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Previous guest lectures and seminars

2022

Promoting Petrarch: Altichiero and Lombardo della Seta in Padua

Professor Rodney Lokaj will address the paradigm of thought created by Francis Petrarch (1303–1373) regarding Europe’s relationship with the classical past and posterity. 

Time and place: Sep. 16, 2022

Francis Petrarch (1303–1373) was more than just another medieval Italian poet. He created a new paradigm of thought regarding Europe’s relationship with the classical past and posterity. Today we call this “Humanism”.

Professor Lokaj will address this new paradigm by looking at the programme implicit in a 14th century fresco in Padua (Italy) containing his first-ever post-mortem portrait.

About Rodney Lokaj 
Rodney Lokaj is professor of Italian philology at the University of Enna “Kore”, Sicily, where he teaches Latin language, medieval Italian, Italian linguistics and philology.

His research and publishing regard the later Middle Ages with an emphasis on medieval Latin and early Italian works, primarily those by Saints Francis and Clare of Assisi, Dante, and Petrarch.

His more recent research has been carried out in Renaissance literature with a princeps edition of the Latin poetry by Baldassarre Castiglione, the author of the Book of the Courtier, and Domizio Falcone, a poet rediscovered by Lokaj himself in the Vatican Library.

2021

Progress and the Scale of History

Dr Tyson Retz on the idea of progress in different conceptions of history.

Time and place: Nov. 12, 2021 12:00 PM–1:00 PM, Georg Morgenstiernes hus, seminarrom 152

Dr Tyson Retz, Associate Professor of History at the University of Stavanger, will discuss his forthcoming Cambridge Element on the idea of progress in different conceptions of history.

He asks the question: how does the scale on which we conceive history shape how we think about progress?

He answers under the categories of ‘no progress’, ‘absolute progress’, ‘collective progress’, ‘everybody’s progress’, and ‘anti-progress’, beginning in antiquity and ending with present-day ecomodernist and degrowth agendas.

Written for students and scholars in the theory and practice of history, attendees will be able to offer feedback that Retz can consider in the final stages of preparing the manuscript.

Contact

Guro Boldvik: gurobold@student.ifikk.uio.no

Sacred Books, Holy Relics and Godly Women: New Perspectives on Sanctity in Europe

Professor Brian Richardson (University of Leeds, UK) and Dr Ruth S. Noyes (National Museum of Denmark) will present on history of the circulation of texts and premodern migrations of sacral heritage.

Time and place: Sep. 14, 2021 2:00 PM–4:00 PM, The Norwegian Institute in Rome

The event is a hybrid taking place at The Norwegian Institute in Rome, and it will also be possible to follow the seminar through Zoom. 

The seminar Sacred Books, Holy Relics and Godly Women: New Perspectives on Sanctity in Renaissance Europe starts from the new research findings of Emeritus Professor Brian Richardson (University of Leeds, UK), author of the recent book Women and the Circulation of Texts in Renaissance Italy (2020), and art historian Dr Ruth S. Noyes (National Museum of Denmark), currently working on a book project called Translatio.

Richardson and Noyes are two key experts in the history of the circulation of texts and premodern migrations of sacral heritage across the Nordic-Baltic region and greater Europe respectively. The seminar will investigate the notion of sanctity in the Renaissance by looking at women as key actors in the circulation of religious books and objects. Richardson's and Noyes's presentations will be followed by an open discussion.

The proposed seminar is related to the ongoing research on sanctity pursued at the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas via the projects "The Legacy of Birgitta of Sweden" and "Women Writing Saints" which focus respectively on the circulation of Birgitta of Sweden's Revelations and the production of religious literature by women writers in Renaissance Italy, in connection with the activities of the interdisciplinary research group 'Textual Traditions and Communities in Early Modern Europe'.

Important information about the physical seminar:

According to Italian legislation, all participants in presentia will be asked to show their Green Pass at the entrance. Documentation can be through an app or paper version.
 
A Green Pass is valid for people who can document:
a) vaccination
b) having had COVID in the past 6 months; or
c) recent COVID-test (valid 48 hours)

The auditorium has reduced capacity in order to respect social distancing. Please contact us before Monday 13th of September if you want to attend in presentia.

Organizer

Eleonora Cappuccilli (UiO) and Clara Stella (UiO)

2020

Oslo Workshop in Ancient Philosophy 

Spring Semester

Time: Jan. 17, 2020

  • Friday 17 January: Sean Driscoll (Boston College), "Cratylus' Silence about Linguistic Correctness", GMH 452, 14.15-16.00
  • Friday 24 January: Robert Roreitner (Prague), "Aristotle, De Anima II.5", GMH 452, 14.15-16.00
  • Friday 7 February: HIlde Vinje (Oslo),  "Swallows and Days: On Bios Teleios in the Nicomachean Ethics" ​, GMH 452 14.15-16.00

2019

Lecture in the Research Group “Novel and Epic, Ancient and Modern”: East, West, and the Ancient Novel in the 21st Century: Scholarship and Ideology

This lecture looks at how contemporary scholarship attempts to deconstruct the East-West dichotomy in (scholarship on) the ancient Greek novel as ideologically biased – and how this attempt at deconstruction can be perceived as ideological itself.

Time and place: Nov. 20, 2019 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, GM 452

Real or imagined, the dichotomy between West and East was a decisive factor in defining identity in ancient Greece ever since the Persian Wars. The same dichotomy has also been a matter of dispute in classical scholarship on various fronts. Inter alia, the (supposed) origin of the ancient Greek novel has often been looked upon along those lines. Recent scholarship has been attempting to unveil this dichotomy as an ideologically biased construct. In this lecture, I will sketch the broader lines of older and newer scholarship on this topic, and I will argue that contemporary scholars who attempt to unveil the East-West dichotomy in earlier novelistic scholarship as ideologically biased behave in fact equally ideologically themselves.

Widow City: Widowhood and Politics in Italian Renaissance Literature

We are very pleased to announce a guest lecture by Anna Wainwright, Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at University of New Hampshire. The lecture is open for everyone.

Time and place: Nov. 8, 2019 12:00 PM–1:30 PM, Georg Morgenstiernes hus, møterom 652

Abstract

The widow, by her very definition, is associated with death and mourning—identified by the loss of her husband, and relegated to a particular category of woman.

In medieval and Renaissance Italy, their particular societal role as designated mourners led to rich literary engagement with widows, from the determined mourning widows of Dante’s Purgatorio, who tirelessly pray their husbands’ way to heaven, to the dangerous “merry” widows of Boccaccio’s Decameron, who engage in sexual escapades that threaten the stability of the social order.

What happened, then, when widows themselves began to write in great numbers in the publishing boom of sixteenth-century Italy—when women like Vittoria Colonna, Veronica Gambara, and Francesca Turina used their pens to prove not only their literary talent, but also their valor as exceptional widows?

How did this change the way widows, and women, were viewed in the changing culture of early modern Italy and Europe? In this talk, I present my book project, Widow City, and offer a snapshot of what widowed life can tell us about the relationship between gender, politics, and the performance of mourning in Italian literature and culture.

About Anna Wainwright

Dr. Anna Wainwright is Researcher on the project The Legacy of Birgitta of Sweden: Women, Politics, and Reform in Renaissance Italy, funded by the Research Council of Norway, and Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at the University of New Hampshire. Her work examines, gender, race, politics and identity in early modern Italy.

A light lunch will be served.

Structural imbalances? Promoting gender equality in history and philosophy

Time and place: Oct. 15, 2019 9:00 AM–1:00 PM, 12. etasje Niels Treschows hus

The purpose of this workshop is to contribute to promoting gender equality in history and philosophy at UiO. We ask why there are so few women in these subjects (both among students and faculty), and what strategies might be used to improve the situation. History and philosophy will be treated in common, since the two subjects are unusual at HF in their lack of balance.

All are welcome.

