Thursday, 0ct. 27th, 2011
6:00 -8:00 pm,
Room: C198

A Child Surrounds This Brain: Negotiating Neurodiversity and Science.

Medical anthropologist Rayna Rapp will speak about her current ethnographic research on parents with children on the autism spectrum and other cognitive diagnoses.

Rayna Rapp, Professor of Anthropology at New York University, is interested in issues of gender, reproduction, health and culture, and science and technology in the United States and Europe. Professor Rapp's publications include Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: the Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America, "Gender, Body, Biomedicine: How Some Feminist Concerns Dragged Reproduction to the Center of Social Theory," and "Flexible Eugenics: Discourses of Perfectibility and Free Choice at the End of the 20th Century." Cosponsored with the Center for Humanities.

Thursday, Nov. 10th,
6:00 -8:00 pm,
Room: 9206/9207

Out of Our Heads

This lecture features the philosopher Alva Noe, author of Out of Our Heads: Why You are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (Hill and Wang, 2009).

Description of Out of Our Heads from Publishers Weekly:
Noe turns Descartes's famous statement on its head: I am, therefore I think, says Noe. The author, a philosopher at UC-Berkeley, challenges the assumptions underlying neuroscientific studies of consciousness, rejecting popular mechanistic theories that our experience of the world stems from the firing of the neurons in our brains. Noe (Action in Perception) argues that we are not our brains, that consciousness arises from interactions with our surroundings: Consciousness is not something that happens inside us. It is something we do or make. Noe points out that many of our habits, like language, are foundational aspects of our mental experience, but at the same time many, if not most, habits are environmental in nature--we behave a particular way in a particular situation. He goes on to challenge popular theories of perception, in particular the claim that the world is just a grand illusion conjured up by the brain. Readers interested in how science can intersect with and profit from philosophy will find much food for thought in Noe's groundbreaking study.

Alva Noe is a distinguished professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. Formally he taught at UC Berkeley as a member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the Center for New Media. Professor Noe is the author of Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons From The Biology of Consciousness (Hill and Wang / Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2009) and Action in Perception (The MIT Press, 2004). Cosponsored with the Center for Humanities.