Join us for the ‘Time for Beauty’ virtual conference, generously sponsored by the British Society of Aesthetics (BSA). This film-based workshop invites students and researchers to explore the captivating relationship between time and the aesthetic qualities of static visual art.
The conference will be broadcast in three episodes
Time for Depiction
Time for Musical Pictures
Time for Expressiveness
With each running for approximately 30 minutes. It will be accessible online from May to July 2023. To register, simply fill out the form at https://forms.gle/tBAo8R2rRcHjxRMx6, and you will receive access to the films online. We look forward to seeing you there!
It is a great sadness to announce the tragic news of the death of our admired and loved colleague, Maria Rosa Antognazza, Philosophy Professor at the Department of Philosophy, King’s College, London. Rosa died yesterday, Tuesday 28 of March, after a short illness, surrounded by her family. She leaves behind her husband, Howard Hotson, and two of her three children.
Rosa was a highly distinguished philosopher, with particular expertise in the history of philosophy, especially Leibniz, and in epistemology and the philosophy of religion. She was a member of the Academia Europaea, the Chair of the British Society for the History of Philosophy, a Trustee of The Royal Institute of Philosophy, and served as President of the British Society for the Philosophy of Religion between 2019 and 2022 and Head of the King’s Philosophy Department between 2011 and 2015.
It was with great sadness that we learnt that Maria Rosa Antognazza, professor at King’s College London and chair of the BSHP, passed away on 28 March 2023 after a short period of serious illness. Rosa was a brilliant scholar, a wonderful colleague, and a good friend to many among us. She will be missed immensely in the BSHP community.
On the anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Vision Fellow in Public Philosophy, A.J. Wendland, and one of Ukraine’s most influential public intellectuals, Volodymyr Yermolenko talk about the power of philosophy in a time of war, the state of higher education in Kyiv, the work Ukrainian academics are doing to support their communities, and what international academics can do to help the Ukrainian academy.
To kick off this academic year, we asked students to create a short video to tell us about a philosopher who is a member of a group that is underrepresented in philosophy.
We’re delighted to announce that the winner of our video competition is Estelle Nusbaumer, with her video on Zhuangzi and Daoism/Taoism. Congratulations to Estelle!
Zhuangzi – Estelle Nusbaumer
We’d also like to offer an honourable mention to our competition runner up, Quince Pan, with his video on Kok-Chor Tan’s Global Luck Egalitarianism:
Quince Pan – Kok-Chor Tan and Global Luck Egalitarianism
Huge thanks to all of the students who submitted videos – the panel really enjoying watching and learning from them.
The History of Philosophy research cluster at KCL has a new website. Visit the link for details about upcoming reading groups, work-in-progress discussions, the KHOPS seminar series (resuming in Spring 2023), workshops on books published by members of the cluster and more. The current members of the cluster are:
Mathilde Victoria Prietzel Nielsen (she/her)President of King’s College London Philosophy Society Undergraduate at King’s College London Department of Philosophy
Mathilde stars with the crew in the adspot for ‘The Pleasures of Regret’
We were summoned at the Prêt across the National Gallery to meet each other, get fuel, a run-through of the plan, and role assignments. I was to be the checker, that is, to keep track of which shots we had done and which we hadn’t (this was not done sequentially!). Other roles included clapper (the wooden board, not hands), extra set of ears, extra set of eyes, prompter/stylist, equipment gather-carrier-set-upper. Once the roles had been assigned we went to the gallery to be let into the gloriously silent halls to get our badges (so as to not get hand-cuffed for wandering the halls at night) before going through the galleries to our first shot, and I must say: Monet, Picasso, and the rest of the gang makes a whole other experience when not diffused by the usual museum buzz.
Though not required, you intuitively lower your eyes, widen your gaze, and raise eyebrows to communicate to and agree with the others that this is not the usual museum experience – it is of course far better.
That is, it is better when you are together with your crew or for the first 150 meters walking alone.
Around 160 you start wondering whether you’re lost and, if so, whom to call on. Cézanne? Raphael? As a team, our main job turned out to be how to keep the lights on whilst keeping the sound off: light sensors required us to keep walking about when filming in order to keep the light on, but it happens that wooden floors may squeak, so we caught ourselves in quite the dilemma (a suitable environment for philosophers, sure). The dilemma we solved with a fusion of modern dance and loss of shoes. The night we rounded off with a communal, laugh, stretch, and yawn.
The centre for Philosophy and Arts (KCL) are delighted to announce a new series of events exploring the relationship between art and our emotions. The series launches at The National Gallery with a film, panel discussion, and Q&A on regret. Reserve your free zoom seat here and join Vanessa Brassey from King’s College London, Andy West, author of ‘The Life Inside: A Memoir of Prison, Family and Philosophy’, and author and arts journalist Chloë Ashby. The event will be chaired by Sacha Golob, King’s College London.
So, what will we be discussing?
Regrets may be painful or bittersweet. They can be ethically loaded or merely a plaintive ‘perhaps’. Perhaps you could’ve been a contender; loved more kindly; been more philanthropic; or sold your bitcoin before December?
This means that regret is an aromatic concoction of nostalgia, reminiscing and grief with gentle top notes of longing. We will be thinking about the ways it can also be intensely and weirdly pleasurable. And how pictures help us to understand this, on their own special way.
The Art & Emotion series. Free (but pre-registration required). Make sure you get your seat.
In collaboration with and hosted by The National Gallery London.
Epidemiologist Julian Peto is advocating mass testing as the key part of a plan to stop the virus spreading. Studies where everyone has been tested have picked up asymptomatic cases. With the addition of isolation and contact tracing this method of testing has been able to massively reduce the spread of the virus. The hope is such a coordinated scheme implemented nationally could help bring the numbers down. There’s a question over which type of test is best to use for mass testing. At the moment many of us do lateral flow tests at home. Although they give instant results their accuracy has been shown to be strongly linked to how well the tests are conducted – hence the need to back up any positive findings with the more accurate PCR test.
PCR takes longer and needs sophisticated lab equipment. However a compromise could be to use RT Lamp tests, they are accurate, give results in around 20 minutes, do require a very basic lab, but without the expensive equipment of PCR. A number of RT lamp tests have now been developed for SARS-Cov2. Kevin Fong has been to see the developers of one of them, the OxLAMP test.
And with the lifting of restrictions how are you going to judge your own personal risk from Covid?
It’s a question that interests philosopher of science Eleanor Knox. She says government mandates on mask wearing and social distancing have allowed us to avoid tricky questions around our own potential risk from the virus and risks our own behaviour might pose to loved ones. Now there’s a lot more to think about in terms of balancing our desires to return to some semblance of normality while levels of Covid infection continue to rise.
This year the lecture will be given by Jeremy Waldron (NYU), with replies from Stephen Darwall(Yale), Frances Kamm (Rutgers), Rae Langton and Richard Holton (Cambridge).
The lecture will take place on Teams on 8 July 2021, 16:00 – 18:00 BST.
King's Philosophy 