Program

  • 9:00-9:15 Coffee and Introduction
    • Kim Christian Priemel & Reidar Maliks
  • 9:15-9:45 Keynote: Nicola Miller (University College London)
    • “Promoting Gender Equality in History: Experiences from the UK”
  • 10:00 – 11:00 Roundtable 1: Why so few women students?
    • Philosophy: Emily Nerland, Tove Pettersen
    • History: Nora Birkeland, Maria Halle
  • 11:10 – 12:10 Roundtable 2: Why so few women faculty?
    • Philosophy: Siri Granum Carson (NTNU), Øystein Linnebo
    • History: Sunniva Engh, Eirinn Larsen
  • 12:20 – 13:00: Roundtable 3: What is to be done?
    • Philosophy: Dragana Bozin, Ingvild Torsen
    • History: Sunniva Engh, Nicola Miller
  • 13:00 – 13:45: Lunch

Keynote: Professor Nicola Miller, University College London. Professor Miller was the convener for the gender working group of the Royal Historical Society, which produced the report Promoting Gender Equality in UK History: A Second Report and Recommendations for Good Practice (2018)

Keynote: Professor Nicola Miller, University College London. Professor Miller ledet arbeidsgruppen for likestilling ved Royal Historical Society som lagde rapporten Promoting Gender Equality in UK History: A Second Report and Recommendations for Good Practice (2018)

Everyone is welcome!

Supported by HFs equality and diversity funds for 2019

Guest Lecture: Renaissance Prophetesses and Female Mystics

We are very pleased to announce a guest lecture by Tamar Herzig, Associate Professor of Early Moderne European History at Tel Aviv University. The lecture is open for everyone

Time and place: May 24, 2019 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Georg Morgenstiernes Hus 152

This lecture explores the contribution of female mystics and prophetesses in Renaissance Italy to inspiring and promoting the reform of religious orders, the Church, and society at large. It traces the reception of women’s mystically inspired calls for reform by their male contemporaries in the Italian peninsula and beyond from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Focusing especially on Italian holy women who were affiliated with reformist currents within the Dominican order, it then charts the ways in which reform-minded mystics who were widely revered as “female Christs” challenged deeply-entrenched gendered presumptions concerning the triune Christian God. Finally, it addresses the role of leading reformist churchmen in facilitating the hereticization of embodied female mysticism, and examines its impact on the modern historiography of Renaissance mysticism and prophecy.

Respondent: Dr. Eleonora Cappuccilli, Postoctoral fellow, History of Ideas (IFIKK)

About Tamar Herzig

Tamar Herzig is Associate Professor of Early Modern European History at Tel Aviv University, specializing in the religious history of fifteenth and sixteenth-century Italy and gender history. She serves as Director of Tel Aviv University’s Morris E. Curiel Institute for European Studies. Prof. Herzig has published broadly on early modern history and religion. Among her publications are the acclaimed monographs Savonarola’s Women: Visions and Reform in Renaissance Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2008) and Christ Transformed into a Virgin Woman: Lucia Brocadelli, Heinrich Institoris, and the Defense of the Faith (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2013). Her new book A Convert's Tale: Art, Crime, and Jewish Apostasy in Renaissance Italy is coming out this Fall at Harvard University Press. Prof. Herzig currently serves as the Renaissance Society of America’s Discipline Representative for the field of Religion and is a member the Advisory Committee of Renaissance Quarterly and of the editorial boards of I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance and the Mediterranean Historical Review; of the academic boards of the Medici Archive Project and the research project Observer l'Observance: Diffusion, réseaux et influence des réformes régulières en Europe; and of the Executive Committee of the international research group for Early Modern Religious Dissents and Radicalism (EmoDir).

Towards Modernity in Sculpture - Gustav Vigeland and his Contemporaries

On the occasion of the Vigeland Anniversary 2019, the Vigeland Museum, in partnership with the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas at the University of Oslo, is organizing a two-day seminar on the development of sculpture in the period 1890–1920, with a special focus on Gustav Vigeland and his French contemporaries.

Time and place: May 23, 2019 10:00 AM–May 24, 2019 4:00 PM, Sentralen

The seminar will be held in conjunction with the exhibition “Parallels. Gustav Vigeland and his Contemporaries. Bourdelle, Maillol, Meunier, Rodin” shown in the Vigeland Museum (12 April - 15 September 2019).

A shift within European sculpture took place towards the end of the 19th century, comparable to what had happened in the field of painting a few decades earlier. This was mainly manifested in a break with the preceding academic tradition, or salon sculpture, where the subject matter was generally related to mythological and allegorical topics and the execution characterized by a delicate flair. In this transitional context, Auguste Rodin is considered the leading figure. His break with the past was not radical, but his extensive experimentation with form and movement was liberating. Another pioneer was the Belgian artist Constantin Meunier. In his realistic representations of workers, one finds a simplification of form and omission of details, an indication of what was to come. In the early 19th century, sculpture develop in different directions, but a (gradual or radical) simplification can be said to be a common denominator.

This seminar seeks to shed light on various aspects of the development of modern sculpture. How pivotal was the impact of art from earlier ages, in particular Greek and medieval art? In what way were artists influenced by current ideologies and philosophical ideas? What is it that characterizes the monumental sculpture of the period?

Program

Day 1: Thursday 23 May

  • 10:00. Registration and coffee
  • 10:30. Welcome speech by Museum Director Jarle Strømodden, Vigeland Museum
  • 10:45-12:15 Medieval Influence on the Development of Modern Sculpture
    Panel Chair: Margrethe C. Stang, NTNU
    • Kjartan Hauglid, De kongelige samlinger: "Impressions from Florence – Gustav Vigeland's exhibition in Trondheim, 1897"
    • Marthje Sagewitz, German Center for Art History (DFK Paris) / University of Leipzig: "Rodin, Vigeland and the Middle Ages. Another Way towards Modernity"
    • Louis Gevart, Art Historian: "Gothic as the New Humanism? Vigeland, French Sculpture and the Medieval Model"
    • Discussion
  • 12:15 Lunch Break
  • 13:15-14:55 Towards Monumentality
    Panel Chair: To be announced
    • Åsa Cavalli-Björkman, Carl Eldhs Ateljémuseum/Linda Hinners, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm: "Tradition and Modernity in Swedish Sculpture during the Late 1800s and Early 1900s"
    • Dalibor Prančević, University of Split/Barbara Vujanović, Ivan Meštrović Museums – Meštrović Atelier, Zagreb: "Political Strength of the Sculptural Programme: Ivan Meštrović and the Position of his Sculpture in the First Three Decades of 20th Century Art"
    • Natàlia Esquinas Giménez, Barcelona University: "Crowds of Bronze and Stone People"
    • Discussion
  • 14:55-15:10: Concluding remarks
  • 17:00-19:00 – Reception in the Vigeland Museum. The anniversary exhibition “Parallels. Gustav Vigeland and his Contemporaries” will be open to participants at the seminar.

Day 2: Friday 24 May

  • 09:30: Coffee
  • 10:00-11:00 A Philosophical Perspective on Modernist Sculpture
    Panel Chair: Gustav Jørgen Pedersen, UiO 
    • Ingvild Torsen, University of Oslo: "The Sculpted Body of Early Modernism as a Challenge to Philosophical Aesthetics"
    • Tobias Kämpf, Art Historian: "The Unease of Civilisation: Nietzsche at the Dawn of Modernist Sculpture in France"
    • Discussion
  • 11:00 Coffee Break
  • 11:15-12:15 Incentives in Vigeland's Art
    Panel Chair: Elin-Therese Aarseth, Vigeland Museum
    • Ingvild Hammervoll, Art Historian
    • The Wrestling Motif – from Antique Sculpture to Modern Ideal? 
    • Elsebet Kjerschow, National Museum, Oslo
    • Gustav Vigeland and the Demonic Dance
    • Discussion
  • 12:15 Lunch Break
  • 13:15-14:15 Reframing Antiquity
    Panel Chair: Trine Otte Bak Nielsen, Munch Museum
    • Guri Skuggen, Vigeland Museum: "Gustav Vigeland – Classicist or Modernist?"
    • Davy Depelchin, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium: "‘A Tendency to Realism, Classical by Nature.’ Reframing Antiquity through Constantin Meunier’s Sculpture."
    • Discussion
  • 14:15 Coffee Break
  • 14:30-15:30 Nationalism-Internationalism
    Panel Chair: Jarle Strømodden, Vigeland Museum
    • Stoyan V. Sgourev, ESSEC Business School, Paris: "An Intersection of Centrality and Marginality in Modern Art: an Analysis of the Students of Antoine Bourdelle"
    • Patric Steorn, Thielska Galleriet, Stockholm: "Negotiating Public Art in Times of Nationalism. Gustav Vigeland and Ernest Thiel"
    • Discussion
  • 15:30-16:00: Concluding remarks

Conference fee:

Two-day seminar: NOK 300,-/150,- (students).
One day seminar (Thursday 23 May or Friday 24 May): NOK 200,-/100,- (students)

The fee covers coffee/tea, lunch and reception in the Vigeland Museum Thursday afternoon.  

