lectures

1 November 2011, Conference Centre, British Library

Why do we have such contradictory views of young people? Fear and mistrust one minute; recognition and celebration the next. Are our perceptions of young people distorted? And what impact do our perceptions of young people and youth culture have on policy decisions? 

The speakers were Professor Ken Roberts, AcSS, Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology, University of Liverpool and Dr Mary Jane Kehily, Senior Lecturer in Childhood and Youth Studies at The Open University. The discussion was chaired by  Ross Hendry, Director of Policy, Office of the Children's Commissioner, England.




Myths and Realities 11: Young people - troubled, troublesome or terrific?

Panel discussion with

Jane Ellison (Commissioning Editor, Radio 4, BBC),

Matthew Cock (Head of Web, British Museum),

Bill Thompson (Technology writer and Head of Partnership Development, BBC Archive Development) 

History on the Internet

Professor Stephen Hawking offers his own perspective on theories about the origin of the Universe, with a talk entitled "Fire in the Equations".

Stephen Hawking: COSMO Public Symposium 2013

Professor Ian Roberts will explore how languages shape human culture and human thought. Some languages have shaped our world more than others and some of them are not as obvious as you might think. This talk offers a sample of those languages, from Sanskrit to Singlish, via French and Esperanto, with one or two real surprises along the way.

Ideas and languages: 10 languages that changed the world

NARRATOR:
In the early fifteenth century, artists and intellectuals in Italy came to realize that the time they lived in was very different from the centuries before.  There was a revival of interest in the achievements of classical antiquity -- in the art, literature, and architecture of the ancient Greeks and Romans.  They came to see the previous medieval period as a time of darkness after the glories of the classical past, and their own era as a new age in the arts.  

In the 16th century, Giorgio Vasari, an Italian painter best known as the biographer of artists, used the term rinascità—meaning rebirth -- to describe this change in the artist’s vision of the world around him.  Later historians coined the term Renaissance from the French word for rebirth.

The focus of the Middle Ages had been the spiritual world, and the major patron of the arts the Roman Catholic Church.  Painted altarpieces and frescos conveyed the church’s teachings in a form that could be understood even by those who could not read.  During the Renaissance, the Christian religion continued to play an important role in art.  But the masters of the 15th and 16th centuries, like Greek and Roman artists before them, looked to man as the measure of all things.  They based even their spiritual images not on an imaginary world, but on the world around them.  In Italy, the remains of numerous ancient sculptures and monuments, still visible after more than a thousand years, inspired many of the great Renaissance artists whose work is on view here at the National Gallery – including Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci. 


Renaissance Overview-English

Talk given by David Chalmers (ANU, NYU) at the Moral Sciences Club of the Faculty of Philosophy

Why isn't there more progress in philosophy?

Peter Marks explores the irony that George Orwell never experienced the fame, authority and controversy that his name and writing command over sixty years after his death.

George Orwell has been called the ‘most influential political writer of the twentieth century’ and ‘the greatest English essayist since Hazlitt’. He is credited with introducing the term ‘cold war’ in 1945.
He invented the terms Big Brother, Thought Police, doublethink and the telescreen.
The adjective Orwellian is used to describe government intrusion and malevolent power.
Peter Marks explores the irony that George Orwell never experienced the fame, authority and controversy that his name and writing command over sixty years after his death.
Peter Marks is Associate Professor at the Department of English University of Sydney, and gave this talk at Clare Hall, on 19 November 2013.

From Nineteen Eighty-Four to 2013 and beyond: The Surprising Legacy of George Orwell

The question of how language is acquired has fascinated scholars of linguistics and philosophy since ancient times. In this talk, I discuss the status of language universals and gaps in relation to this debate.

The question of how language is acquired has fascinated scholars of linguistics and philosophy since ancient times. Chomsky's work on this topic in the mid 20th century sparked a cognitive revolution after which the focus shifted from behaviourist approaches towards mental models positing a richly specified Universal Grammar (UG).

More recently, though, different kinds of objections have been raised to the concept of UG, notably the issue of how such a system could evolve.

In this talk, I discuss the status of language universals and gaps in relation to this debate. We shall see that many things which we might expect to find in human languages simply never occur. These gaps, we shall see, provide quite strong support for some kind of cognitive bias in language acquisition, particularly when evidence from artificial language acquisition studies is considered.

Michelle L. Sheehan is a Research Associate, Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics.

Nature or nurture: how much of language is innate?

An ethicist and palliative care physician examines end of life questions from both analytic and practical angles.

Few areas of medicine are as rife with ethical questions as the end of life. 

Is it ever appropriate for a physician to hasten a patient's death?  Do those who are using a disproportionate amount of societal resources have a "duty to die"?  Is the terminally ill patient who takes his own life acting courageously, or taking the easy way out?  Who decides when "enough is enough"?  

