The Public Life of Things: How We Know People and Things and How They Affect Us
The Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas invites
faculty and students to join Scholar in Residence, Richard Mohr,
for a discussion of cross-disciplinary methodologies in the
humanities.
Bring your lunches; we'll provide the coffee and cookies
Dr. Mohr is Senior Lecturer and Co-Director of the Legal
Intersections Research Centre at the University of Wollongong in
Australia
Dr Mohr will look at the use of the concepts of representation and intention in cross disciplinary studies in the humanities. Levinas and Ricoeur considered that our direct and intentional understanding of people and things brought about the ‘ruin of representation’: we don’t store pictures of things, we grasp their meaning (for us). Is this a process of reaching out or of opening up to other people and to things? Benjamin’s work illustrates how ideas and things have a life of their own. The epistemological problem of representation thus becomes an ontological problem of efficacy, as things (bearing symbols or ideas) enter into human affairs.