The planning committee: Øystein Sjåstad, Erik Mørstad, Jarle Strømodden, Elin-Therese Aarseth and Guri Skuggen

For questions: guri.skuggen@kul.oslo.kommune.no

Workshop, Philosophy of Perception

Time and place: May 14, 2019–May 15, 2019, Georg Morgenstiernes hus, rom 219

Schedule

Tuesday 14th May
  • 10:00 Coffee and welcome
  • 10:15-12:00 Craig French (Nottingham): “Austerity and Illusion”
  • 12:00-12:30 Lunch
  • 12:30-13:30 Kristoffer Sundberg (Oslo): “Are illusions hallucinations of properties?”
  • 13:45-14:45 Raúl Ros Morales (Glasgow): “The screening-off problem and the epistemic account of hallucination”
  • 15:00-16:00 Jola Feix (Oslo): "What is direct in direct social perception theory? Perceptualism and the directness thesis"
Wednesday 15th May
  • 9:00-9:15 Coffee
  • 9:15-10:45 Jonathan Knowles (NTNU): “Relationalism, Berkeley’s puzzle, and Phenomenological Externalism”
  • 11:00-12:30 Solveig Aasen (Oslo): “Perceiving In and Perceiving By”
  • 12:30-13:15 Lunch
  • 13:15-14:45 Anna Drozdzowicz (Oslo): “On the auditory experience of speech and voice perception”
  • 15:00-16:30 Sebastian Watzl (Oslo): “Do considerations about attention show that sensory experience does not have content?”

Lecture in the Research Group “Novel and Epic, Ancient and Modern”: When Dadaism Meets Homer: Raoul Schrott’s German Iliad and Its Popular and Scholarly Reception

In 2008, the Austrian poet and dadaist Raoul Schrott published a German translation of Homer’s Iliad and effectively announced it as the first to fully convey what Homer supposedly said and meant, whereas all previous translations were dismissed as travesties of the original.

Time and place: May 2, 2019 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, GM 652

Schrott’s translation was met with great interest by the general public, but triggered an uproar among Classics scholars. In this lecture, professor Silvio Friedrich Bär will analyse and discuss the diverging mechanisms of popular versus scholarly reception and offer some explanations as to why these differed so profoundly in the case of Schrott. Inter alia, it will be argued that Schrott’s translation is more firmly rooted in the classical tradition than some of his critics acknowledge and that scholarly reception often has its blind spots when it comes to understanding and acknowledging the mechanisms of popular reception. Furthermore, it will be demonstrated that Schrott’s popular success can only be understood in the context of the political debate about European integration in Germany at the time of its publication.

Sophia Connell on "Nous in Aristotle's Biology"

Time and place: Apr. 12, 2019 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, GMH 452

Public, social, or private?

The lecture will address the notions of the public, the social and the private in the works of the seventeenth-century natural philosopher and writer Margaret Cavendish.

Time and place: Apr. 12, 2019 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Georg Morgenstiernes hus 152

Full title: Public, social, or private? Spheres of action in the work of Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673)

Despite being a woman Cavendish claimed a legitimate space as an intellectual in her time, not least through her many published books. For the purpose of the lecture Cecilia Rosengren focuses on her Orations of divers sorts, accommodated to diverse places (1662) in which political, moral and social issues are dealt with in the form of speeches held by women and men, rich and poor, rulers and citizens, soldiers and civilians, scholars and students and others. Rosengren hopes to show that the book not only reflects upon Cavendish's own experience of exile and can be read as a sort of analysis of the recent civil war, but also relates to early modern transformations of the public and private spheres.

Cecilia Rosengren is a senior lecturer in the history of ideas at the University of Gothenburg.

Cesare Cuttica on The Horror of the Public Sphere

On Friday March 29 Dr. Cesare Cuttica from Université Paris 8 will hold a guest lecture on "The Horror of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England. Historical Analysis and Contemporary Lessons".

Time and place: Mar. 29, 2019 1:00 PM–2:00 PM, Room 207, GM

By focusing on anti-democratic ideas in England in the period 1570-1649, and by illustrating the rich variety of debates about popular government and the place of the 'many-headed multitude' in it, my talk has three main goals. First, it intends to show the complex nature informing harsh criticism(s) of democratic opinions, procedures and people articulated in a panoply of different discursive moments. The latter involved not only politics, religion and morality, but also the metaphysical, economic, linguistic and natural domains. Attacks on democracy were encompassing because they reflected a deeply seated fear of homo democraticus and of a broad spectrum of elements entailed by democratic life. Second, the talk takes into consideration a specific aspect of anti-democratic language in that it concentrates on the relentless critique of the populace's participation in public affairs. The lower orders' increasing attempts to gain a voice in public discussions surrounding parliamentary politics, taxation, ecclesiastical reform, political representation and social equality provoked strong reactions on the part of the establishment. These pointed to the danger of having uneducated and violent mobs express their opinions on things they knew nothing of and do so through a cacophony of subversive, irresponsible and loose chatter. Third and last, the talk wants to provide a platform for examining the legacy of ideas that are currently the object of vehement debate (especially, in light of the US election of Donald Trump, the UK Brexit referendum and the rise of populisms across the globe). In fact, like in early modern England, nowadays too much politico-philosophical reflection focuses on the role and place of large masses of people in the expanding arenas of social media and public discourse.

Both students and faculty members are welcome to attend. No registration is necessary.

Hallvard Fossheim on "Statesmanship and Individuality"

Time and place: Mar. 22, 2019 2:00 PM–4:00 PM, GMH 452

Giovanni Fanfani on Weaving Imagery in Ancient Greece

Time and place: Jan. 22, 2019 4:15 PM–6:00 PM, Georg Morgenstiernes hus 452

erracotta lekythos (oil flask), attributed to Amasis Painter (ca. 550-530 BCE). Source: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/253348

Ranking among the earliest technologies developed by humans, weaving (and the related techniques of plaiting, braiding, and stringing) may seem to enjoy in early Greek thought the status of a cognitive paradigm for the process of creating complex structures: the woven pattern, in particular, emerges not as a design superimposed on the fabric, but as a structure made of two systems of threads, regulated by numerical relationship. The talk by Giovanni Fanfani (Deutsches Museum, Research Institute for the History of Science and Technology) will explore areas of interaction between ancient weaving and choral lyric as well as (a few instances of) presocratic cosmology.

The title of the talk, which opens this year's Classics seminar, is Hymnos poikilos, kosmos poikilos: aspects of weaving in Greek choral lyric and presocratic
cosmology.

2018

Youth, sex and sexual morality in Byzantium

Time and place: Dec. 14, 2018 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Seminarrom 203, Georg Morgenstiernes hus

Throughout history, societies have had different ways of regulating the age and circumstances under which sexuality could be exercised and of assessing sexual relationships as “normal” or “abnormal”. Adolescent sexuality and sexual behaviour have been and still are controversial topics of debate among sociologists, psychologists, educators, and historians. Teenagers, as they go through a liminal stage of life between childhood and adulthood, experience the first bloom of sexuality, but have to do so in socially-sanctioned ways. When should teenagers start their sexual lives? Under what circumstances? How should societies regulate sexual behaviours? From sexual education at home to teenage prostitution, from hormone-ridden boys to novice-tempted monks, Byzantine society presents a wide range of practices, behaviours, and opinions about the sexual life of youths. How did Byzantine youths live out their sexuality? The presentation explores this issue by looking at a varied corpus ranging from hagiographies to monastic rules and medical textbooks.

