategies for collaborations across programs that invigorate our teaching and especially our learning.

Comments

Panelists:

Carolyn Cooke chairs the MFA Programs at CIIS. She is the author of a novel, Daughters of the Revolution, and two collections of short stories, The Bostons and Amor and Psycho. Her fiction has won the PEN/Robert Bingham Prize, and has been featured in Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Paris Review.

Brian Thomas Swimme earned his PhD in mathematics in 1978. Shortly thereafter he came to the realization that most of the dismantling of the Earth Community was being carried out, and planned, by people with PhDs. He joined the Institute in 1990 with the express purpose of figuring out -- with the help of the amazing creative personalities at CIIS -- what in the world it would mean to actually know something. Because certainly the "knowledge" that led to earning a PhD could not amount to real knowledge.

Event Type

Panel Discussion