We write to invite you to the next virtual meeting of our seminar, which will take place on Tuesday, December 14th at 4:00 PM U.S. EST. Our December speaker has had to postpone his talk, and will speak to us in the coming year. We are pleased to announce that Professor Hilary Gatti of the Fondazione Università di Roma “La Sapienza”, will speak to us on:"Shopping at the Right Shop: A Renaissance Metaphor for the Intellectual Disciplines."
If you would like to attend the meeting, we kindly ask that you fill out the RSVP form linked to below by Friday, December 10th, rather than responding to us by email, so that we can tally the list of attendees.
The abstract for the talk is as follows:
I intend to examine three figures of the European Renaissance and their ideas of human knowledge as an exercise in intellectual history. In Leonardo da Vinci, we famously find knowledge of universal value that knew no boundaries. This is still present in the Italian philosopher-poet Giordano Bruno. Writing in London in 1584, Bruno however began to think of knowledge as divided into different spheres or fields, different “areas” of knowledge, making it necessary to know where to go to procure the kind of knowledge you require. Bruno devised the shopping metaphor of my title. But Bruno still thought that the different branches of knowledge merge to become a universal “knowledge of the world”, or even of the universe. An English near contemporary of Bruno’s, Francis Bacon, is usually considered a proponent of “The New Science”. His Utopian research center in The New Atlantis presents a futuristic vision of forms of technical knowledge yet to come. Bacon, however, calls this institution Salomon’s House, emphasizing a knowledge still of universal value. His wise men are also studying the workings of the mind, investigating new forms of language and logic with which to dominate the new forms of knowledge. Compared to Leonardo or Bruno, Bacon is already thinking of knowledge as divided far more sharply into different “disciplines”, even if as yet there is no clear-cut separation into what today we think of as the very different domains of knowledge of the scientist and the humanist.
Click here to RSVP
Those who respond will then receive an email Zoom invitation shortly before the day of the meeting that will include a link and password to let you access the meeting.
You do not need to own the software Zoom since you will be invited through the link. (We recommend opening the link 5-10 minutes before 4:00 PM that afternoon.) You must turn on your computer's speaker system when joining. You will then discover two buttons to the lower left of the bottom Zoom task bar that allow you to join aurally and visually.
As has become our new custom, we will stipulate an ending time of 6:15 PM, which will allow for a few minutes of informal conversation over a virtual toast of wine (BYOW). Everything will be aural and visual, including the PowerPoint slides. You can participate with or without your own camera on (or with it covered with tape, if you prefer). During the talk, we will ask everyone to "mute" their microphone (if you have not taken part before, how to do this will be made clear once we're all in the Zoom meeting).
Again, please be sure to respond at this link by Friday, December 10th if you plan to attend. If you require additional assistance, feel free to reach out to Mackenzie Fox at [email protected].