Oana Maria Cojocaru is postdoctoral fellow at The Research Institute of the University of Bucharest, working on a project on adolescence and youth in Medieval Byzantium. In 2016 she was awarded PhD in Intellectual history – Byzantine studies at the University of Oslo (IFIKK), and she is currently preparing a monograph based on her doctoral dissertation which deals with ideas and attitudes to childhood and everyday life experiences of children in Medieval Byzantium (9th to 11th centuries). She has published articles related to children and childhood and is co-editor (with Reidar Aasgaard and Cornelia Horn) of the volume Childhood in History: Perceptions of Children in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds (Routledge 2018). She has also presented at various conferences in Germany, Norway and UK on topics concerning children’s disability, methodological approaches in childhood studies and children’s agency and everyday life experiences.

The Infinite Image Lecture Series

Time: Nov. 22, 2018 4:15 PM–6:00 PM

Zeynep Celik ALexander "Botany's Empire: Kew and the Agriculturalization of the Modern World"

Making the Cut: Reading Disability and Animality in the 21st Century

Why and how are the lives of different beings valued differently? To what extent do ideas about embodiment and capability impact upon this attribution or denial of value?

Time and place: Nov. 9, 2018 12:00 PM–1:00 PM, seminarrom 207 Georg Morgenstiernes hus

And how do literary and cultural texts reflect, perpetuate, and (de)construct ideas about the relative value of life?

Tom Z. Bradstreet, a Doctoral Research Fellow at ILOS affiliated with the research project ‘The Biopolitics of Disability, Illness, and Animality’, will engage these questions – among others – in this talk about contemporary literary representations of disabled people and nonhuman animals.

After introducing key ideas from the realms of biopolitics, disability theory, and animality studies, Bradstreet will use his concept of ‘narrative maiming’ in order to expose the underlying problematics of representations of disability and animality which at first glance seem encouragingly progressive.

A simple lunch will be served.

Welcome!

The Infinite Image Lecture Series

Time: Nov. 8, 2018 4:15 PM–6:00 PM

Branka Arsic "Coral Psyches: Melville's Image of Thought"

The Epistemology of Linguistic Understanding Workshop

The workshop is open to all, but please register to K.P.Pedersen.

Time and place: Nov. 6, 2018 9:00 AM–6:20 PM, Georg Morgenstiernes hus

Programme

Tuesday November 6th- G.M. 652

09:00-09:30 Welcome
09:30-11:00 Guy Longworth: 'Thinking Together'  

We often take ourselves to hear (or see, or feel) people say things. I discuss some of the perceptual and cognitive abilities that are involved in those (and associated) achievement(s). Focusing on the case of thinking out loud, my aim is to explore Ryle’s suggestion that the positions of speaker and audience are in certain significant ways symmetrical.

11:05-12:30 Anna Drożdżowicz: 'Experiences of understanding as reasons'

It is often observed that competent language users experience perceptual-like states of utterance understanding (e.g. Fodor, 1987; Pettit, 2002; Siegel, 2006; Dodd, 2014). Recent debates on the epistemology of language understanding point to the potential justificatory role of such experiences in forming beliefs about what speakers say, on the assumption that such states have perceptual-like nature and that their epistemic contribution is roughly similar to that of perceptual states (e.g. Fricker, 2003, Brogaard, 2016). However these accounts say very little about the exact relation between such experiences and corresponding beliefs about what speakers say. In my talk I plan to address this issue by making two related points. First, I will argue that the exact role(s) that such states can play can be captured in terms of (a) doxastic justification where such experiences provide reasons that hearers can treat as reasons for their beliefs and (b) discursive justification that is crucial for many cooperative tasks based on linguistic communication. Second, I will argue that we should abandon a simple perceptual-like model of epistemic reasons that such states can provide. Drawing on observations about the phenomenology and origin of such experiences, I will argue that the nature of epistemic reasons they can provide is different from those we often get from ordinary cases of perception.

12:30-13:30 Lunch
13:30-15:00 Natalia Hickman: 'Semantic Normativity Revisited: Semantic Deviance, Reasons-sensitivity and Illusions of Thought'

The paper reconsiders the question whether meaning is normative, picking up on a sensible suggestion of H-J Glock’s, viz. that the motivation for any plausible normativism must begin from the idea of a semantic mistake. §1 Provides a theoretical rationale for this starting point, clarifying a notion of semantic deviance and articulating a normativist interpretation of it. §2 explores semantic deviance in connection with failures of sense or thought, with particular reference to the semantic system of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, but also in connection with the (less niche, though still controversial) idea of a semantic category-mistake. The tentative conclusion is that illusions of thought and sense provide an argument for semantic normativism, insofar as one ought, unconditionally, to avoid failures of sense and thought. §3 Attempts to make progress in the assessment of normativism from a different angle, while still understanding normativism in terms of semantic deviance. I consider whether a general knowledge norm of practical rationality, instead of any semantic normativity, could explain why a speaker is criticisable for failures to employ linguistic expressions in a way that is guided by the facts, rather than fictions or confusions, concerning their meaning. My first conclusion, again tentative, is that it can’t: such a norm explains why a speaker’s choice of linguistic expression ought to be guided by a known fact, but not why it should be guided by the relevant semantic fact in particular, i.e. by what the expression means. My final speculation is that a speaker’s language use will qualify as rational only if we can explain the special pertinence of a semantic fact to her semantic acts (i.e. her uses of expressions), and that this requires us to postulate a normative connection between fact and act: between meaning and use.

15:00-15:10 Coffee
15:10-16:40 Jennifer Hornsby: 'Knowing what I say (or, as it might be, what you yourself say, or she herself says, or .. !)'

I’ll try to update arguments for a suggestion I’ve made before. I suggested that when one thinks of oneself as speaking—i.e. as playing the role of agent in, say, a testimonial exchange—the merits of thinking of some linguistic knowledge as a kind of know-how or competence whose possession is not a matter of knowing facts/propositions can be clear. (The idea is to take the focus off audiences of speech, often treated as needing to “interpret” utterances.)

I shall need to defend what I take to be Gilbert Ryle’s conception of knowledge how against what seems to me Jason Stanley’s misreading of Ryle. (Stanley replied to me when I first made my suggestion. And in his 2011 book, Stanley presents his own “intellectualism” as the only alternative to Ryle.)

I don’t think that there needs to be very much wrong with the formula: “To know the meaning of an utterance is to know the meanings of its constituent words and to know how the words are put together.” But I think that it’s possible to distinguish between knowledge of these two sorts without treating knowledge of either sort as propositional au fond.

16:45-18:10 Andrew Peet: 'Communication, Reliability, and Understanding'

In this talk I present some objections to reliability based approaches to understanding. That is, views committed to the following:   RELIABLE WHAT IS SAID: Understanding involves reliable recovery of what is said (i.e. the speaker's intended meaning).   I then consider how we might develop a view of understanding in the spirit of the reliability based approach, but which avoids the problems I raise. 

Wednesday November 7th- G.M. 452

09:00-09:30 Coffee
09:30-11:00 Sandy Goldberg: 'The Epistemology of Testimony: Comprehension vs. Trust vs. Assurance'

One of the central choice points in the epistemology of testimony concerns whether to model the phenomenon in individualistic or interpersonal terms.   Those who favor the latter (like myself) hold that the epistemic goodness or badness of a testimonial belief sometimes reflects the epistemic goodness or badness of the testimony (or the relevant cognitive state of the testifier).  But what is the mechanism by which facts pertaining to one person – the speaker – bear on the epistemic goodness of a belief in another person – the recipient of the testimony?   To date, the two main answers have appealed either to the phenomenon of trust (of a speaker by an audience) or else to the phenomenon of assurance (of an audience by a speaker).  In this paper I suggest that the state of comprehension (of a speech act by an audience) may provide all that we need in the way of such a mechanism.

11:05-12:35 Joey Pollock: 'Holistic understanding, disagreement, and verbal disputes'

Traditional accounts of disagreement require that different subjects can often entertain the same propositional contents. For example, a simple case of disagreement is one in which two subjects take opposing attitudes to the same content. For most views of mental content, this ‘shared content’ approach is an obvious choice. However, for the radical holist, this framework is problematic: the holist claims that different subjects cannot, in practice, share thought content.  

