Harman Academy for Polymathic Study, DML 241

Brain implants to augment memory used to be the stuff of science fiction, but no longer.  Neuroprosthetics, such as cochlear implants, have been around for decades, and the FDA recently approved the first retinal implants.  But today, brain implants to improve and augment memory is the epicenter of neuroprosthetics R&D and for good reason.  Based on current projections, by 2050, persons with various types of dementia, which includes Alzheimer’s disease, will exceed 16 million, or about 1 in 5 Americans age 65 and older.  This means that at...

Whose Nature Is It? A Conversation on the Social Inequality and Accessibility of the Outdoors

We think of the wilderness as boundary-less, open space, free of racial, gendered, and social biases and discriminations of modern urban society.  Or is it? For this inaugural session of the 4Ps series, wilderness writer and feminist hiker Shawnté Salabert and @modernhiker founder and Editor-in-Chief Casey Schreiner will discuss the historic and present restrictiveness of the wilderness and explore with us ways we might change the social landscape of the great outdoors.

We are all citizens of one world, we are all of one blood. To hate people because they were born in another country, because they speak a different language, or because they take a different view on this subject or that, is a great folly. Desist, I implore you, for we are all equally human. . . . Let us have but one end in view: the welfare of humanity. The school is the manufactory of humanity.

Comenius, circa 1640

 

Higher education is intended to equip one with the tools for critical thinking. Faith, on the other hand, according to Webster’s dictionary, presupposes a...

A conversation with Miriam Pawel, historian, journalist, and author of The Browns of California: The Family Dynasty that Transformed a State and Shaped a Nation

 

Light lunch will be served.

The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.

--Rabindranath Tagore, Bengali polymath

 

God has planted eternity in the human heart.

--Ancient Jewish wisdom literature

 

Moment: present time.  Eternity: a state to which time has no application. Being: existence.

--Oxford Dictionary

 

For our final Polymathic Pizza session in the fall 2018 series on TIME, Dean of Religious Life Varun Soni will guide us in an excavation of the theological, spiritual, and experiential meanings and interconnectedness of the moment,...

Will there always be, as the author of Ecclesiastes wrote, “a time for peace and a time for
war?”
Historian Lewis Mumford, among others, has argued that warfare, as an ongoing and
necessary expression of the state, originated with the rise of urbanism in the Tigris-Euphrates
Valley, thousands of years before the Common Era.  The twentieth century witnessed global,
regional, and local war on a near-continuous basis.  In nearly the entirety of the first two
decades of the twenty-first century the United States has been at war in the Middle East and...

Physicists say that it is theoretically possible to time travel into the future, but not into the past.  Imagine, though, interactive live art that could function like a time-machine and challenge this assumption.  Encountering Professor Edgar Arceneaux’s work is to experience this kind of time travel, moving fluidly through the past, the present and the future.  For instance, when witnessing/participating in his interactive, multi-media, temporally fluid live performance art, Until, Until, Until, one moves through time and in time, where “linear logic is abandoned...

In our opening session, TIME served as the framework to understand the universe.  TIME though, as Professor of Anthropology Janet Hoskins has shown in her research, can also serve as a paradigm to illuminate human cultures here on earth.  In her work with the Kodi, an indigenous people who live on Sumba Island in the Indonesian archipelago, Hoskins used TIME to understand their cultural and social practices: “Time,” Hoskins argues, “must be seen as a crucial (perhaps the crucial) dimension of analysis.”  All aspects of Kodi life-- marriage, clan,...

The Harman Academy for Polymathic Study guides its enquiries through four flexible pathways or Quadrants:  (1) critical and integrative thinking; (2) study of the polymaths; (3) the tapestry of knowledge; and (4) communication.  In order to explicate these Quadrants more fully, Edwin McCann, professor of philosophy and English, will conduct four conversational workshops over the fall and spring terms from a philosophical, historical, and practical point of view.  Attendance at these two sessions covering all four quadrants is required for Academy certification.

 ...

The Academy for Polymathic Study guides its enquiries through four flexible pathways or Quadrants:  (1) critical and integrative thinking; (2) study of the polymaths; (3) the tapestry of knowledge; and (4) communication.  In order to explicate these Quadrants more fully, Edwin McCann, professor of philosophy and English, will conduct four conversational workshops over the fall and spring terms from a philosophical, historical, and practical point of view.  Attendance at these two sessions covering all four quadrants is required for Academy certification.

 

Quadrants...