Please join us in conversation with Philip Kitcher as we discuss themes from his new book, Life after Faith. While atheist writers gleefully cataloguing religion’s intellectual and moral vices have been numerous of late, too few have treated their target with the respect it deserves for successfully providing emotional comfort and social cohesion. Kitcher changes that, acknowledging religion’s virtues even as he constructs a secular humanist alternative to replace it.
Talk with him about this on Monday, February 23, 2015 at 7:00pm at Book Culture, 536 West 112th St., NY, NY (212) 865-1588
A talk by Anne Simon, moderated by Eliza Zingesser
Zoopoetics aims to highlight the plurality of stylistic, linguistic and narrative tools used by writers to express the plurality of animal activities, affects and worlds, as well as the intricacies of the interactions between humans and animals. Such an approach helps to understand that all life forms are in a relationship of dependence with an archè (Husserl)—an origin, a reason, a refuge, a dwelling, the Earth— and that animals are more stylistic or rhetorical beings than we usually think of them as being. Evolution and biomorphic logics allow us to intuitively understand other species related to us, to share many of their emotions and expressions, and to be able to account for them through specific human means, such as evocative and figurative language. The lecture will show that perspectivism, metamorphosis and hybridity are universal patterns and experiences that literature embodies in different ways.
Anne Simon is a Research Director at the Centre National de la Recherche Française and a Member of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), where she leads the Project « Animots » ; an author of Trafics de Proust, 2016 and La rumeur des distances traversées, to be published in 2018. Her research focuses on disturbing relationships between philosophy and literature, and on zoopoetics.