I have two aims in this talk. The first is to suggest an account of agreement and disagreement for the holist: this account treats both agreement and disagreement as graded notions. My second aim is to show that the structure of the holist’s account should be attractive to all philosophers who work on disagreement, regardless of their semantic commitments. Disagreement (and agreement) between subjects cannot be adequately characterised without appeal to a holistic account of linguistic and conceptual understanding.

12:35-13:35 Lunch
13:35-15:00 Kim Pedersen: 'Knowing What Speakers Say'

Hearing utterances in a familiar language typically provides us with knowledge of what was said by the speaker in making those utterances. For example, hearing your friend utter the sentence ‘hedgehogs have about five thousand spines’ you straight away come to know that she said that hedgehogs have about five thousand spines. How does one come to know what was said in cases like this? Given the phenomenological immediacy with which the knowledge is formed - one seems to just hear the speaker as saying such-and-such - one might think that the knowledge is immediate, not dependent on further knowledge. Many philosophers are committed to this claim. In this talk I will argue that the knowledge is not immediate: knowledge of what is said in ordinary cases depends on further pieces of knowledge - specifically, knowledge of word meanings. I'll show that knowing what words mean plays an epistemic role, not just a causal one.

15:00-15:15 Coffee
15:15-16:45 Anders Nes: 'A nonconceptual content of understanding'  

I argue that fluent utterance comprehension, as a personal-level achievement, has a nonconceptual content, concerning semantic aspects of the utterance understood. Specifically, I argue that this so because such comprehension involves a nonconceptual representation of the relation _x means y_, represented to hold between an utterance and whatever it is taken to mean. I call this view 'metasemantic nonconceptualism'. My argument rests on two main claims. First, 'Comprehension as Metasemantic', according to which understanding a certain utterance, U, as having a certain meaning, M, requires not merely grasping M but grasping M as a meaning of U. Second, 'Semantic Concepts Unrequired', according to which understanding an utterance as having a certain meaning does not require possession of semantic concepts, such as the concepts of meaning, reference, or truth. I defend the Comprehension as Metasemantic by reflections on cases where hearers entertain a content that may or may not be the meaning of an utterance that they perceive, but do not understand the utterance as having that meaning, and, I claim, fail to do so because they do not attribute the content to the utterance as its meaning. I defend Semantic Concepts Unrequired by appeal to developmental studies indicating that at least some speakers, notably three-year olds, have such limited metalinguistic awareness that they do not meet plausible possession conditions for semantic concepts. I end by speculating on what form the posited nonconceptual content in comprehension might take, distinguishing two options. On the first, comprehension implicates a purely nonconceptual content of the form, roughly, _this utterance means that_, where the final 'that' is understood as a nonconceptual referential element, functioning perhaps something like a demonstrative, picking out a conceptualised content. On the second, comprehension implicates an essentially only partially nonconceptual content, to the effect that _this utterance means M_, where the subject needs to possess the concepts that specify the meaning M, but not the concept of meaning specifying its represented relation to the utterance.

The Infinite Image Lecture Series

Time: Oct. 4, 2018 4:15 PM–6:00 PM

Jussi Parikka "Visual hallucination of probable events, or, on machine learning and predivtion"

Iconocrash. Ruptures, scratches, and hazardous mobility in pre-modern Europe

Guest lecture: Mattia Biffis, University of Oslo, Norwegian Institute in Rome

Time and place: Oct. 3, 2018 3:15 PM–4:00 PM, GM 452

According to Giorgio Vasari, one of the greatest innovations of Renaissance art was the introduction of the canvas, a new material support that allowed pictures “to be carried from place to place.” With their flexibility and resilience, canvases proved to be ideal in fostering painting’s mobility, allowing pictures to be easily transmitted and exchanged across long distances. Yet, as a downside, increased mobility also introduced pictures to what geographers call the “friction of distance,” exposing them to the risk of loss, miscarriage, and, above all, material damages. In this lecture, I will explore the physical harm caused to paintings through mobility, investigating the ruptures, scratches, and other physical traumas that could jeopardize their material integrity during transit from the places of origin to their final destinations. I will consider cases of such painters like Titian or Rubens, whose extensive output was frequently endangered by long distance mobility. In doing so, I will also consider early modern attitudes toward material imperfection, addressing them in connection with modernist ideas of chance and creative spontaneity. As Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass (1915–23) demonstrates, for example, modern aesthetics came to terms with the idea of damage during transit, accepting vulnerability as a creative function of the art object.

Mattia Biffis is postdoctoral fellow at the Norwegian Institute in Rome. Entitled “Painting, Distance, and Circulation: a Geography of Things in Early Modern Europe,” his project investigates the physical and material circumstances by which art is transmitted, displaced, and re-contextualized, creating new markets, audiences, and meanings.

For more information, contact Per Sigurd Styve.

The Infinite Image Lecture Series

Time: Sep. 26, 2018 4:15 PM–6:00 PM

Ashley Woodward "Infinitely Digital: Time, Technology and the Image"

Oslo Workshop in Ancient Philosophy

Program Autumn Semester 2018  

Meetings take place in Georg Morgenstiernes Hus (GMH), Blindernveien 31, 0371 Oslo)

Draft papers will normally be circulated in advance
Time and place: Aug. 24, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, GM452

  • Friday 24 August, Arnold Brooks (Chicago), "A Fault Line in Aristotle's Physics", 14.15-16.00 GMH 452
  • Friday 31 August, Mary Louise Gill (Brown), "Two Versions of Hylomorphism in Aristotle's Metaphysics", 14.15-16.00, GMH 452
  • Friday 7 September, Agnes Callard (Chicago), "The Virtuous Spiral: Aristotle on Deliberation", 14.15-16.00, GMH 452
  • Friday 14 December, Pål Rykkja Gilbert (Oslo), "Prohairesis in Aristotle's Ethics", 14.15-16.00, GMH 452

For further information and inclusion on the mailing list, please contact Thomas Kjeller Johansen or Øyvind Rabbås.

Talk by Andrew Y. Lee on "Introspective Error"

Organized by the Thought and Sense Project

Time and place: June 12, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, GM 652

Guest Lecture: Juan Christian Pellicer

Time and place: Apr. 13, 2018 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, GM 205

Juan Christian Pellicer (Professor of English at ILOS) will be giving a guest lecture on Friday 13 April: “Reception in the Figure of Allusion: Responding to Virgil’s Aeneid Through Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667)”. Pellicer’s lecture takes place as part of the course ANT2700/ANT4700 but is open to the general public.

Please come and spread the word!

Jens Mangerud and Anastasia Maravela: 'Points of contact between the archive of Pompeius Niger and the archive of Tryphon the weaver'

Open seminar with Prof. Anastasia Maravela and PhD candidate Jens Mangerud.

All students, staff members and other guests are welcome.

Time and place: Mar. 23, 2018 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Papyrus collection, University of Oslo Library

With SB VI 9161 (= P.Oslo inv. 1460) as point of departure we will explore possible points of contact between the social networks of the veteran Pompeius Niger and Tryphon the weaver (first cent. Oxyrhynchus).

Tragedy: Ancient and Modern

Workshop Schedule

Time and place: Mar. 23, 2018 9:00 AM–Mar. 24, 2018 5:15 PM, Room 652, Georg Morgenstierne's House

March 23

  • 9:00-10:15 Michael Silk: “Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral: The Classical as the Other”
  • 10:30-11:45 Andrew Huddleston: “The Religion of Tragedy”
  • 11:45-13:00 Lunch
  • 13:00-14:15 Michael Forster: “Plato and Aristotle on Tragedy”
  • 14:30-15:45 Kristin Gjesdal: “After Hegel: Ibsen and the Problem of Modern Tragedy”
  • 16:00-17:15 Connie Meinwald: “What Do Drama Fiends Learn? Plato’s Avid Spectators and Aristotle’s Poetics”

March 24

  • 9:00-10:15 Edith Hall: “Tragic Revenge and Gender from the Erinyes to the 21st Century”
  • 10:30-11:45 Franco Trivigno: “Plato’s Definition of Tragedy”
  • 11:45-13:00 Lunch  
  • 13:00-14:15 Bente Larsen: "Abstraction and Melancholy"
  • 14:30-15:45 Hilde Vinje: “Hamartia in Aristotle's Poetics”
  • 16:00-17:15 Sebastian Gardner: “Tragedy as a Metaphysical Solution”

2017

Hagiography Workshop

God, the Saint and the text: Hagiographical studies as an interdisciplinary field.

