Jessica Payne, "Sleep on it! There’s More to It Than Just the Old Adage"
People spend up to 1/3 of their lives sleeping, yet scientists are still trying to determine sleep’s function. One of the best theories to date is that sleep is by and for the brain, in the service of cognition. In this talk, we will learn about the sleeping brain, and how it influences memory, emotion, decision making, creativity and insight. The broad question is, “What is sleep and what does it do for us?”…
Abstract Unlike most in his age, Kant was a constant and forceful defender of action at a distance. In virtue of this advocacy, he counts as a spokesman for Newtonian science. Less known are his views on contact interactions. As it rurns out, Kant developed these views so as to fulfill a foundational agenda inherited form Leibniz not Newton. This agenda required natural philosophers to show that action by contact is (1) intelligible, and (2) grounded in an a priori dynamics. To solve this dual problem, Kant draws on his metaphysics of motion and matter.…
The Reilly Center is a co-sponsor of this Law and Market Distinguished Speaker Series featuring Brett Frischmann of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University. In this lunchtime lecture, Frischmann will discuss his new book Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources (Oxford, 2012).
Abstract: Aristotle's distinction between potential and actual infinity has an important afterlife in early modern discussions of space and geometry. Descartes seems to argue that space, which is identical with the material world, is merely potentially infinite, concluding that only God, who is distinct from the world, is actually infinite. In unpublished work, Newton rejects this Cartesian view, contending that God inhabits the world, which consequently should be characterized as actually infinite. Newton's view, held on robust metaphysical grounds, raises intriguing questions about how geometric methods can be employed to represent infinite objects and an infinite space.…
The Spectrum of Healers and Health Care in Late Medieval Provence: From Doctors to DIY Relics in the Care of Body and Soul.
This essay uses medieval canonization inquests to answer the seemingly simple question: What did people do when they were sick?" My talk shows that answer was often far more complex than traditional research in the history of medicine shows. By sifting through hundreds of narratives of people coping with their own and loved-ones' health care, we find that people used a plurality of available methods and even created new ones (like making their own relics) when needed. We also see that medieval persons’ concepts of health care extended beyond the boundaries of the physical body to include the passions or what contemporaries called “accidents of the soul.” Healers and sufferers saw that sadness, fear, and anxiety could damage physical health and were health problems in their own right.…