In this talk, an ethicist and palliative care physician examines questions such as these from both analytic and practical angles, with reference to recent controversies such as Sarah Palin's supposed "Death Panels" and the current furore over the Liverpool Care Pathway.

Ethics at the end of life

JOHN HAND:
“This is John Hand, curator of Northern Renaissance Painting.  We’re looking at a painting  by Albrecht Durer, perhaps the greatest German artist of the Renaissance.”

NARRATOR: 
This Madonna and Child reflects Durer’s awareness of the new ideas and techniques transforming European painting at the end of the 15th century.  To escape an outbreak of plague in his native Nuremberg in 1494, he traveled to Venice, where he came to know artists like Andrea Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini.  Just how influential was their work on this “Madonna and Child”?

JOHN HAND:
“If I tell you that about 1932, the painting was sold at Christie’s as a work by Giovanni Bellini, you will understand to what extent Durer absorbed the art of the great Venetian masters.” 

NARRATOR:
Bellini’s influence is especially clear here in the robust, almost sculptural modeling of the figures, and the contrast between Mary’s blue robe and the red drapery behind her.  Durer also admired the painting of the Netherlands; the view through the window resembles landscapes common in Dutch portraits of the time. His own masterful technique is amply evident in the exquisite rendering of textures.

There’s another painting by Durer on the other side of this wood panel.  It shows Lot and his daughters fleeing the fiery destruction of the sinful cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.  To see it, walk around the partition.  

JOHN HAND:
“Pictures of this type, which are painted on both sides, obviously were not hung on the wall.  It was more likely that the painting was kept in a drawer or a cabinet and taken out only on special occasions, perhaps for devotional use.”

NARRATOR:
Lot and his daughters flee in the foreground.  But back on the path, surrounded by rocky pinnacles, you can make out a grayish shape – all that is left of Lot’s wife.  Against God’s orders, she has turned to look back on the destruction, and God has turned her into a pillar of salt.  At the right, Dürer renders the two doomed cities in keeping with the description in the Book of Genesis:

ACTOR:
	‘Then the lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire.  And he overthrew those cities, and all the inhabitants of those cities and the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace.’

JOHN HAND:
”And Dürer’s monogram is barely visible in a little dark circular area at the left hand side, almost like a little hole drilled into the hill.”

“What’s also interesting here is that the technique is different from front to back.  The back is more, you might say, loosely painted, the brushwork is more visible, it’s not as finished as the front.  This may have something to do with economics, because Dürer charged different prices.  He distinguished between what he called fine painting and typical painting.  And the fine painting cost more and the more typical painting cost less.   And in all the two-sided Dürer paintings that I know, the front is more finished than the back.”


Madonna and Child, Durer-English

Death and the Miser, Bosch-English

NARRATOR:
The most celebrated paintings in 18th-century Europe were not portraits or landscapes but what are known as “history paintings.”  The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, completed in 1791 by the American-born artist Benjamin West, shows the power of such large-scale compositions, alive with figures from the Bible, classical mythology, or history.

Artists who depict Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden usually offer a glimpse of the Garden. Not West.

Curator, Franklin Kelly.

FRANKLIN KELLY:
“Instead, we are shown a dark cloud out of which bursts light in the form of the Archangel Michael, who is expelling them by the sheer force of divine moral will.”

“And what awaits them is a world that is mysteriously unformed and unclear, it’s difficult to make out the shapes of the land, all one sees is darkness.  And in that darkness their companions in this new world are the snake who has led them on this road to the fall; a lion, which is tearing at the hindquarters of a horse and in the sky, an eagle fighting with another bird.  And these are telling and pointed reminders that in the Garden of Eden, there was no disharmony; animals all got along, there was no unhappiness.  And so, West has shown the expulsion, but has also very pointedly, very vividly suggested what the consequences of this expulsion are.” 

NARRATOR:
West’s masterwork was commissioned to hang in Windsor Castle by England’s King George III – the same king who reigned during the American Revolution.  When the King changed his mind about the picture, it was lost to public view for nearly two centuries.

FRANKLIN KELLY:
“This particular painting was known only through a sketch for many, many years until it resurfaced at an auction in London in 1989.  At the time, when we went to see it was so covered with discolored varnish and dirt, that it was almost impossible to make out the large figures of Adam and Eve and the angel Michael, let alone the figures at the lower right of the snake and the fighting animals.”


The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, West-English

DAVID BROWN:
“The Feast of the Gods was completed by Giovanni Bellini, the dean of 15th-century Venetian painters, only two years before his death, when he was in his mid-eighties.  On the wooden tub at the far right, you can see an illusionistic scrap of paper with his signature, and the date – 1514.”