Time and place: Nov. 24, 2017 10:15 AM–Nov. 25, 2017, Sophus Bugge’s house, Seminar room 1

Programme

Friday the 24th of November

Seminar room 1, Sophus Bugge's house

  • 10.15 Welcome and presentations – coffee, tea and biscuits

Talks and panel: Hagiography as cross-cultural product – Translation and transmission 

  • 10.30 Session one
    • Karine Åkerman Sarkisian (Uppsala): Hagiography as a bridge-builder
    • Christian Høgel (Odense): Mapping the Metaphrastic menologion
    • Marijana Vuković (Oslo): Adapting the memory of a late antique martyrdom in the Middle Ages: The case of the Martyrdom of Irenaeus of Sirmium
    • Moderator: Christine Amadou (Oslo)
  • 11.30 Questions and discussion
  • 12.00 Session two
    • Barbara Crostini (Uppsala): Symbolic Deaths: Stylites and the Death of the Saint
    • Jan Erik Rekdal (Oslo): The problematic ideal death propagated by the church for the warrior kings in medieval Ireland. The representation of death in Irish hagiography
    • Karl-Gunnar Johansson/Daria Segal (Oslo): Saint Jerome as Authority and Intermediary in the Norse World
    • Moderator: Christine Amadou (Oslo)
  • 13.00 Questions and discussion
  • 13.30 Lunch (sandwiches)

Talks and panel: Hagiography as a literary genre 

  • 14.30 Session one
    • Koen De Temmerman (Ghent): Beyond novelistic heroism. The rhetorics of eugeneia, slavery and chastity in the ancient Greek novel and early-Christian narrative
    • Laura Feldt (Odense): Hagiography and the Fantastic. Religion, literary mediality, and the materiality of writing in the Life of the Jura Fathers Réka Forrai (Odense): Tongues and Lives: Hagiography in Translation (on Skype)
    • Moderator: Ingela Nilsson (Uppsala)
  • 15.30 Questions and discussion
  • 16.00 Session two
    • Hanna Havnevik (Oslo): The Abbot and the Hermit: Tibetan Hagiography as a Literary Genre
    • Marketa Kulhankova (Brno/Uppsala): Aspects of voice in the Byzantine edifying story
    • Moderator: Ingela Nilsson (Uppsala)
  • 16.45 Questions and discussion.
  • 17.15 Fruit and a break
  • 18.00 Kate Cooper (London): Violence and the Early Christian Heroine
  • 18.45 Drinks and discussion
  • 20.00 Dinner at a nearby pizzeria
Saturday the 25th of November 

Seminar room 205, Georg Morgenstiernes hus.

Hagiography, society and religious practices 

  • 09.30 Session one
    • Vincent Déroche (Paris): Texts, buildings and artefacts at pilgrimage sites
    • Rakel Igland Diesen (Trondheim): Conceptions of Nordic Childhood and Youth in Medieval Hagiography
    • Myrto Veikou (Uppsala): Bodies in the Arena of Holiness. The Body as an Agent of Sanctification in Byzantine Greek Saints’ Lives
    • Moderator: Christian Høgel (Odense)
  • 10.30 Questions and discussion, with coffee, tea and biscuits
  • 11.00 Session two 
    • Steffen Hope (Odense): The interplay between liturgy and hagiography in the medieval cult of saints
    • Ildar Garipzanov (Oslo): Hagiography beyond Text: Saint Michael and his Signs in the Early Middle Ages
    • Tonje Sørensen (Bergen): The eternal recurrence – reflections on Bill Viola’s ‘Martyrs’ (2014) as a work of hagiographic art
    • Moderator: Christian Høgel (Odense)
  • 12.00 Questions and discussion
  • 12.30 Lunch (sandwiches)
  • 13.00 Final discussion 
    • Christian Høgel
    • Karine Åkerman Sarkisian
    • Vincent Déroche
    • Koen de Temmerman
    • Kate Cooper

Guest Lecture With Kate Cooper – Violence and the Early Christian Heroine

Story-tellers have always known that damsels in distress make for fascinated listeners.

Time and place: Nov. 24, 2017 6:00 PM–6:45 PM, Seminar room 1, Sophus Bugge's house

More recently, historians asked how ancient writers wove their stories around heroines who could capture the imagination – and the sympathy – of ancient audiences.

Whether intentionally or intuitively, early Christian writers seem to have used the magnetic quality of imperiled heroines as a tool to cultivate the loyalty and commitment of the faithful. In other words, early Christian martyr narratives may well have been the ancient equivalent of modern 'viral' stories, and when violence was involved, the charisma of the heroine was all the more powerful.

This lecture is open for all.

About the Lecturer

Kate Cooper is Professor of Ancient History in the University of Manchester.

Her books include Band of Angels: The Forgotten World of Early Christian Women, published by Atlantic Press (UK) and Overlook Press (US) along with The Virgin and the Bride (Harvard) and The Fall of the Roman Houshehold (Cambridge).

Lorentz Dietrichson Lecture 2017: Michael Ann Holly

IFIKK and Kunsthistorisk Forening (The Art History Association) invites you to the Lorentz Dietrichson Lecture 2017.

Time and place: Oct. 19, 2017 6:00 PM, Gamle Festsal

Michael Ann Holly will give the talk «The Back of the Painted Beyond». The talk will mostly be a phenomenological talk addressing the question «where do vanishing points go when they vanish?» with reference to early modern works of art.

The lecture is open to everyone.

Michael Ann Holly is the Starr director emeritus of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute, having served as director from 1999 to 2013. She was previously a founder of the Visual and Cultural Studies Program and chair of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Rochester.

Holly is the author or co-editor of several books on subjects concerning the historiography and theory of art history. They include: Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image (1996) and Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (1984). Most recently, she published The Melancholy Art (2013), which examines the melancholic tendencies running through the history of art as a discipline.

Oslo Workshop in Ancient Philosophy

Program Autumn Semester 2017  

All meetings take place in Room 467, Georg Morgenstiernes Hus (Blindernveien 31, 0371 Oslo) from 16.15-17.30

Time: Nov. 13, 2017 4:15 PM–5:30 PM

  • Monday 16 October: Franco Trivigno, The Argument against Traditional Theism in Laws 10.905d8-907b4
  • Monday 13 November: Thomas Kjeller Johansen, Memory and Epistemic Progress in Aristotle’s Metaphysics I.1
  • Monday 4 December: Eyjólfur Kjalar Emilsson, Plotinus on matter as evil: how would he respond to Proclus’ criticisms?

For further information please contact Thomas Kjeller Johansen or Øyvind Rabbås.

A Novel Afternoon II

The Novel and the Romance from Generic and Historical Perspectives. Open for all.

Time and place: May 30, 2017 2:15 PM–7:00 PM, GM 652

The novel as a literary form has travelled far and wide: from the shores of the Mediterranean, to the libraries of Byzantium, the salons of the early modern period, the book shops of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and into the digital age. We study the novel and romance tradition across different periods, within different national contexts and informed by different disciplinary backgrounds. At the first ‘novel afternoon’, held in March 2017, we brought together Scandinavian scholars engaging with these different aspects of the novel in order to start a conversation and explore potentials for collaboration.

At this second ‘novel afternoon’ we will delve into the relation between the novel and its twin-genre, the romance, with talks from different generic and historical perspectives and a discussion based on a shared critical reading.

Six scholars will present ongoing work: Silvio Bär (Oslo), Adam Goldwyn (Fargo), Bente Lassen (Oslo), Karin Kukkonen (Oslo), Ingela Nilsson (Uppsala/Oslo) and Simona Zetterberg Gjerlevsen (Aarhus).

As a point of departure for the joint discussion, participants are kindly asked to read chapters 1-3 in The Nature of Narrative (1966) – the foundational book by Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, provided with a new chapter by James Phelan in the 2006 edition. Questions such as the relation between novel and romance, not the least in a diachronical perspective, remain unresolved and understudied, and this will be a good occasion to start thinking together across disciplinary boundaries about the distinctions and convergences between these generic terms.

The event is organized in collaboration with the Text and Narrative in Byzantium research network at Uppsala University, funded by Riksbankens jubileumsfond.

