AMA Announcement: Monday 1/8 1PM EST - Hilary Lawson, Director of the
Institute of Art and Ideas, Founder of the HowTheLightGetsIn philosophy
on post-realist philosophy and public philosophy
Abstract
The mods of /r/philosophy are pleased to announce an upcoming AMA by
Hilary Lawson, Director of the Institute of Art and Ideas, Founder of
the HowTheLightGetsIn philosophy festival and Vice Chair of the LSE
Forum for European Philosophy. Hilary Lawson will be joining us on
Monday January 8th at 1PM EST to discuss issues in post-realist
philosophy, metaphysics and his work with public philosophy. Hear it
from him: Hilary Lawson Hi reddit, I’m Hilary Lawson - post-realist
philosopher, director of the Institute of Art and Ideas and founder of
the world’s largest philosophy and music festival HowTheLightGetsIn.
Born and raised in Bristol, England, I was awarded a scholarship to
study PPE at Balliol College Oxford . As a post-graduate I came to see
paradoxes of self-reference as the central philosophical issue and began
a DPhil on The Reflexivity of Discourse. This later became the basis for
my first philosophical book Reflexivity: The Post-Modern Predicament.
Alongside my more philosophical writing, I also pursued a media career
following my studies. Within a few years I had created my own prime time
television series ‘Where There’s Life’ with a weekly UK audience in
excess of ten million. In 1982, I went on to co-author a book based on
the series and was appointed Editor of Programmes and later Deputy Chief
Executive at the television station TV-am. Meanwhile I continued to
develop my philosophical thinking and had initial sketches of the theory
later to become Closure. In 1985 I wrote Reflexivity: The Post-Modern
Predicament as part of a series on modern European thought. In the book,
I argued that the paradoxes of self-reference are central to philosophy
and drive the writings of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida. In the late
1980s I founded the production company TVF Media which made documentary
and current affairs programming, including Channel 4’s flagship
international current affairs programme, The World This Week. I was
editor of the programme, which ran weekly between 1987 and 1991. The
programme predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall, the war in Yugoslavia
and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, amongst its other laudable
achievements. In the 1990s, I focused on writing Closure. It took a
decade to complete and was published in 2001. The book has been
described as the first non-realist metaphysics. Having begun my
philosophical career as a proponent of postmodernism, latterly I became
a critic arguing for the necessity of an overall framework and the need
to move on from a focus on language. Closure proposes that the human
condition is to find ourselves on the cusp of openness and closure. The
world is open and we, along with other living organisms, are able to
apprehend and make sense of it through the process of closure. I would
define closure as the holding of that which is different as one and the
same. Human experience is seen to be the result of successive layers of
closure, which I consider to be preliminary, sensory and inter-sensory
closure. The highest level of closure, inter-sensory closure realises
language and thought. The theory shifts the focus of philosophy away
from language and towards an exploration of the relationship between
openness and closure. An important element of the theory of closure is
its own self-referential character. I founded the Institute of Art and
Ideas in 2008 with the aim of making ideas and philosophy a central part
of cultural life. Our website IAI.tv, which posts to the sub, was
launched in 2011. We then moved to publishing articles in 2013 and free
philosophy courses on IAI Academy in 2014. Links of Interest: Routledge
has partnered with the IAI to offer a generous 20% off all their
philosophy books and a free giveaway each month. Click here for details.
Tickets and lineup for HowTheLightGetsIn 2018 can be found here -
discounts available for students and U25s. After the End of Truth: A
debate with Hannah Dawson (KCL) and John Searle (Berkeley) on objective
truth and alternative facts What Machines Can’t Do | Hilary
Lawson in debate with David Chalmers (NYU) and cognitive scientist and
sex robot expert Kate Devlin (Goldsmiths) on the question of machine
minds After Relativism: A debate on the pitfalls of relativism and
potential solutions with Simon Blackburn and Michela Massimi AMA Please
feel free to post questions for Hilary Lawson here. He will look at this
thread before he starts and begin with some questions from here while
the initial questions in the new thread come in. Please join us in
welcoming Hilary Lawson to our community!