“The subject is a bacchanal, really a kind of orgy.  For Bellini, it was a radical departure from the madonnas, saints and portraits he had focused on throughout his long career.  But risqué mythological themes had become very important to the younger generation of Renaissance painters, many of whom had been his pupils.  When Bellini took up this subject, he was in effect becoming their rival.”

“Bellini chose to represent the bacchanal as a kind of picnic out in nature in which the Olympian gods drink and eat and nod off.  They include Mercury lounging at the left with his helmet and staff, and just to the right, Jupiter, ruler of the gods.  He’s identified by an imperial eagle.  There are some mildly titillating moments – for example, in the lower right, the lustful Priapus slyly lifts the gown of the sleeping nymph Lotis.”
“But his attempt will be foiled by the braying of the ass at the far left – which will wake up the entire assembly.  In a moment, Priapus will be ridiculed, and before he flees in embarrassment, he will demand the yearly sacrifice of an ass to make up for his humiliation.”

“The elderly Bellini may not have felt entirely comfortable with the erotic overtones of his subject matter.  But the subject is almost secondary because he painted it in such a beautiful way.  In fact, I’ve seen many visitors stop to admire the glorious symphony of pinks, whites, blues, and yellows, the lush landscape, and the ravishing still-life details here – such as the bowl of fruit at the feet of the gods, the various wreaths that crown their hair or, at the left, the wine pouring from a keg into a clear glass jug.  People walk off in awe without paying attention to the meaning of the picture at all.”

“The landscape behind the figures was altered:  in Bellini’s original work, the trees over on the right extended all the way across the canvas.  Years later, his brilliant pupil Titian replaced many of them with the craggy mountain that now looms at the left, perhaps to suit other pictures hanging nearby, three of which he painted himself.  So this masterpiece is really a dual effort: a figure painting by Bellini, and a landscape largely by Titian.”

DAVID BULL:
“I set out to clean the painting in 1985, determined to investigate the findings of John Walker, who as director of the National Gallery had published a pioneering book about this work in 1954.  It included an x-radiograph that revealed Bellini’s original composition of 1514, where he had painted a continuous row of tree trunks behind the figures.” 

“The painting hadn’t been cleaned since the early 19th century.  It was covered with a deep yellow-brown varnish that had also lost much of its transparency.  Removing the varnish revealed a wonderful range of Venetian color and the details became much clearer.”

“I concluded that the first alteration of the landscape had been made by the court painter Dosso Dossi.  Titian’s alterations covered over most of Dosso’s, but he left the pheasant in the tree at the upper right, and the bright green foliage just above the bird.  We don’t know why Titian left this small area of Dosso’s work, but we do know that the Duke of Ferrar, who had commissioned the painting, had such a passion for pheasants that he wouldn’t allow them to be eaten in his court.  So perhaps the Duke didn’t want his precious pheasant disturbed – or perhaps and more likely, Titian might have wanted to avoid hurting Dosso’s feelings.  Walker also suggested that Titian had made seventeen alterations to the figure themselves.  I found that Titian hadn’t made any alterations to the figures.” 

“We worked all this out through x-radiographs, infrared reflectography, and taking minute paint samples.  Under a microscope, I was able to distinguish the successive layers of paint.  In some places there are as many as fourteen layers; and in others, only three.  By analyzing the paint and comparing information I managed to determine which layers belonged to which painter.  The varnish removal and investigation took four-and-a-half years – a long time.  And I aged about twenty-five.  But the result, I think you’ll agree, is a painting of remarkable beauty.”


The Feast of the Gods, Bellini and Titian-English

Rowan Douglas Williams is an Anglican bishop, poet and theologian. He was the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, Metropolitan of the Province of Canterbury and Primate of All England, offices he held from December 2002 to December 2012. He was previously Bishop of Monmouth and Archbishop of Wales, making him the first Archbishop of Canterbury in modern times not to be appointed from within the Church of England. He spent much of his earlier career as an academic at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford successively. Apart from Welsh, he speaks or reads nine other languages. In 2013, he was appointed Master of Magdalene College in Cambridge.

Rowan Williams: Possibilities of situations: body, language, and knowledge

Senior Lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Economics at Harvard University, as well as a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

Legalizing Drugs — Jeffrey Miron (2014) | Harvard Thinks Big

Fresh from a party, a teen posts a photo on Facebook of a friend drinking a beer. A college student repurposes an article from Wikipedia for a paper. A group of players in a multiplayer online game routinely cheat new players by selling them worthless virtual accessories for high prices. How do youth, and the […]
  
 Jan 30, 2015

Carrie James on Disconnected: Youth, New Media, and the Ethics Gap [AUDIO]

Stephen Heyneman, professor at Vanderbilt University reflects on the role of corruption in educational settings around the world.

lectures

Daria Herbika