Please also note that this second ‘novel afternoon’ will be followed by an ‘epic afternoon’ on 12 October. We will then discuss the flexible and inclusive character of epics, tracing it from antiquity into modern days. Among our guests then will be Irene de Jong (Amsterdam) and Mats Malm (Göteborg).

The Greek Theatre and Human Sacrifice: On and Off Stage

A lecture series with Valentina Zanusso (Rome) & Nicoletta Canzio (Cassino). Open for all.

Time and place: Apr. 26, 2017 9:30 AM–1:00 PM, Blindern Campus, Georg Morgenstiernes building, room n. 206

  • 9:30–9:45 Silvio Bär: Introduction
  • 9:45–10:45 Valentina Zanusso: Iphigeneia Beyond the Stage: The Development of the Myth from Euripides to Dictys Cretensis
  • 10:45–11:00 Break
  • 11:00–12:00 Nicoletta Canzio: “I Shall Always Be Called ‘Maiden’”: Some Considerations about Polyxena’s Fate on and off Stage

This is part of the lecture series Heroes and Sacrifice in the Ancient World. A lecture series with Valentina Zanusso (Rome) & Nicoletta Canzio (Cassino). Both arrangements are open to the general public, and all Greek and Latin texts will be accompanied by an English translation.

Heroes and Sacrifice in Ovid’s Metamorphoses

A lecture series with Valentina Zanusso (Rome) & Nicoletta Canzio (Cassino). Open for all.

Time and place: Apr. 25, 2017 10:00 AM–1:00 PM, Blindern Campus, Georg Morgenstiernes building, room n. 152

Programme

  • 10:15–11:00 Valentina Zanusso: Folkloric Motives and Literary References in Ovid’s Birth of Heracles (Met. 9.281–323)
  • 11:00–11:15 Break
  • 11:15–12:00 Nicoletta Canzio:“‘Tis the Daughter of Priam and not a Captive Who Asks it”: Polyxena’s Episode in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (13.439–480)

This is part of the lecture series Heroes and Sacrifice in the Ancient World. A lecture series with Valentina Zanusso (Rome) & Nicoletta Canzio (Cassino). Both arrangements are open to the general public, and all Greek and Latin texts will be accompanied by an English translation.

Talk: "Rightness Comes in Degrees" by Neil Sinhababu

Time and place: Apr. 7, 2017 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, GM 652

Abstract

States of affairs can be better or worse. Their goodness fits on a continuous scale. I argue that the rightness of actions fits on a similar continuous scale, even though we don’t use the words “righter” and “wronger”. I outline and defend a version of scalar consequentialism, according to which the rightness of action is a matter of degree, determined by how good the consequences are. This view allows actions to simply be right, and explains phenomena that some deontological views have difficulty explaining.

Neil Sinhababu is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at National University of Singapore. His latest book, Humean Nature: How Desire Explains Action, Thought, and Feeling, was published only a week ago by Oxford University Press. Sinhababu's papers have appeared in Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Review, and Noûs, among other venues. His most (in)famous paper is arguably "Possible Girls," published in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, in which Sinhababu argues that if David Lewis’ modal realism is true, modal realists from different possible worlds can fall in love with each other.

Spontaneous Thought in Sleep & Dreams

World leading scholar on the philosophy of dreams, Jennifer Windt from Monash University, presents promising points of contact between sleep and dream research, and research on waking mind wandering.

Time and place: Feb. 16, 2017 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Seminar room 652

About the lecture

Sleep and dreaming are increasingly discussed in the context of the growing theoretical and empirical literature on mind wandering and spontaneous thought in wakefulness. Based on similarities in phenomenological reports and underlying neural activity, dreaming has even been suggested to be an intensified form of waking mind wandering. It is tempting to conclude that the analysis of dreaming and waking mind wandering can inform each other, and perhaps even that dreaming might be used as a model of waking mind wandering.

In this talk, I introduce a taxonomy for describing not just dreams, but also types of conscious cognitive activity in sleep that are best classified as dreamless. I then use this taxonomy to identify what I take to be the most promising points of contact between sleep and dream research and research on waking mind wandering. I also raise a number of challenges to the claim that dreaming be regarded as an intensified form of waking mind wandering. Rather than focusing on the contrast between dreaming and waking mind wandering, I propose that future research, both theoretical and empirical, should focus on the entire range of conscious activity in sleep.

Contact: Sebastian Watzl, CSMN

2016

A Conversation on Habit in the Novel and Film Remainder

Participants: British writer Tom McCarthy, Omer Fast, Israeli/American video artist and filmmaker living in Berlin, and Aron Vinegar, art historian at IFIKK, UiO.

Time and place: Nov. 21, 2016 7:00 PM, Wergeland Room, Litteraturhuset

In a nutshell, at the beginning of Remainder the protagonist is hit by unnamed falling debris from the sky and subsequently loses most of his habitual actions that we take for granted. After some lovely descriptions of him having to visualize and plan out every single step in order to achieve simple acts like walking or picking up a carrot, he has a proustian moment at a party. While touching a crack on a bathroom wall he is momentarily immersed in a previous time when he had familiar habits and modes of inhabitation. He subsequently uses the large sum awarded for the accident to buy an apartment block and pay people to help reenact that past moment. Needless to say, it gets very disturbing from there! The novel and film draw out all the complex issues that habit raises, such as the relations between activity and passivity, automaticity and will, freedom and constraint, stability and change.

Bios of Participants

Tom McCarthy is a writer and artist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages. His first novel, Remainder, which deals with questions of trauma and repetition, won the 2008 Believer Book Award and was recently adapted for the cinema. His third, C, which explores the relationship between melancholia and technological media, was shortlisted for the 2010 Booker Prize, as was his fourth, Satin Island, in 2015. McCarthy is also author of the 2006 non-fiction book Tintin and the Secret of Literature, an exploration of the themes and patterns of Hergé’s comic books; of the novel Men in Space, set in a Central Europe rapidly disintegrating after the collapse of communism; and of numerous essays that have appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The London Review of Books, Harper’s and Artforum. In 2010 he wrote the screenplay for Johan Grimonprez’s multiple award-winning film Double Take. In addition, he is founder and General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society (INS), a semi-fictitious avant-garde network of writers, philosophers and artists whose work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Palais de Tokyo Paris, Tate Britain and Moderna Museet Stockholm. In 2013 he was awarded the inaugural Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction by Yale University.

Omer Fast was born in Jerusalem in 1972. He holds a BA in English from Tufts University, a BFA in Visual Arts from the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts and an MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York. Since finishing his studies in 2000, Fast has participated in over 200 international exhibitions, including one-person shows at the Whitney Museum in New York, the Jeu de Paume in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna. Group exhibitions include Documenta 13, the Venice Biennale 2011, the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Fast received the Bucksbaum award for his work “The Casting” at the Whitney Biennial in 2008 and has also won the National Galerie’s Prize for Young Art in Berlin in 2009 with his work “Nostalgia”. His work is in several international collections including Tate Modern, the Guggenheim Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Centre Pompidou. A monographic survey of Fast's work will open at the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin in November, 2016.

Aron Vinegar

Laughter and Comedy in Ancient Philosophy

The workshop is open to all interested!

Time and place: June 16, 2016 2:00 PM–June 17, 2016, Room 452, Georg Morgenstierne's House

June 16    

  • 2-2:15pm     
    • Welcome and Introduction
    • Mathilde Skoie, Department Chair, IFIKK, University of Oslo
  • 2:15-3:30pm     
    • Humor as Philosophical Subversion
    • Richard Bett, Johns Hopkins University
    • Comments: Marko Malink, NYU
  • 3:45-5pm     
    • Laughter and the Moral Guide: Dio Chrysostom and Plutarch
    • Michael Trapp, King’s College London
    • Comments: Eyjólfur Kjalar Emilsson, University of Oslo
  • 7pm     Dinner

June 17

 

  • 9-10:15am:
    • Aristotle on Laughter and Aggressiveness
    • Pierre Destrée, Université Catholique de Louvain
    • Comments: Hallvard Fossheim, University of Bergen
  • 10:30-11:45am:
    • Aristotle on Wittiness
    • Matt Walker, Yale-NUS College
    • Comments: Panos Dimas, University of Oslo
  • 12-1:30pm Lunch
  • 1:30-2:45pm:
    • Plato on Laughter and Moral Harm
    • Franco V. Trivigno, University of Oslo
    • Comments: Thomas Kjeller Johansen, University of Oslo
  • 3-3:45pm:
    • Comments on "Laughing Properly: Risum mouere in Cicero’s Rhetorical and Philosophical Works" by Charles Guérin, U. Paris Est-Créteil
    • Pål Rykkja Gilbert, University of Oslo
  • 7pm: Dinner

 

Anne Boud’hors: Reconstructing the history of the Coptic Gospel of Mark

The Papyrus Collection of the Oslo University Library and the research project Strengthening Research Capacity in the Papyrus Collection of the Oslo University Library have the pleasure of announcing the seminar.

Time and place: May 27, 2016 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Papyrus room, Humanities and Social Sciences Library, Georg Sverdrups, 4 etasje

Anne Boud’hors (CNRS/Institut de recherche et d'histoire des textes, Paris)

Abstract

Some years ago the remains of a papyrus codex containing the Gospel of Mark in Sahidic Coptic were identified by Sebastian Richter in the collection of the University Library in Leipzig. During the second summer school of Coptic papyrology (Leipzig, 2008) several fragments were studied by a group of participants. The publication of the entire manuscript is now being completed. It turns out that this codex is not only a manuscript among others in the list of the witnesses but actually occupies a special place in the textual tradition that can confirm and refine the research that I have been carrying out for years about the history of the Gospel of Mark in Coptic. Thus, my presentation will be in two parts: first, I will explain the situation of the Coptic Gospel of Mark, which, as in Greek, is different from the other three gospels; then, we will analyze a passage from chapter 6, starting with the Leipzig codex, in order to situate this witness in the general picture and to examine what it brings back to our knowledge of the process of copying, transmitting and using the text.

Anne Boud’hors is Directeur de recherche at the Institut de recherche et d'histoire des textes (IRHT) at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), Paris. She edits Coptic and Greek manuscripts from Egypt and studies their religious and cultural context.

Guest Lecture by Bashshar Haydar

Time and place: May 26, 2016 5:15 PM–7:00 PM, Seminarrom 152, Georg Morgenstiernes hus

Bashshar Haydar "Should moral intuitions be trusted?"  

The seminar is a guest lecture as part of the graduate course FIL4330 "Distributing Death" , but is open for everyone interested.

2015

Workshop: Meaning and Embodiment in Art

How can abstract ideas and general concepts be given a concrete and material expression in art? The workshop is open to faculty and students from all departments.

Time and place: May 8, 2015 9:30 AM–4:45 PM, Room 144, Georg Morgenstiernes hus

This becomes an urgent question for philosophers, art historians and critics, from the 18th century and onwards, and remains a central problem within art practice as well as many disciplines in the humanities.

The goal of the workshop is to explore this question by gathering researchers and students working within philosophical aesthetics.

Detailed program

 

  • 9.30 – 10.50: Kristin Gjesdal, Temple University/UiO: ”The End of Art and the Beginning of Translation: Herder on Culture, Art, and Historicity."
  • 11 – 12.20: Elisabeth Schellekens, Uppsala University: "What We Owe Beautiful Objects"
  • 13.30 – 14.50: Andrew Huddleston, Birkbeck, University of London: “Art, Culture, and Meaning in the Early Nietzsche”
  • 15 – 16.15: Ingvild Torsen, UiO: ”Body in Sculpture”
  • 16.15 – 16.45: Student led panel discussion

Abstracts

For questions, contact ingvild.torsen@ifikk.uio.no

2014

Inaugural Lecture by Silvio Bär : “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”

A Newly Discovered Sappho Poem and The Fragmentarisation of Antiquity. The lecture is open for all. Welcome!

Time and place: Sep. 18, 2014 3:15 PM–4:00 PM, Undervisningsrom 1, 3. etasje, Georg Sverdrups hus

Since the turn of the millennium, numerous breathtaking discoveries of various previously unknown ancient Greek texts were made – and have kept the field of Classical Studies thrilling, lively and busy. The latest addition to this is a newly discovered and freshly edited fragment of a poem by the famous and legendary Greek lyric poet Sappho (c. 630 – c. 570 BC). In this poem, the lyric speaker commemorates the absence (and potential loss) of her elder brother, and longs for the growing-up of the younger.

In the first part of my lecture, I will present the Greek text and its carrier medium (an Egyptian papyrus from around 200 AD), alongside with a translation and a concise interpretation of the poem’s content. In this context, it will be demonstrated to how far an extent a 2600 years old poem can, at the same time, be close and alien to a 21st-century audience.

In the lecture’s second part, some general considerations will be offered with regard to the way we think of Antiquity today – a period of which our knowledge is, after all, highly fragmentarily; and how the discovery and ‘re-construction’ of a fragmented poem such as that of Sappho can ultimately be read as a metaphor of the ‘fragmentarisation’ of our own image of Antiquity.

2013

Research seminar in the history of ideas

Line Cecilie Engh: "The Pope's Bride. Impacts of bridal imagery on power relations in Western Europe,1100-1400"

Time and place: Nov. 29, 2013 12:00 PM–2:00 PM, Rom 207, Georg Morgenstiernes hus

Post doc fellow in the history of ideas, Line Cecilie Engh, will present her ongoing research project "The Pope's Bride. Impacts of bridal imagery on power relations in Western Europe,1100-1400".

The presentation is held in English, and is open to everyone. Please email ellen.krefting@ifikk.uio.no if you are interested in attending, and you will receive Line's abstract.

Welcome!

2012

Workshop: The Many Faces of Legitimacy

The Many Faces of Legitimacy: On the different aspects of ‘legitimacy’ in healthcare debates and policy-making

Time and place: Oct. 18, 2012 9:00 AM–Oct. 19, 2012 3:00 PM, Georg Morgenstiernes hus, room 652

Programme:

Thursday, October 18
  • 10:00 - 12:00 Chair: Ole Fritjof Norheim
  • 10:00 - 11:00 Silje Aambø Langvatn: “Rawls on legitimacy” (25 min.) Comments (10 min.): Ole Fritjof Norheim
  • 11:00 - 12:00 Keith Syrett: ”Courts, expertise and resource allocation: is there a judicial ‘legitimacy problem’?" (25 min.) Comments (10 min.): Siri Gloppen
  • 12:00 - 13:00 Lunch
  • 13:00 - 15:00 Chair: Kristine Bærøe
  • 13:00 - 14:00 Andreas Føllesdal: ”Two Domains of Health” (25 min.) Comments (10 min.): Berit Bringedal
  • 14:00 - 15:00  Ann Charlotte Nedlund: ”The value of internal legitimacy when setting priorities in health care” (25 min.) Comments (10 min.): Lydia Kapiriri
  • 15:00 - 16:00  Ole Frithjof Norheim: ”Guidance on Priority Setting in Health Care (GPS Health)” (25 min.)
  • 19:30 Dinner for speakers, Eik Restaurant, Universitetsgata 11
Friday, October 19
  • 9:00 - 12:00 Chair: Berit Bringedal
  • 9:00 - 10:00  Norman Daniels: ”Legitimacy, fairness, and accountability for reasonableness” (25 min.)
  • 10:00 - 11:00  Lydia Kapiriri: ”The legitimacy of development partners' involvement in low income countries' priority setting” (25 min.) Comments (10 min.): Eli Feiring
  • 11:00 - 12:00  Greg Bognar: “Legitimacy and social value judgments” (25 min.) Comments (10 min.): Erik Nord
  • 12:00 - 13:00  Lunch
  • 13:00 - 16:00 Chair: Silje Aambø Langvatn
  • 13:00 - 14:00 Kristine Bærøe & Rob Baltussen: “Integrating Accountability for Reasonableness and Multi-criteria Decision-Making Analysis for legitimate healthcare decision-making in a real world setting” (25 min.) Comments (10 min.): Greg Bognar
  • 14:00 - 15:00  Eli Feiring: ”Legitimate decision-making: A democratic equality Perspective” (25 min.) Comments (10 min.): Andreas Føllesdal
  • 15:00  Closing remarks
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