“Defending the Intellectual: Lessons from Ancient Greece” (Jacqueline Feke)

Title:

Defending the Intellectual: Lessons from Ancient Greece

Location & Time:

JHB, room 100, Oct. 20, 4-6pm

Abstract:

What can Ancient Greece teach us about anti-intellectualism, and how we might guard against it? In this talk, Dr. Jacqueline Feke, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Waterloo and Visiting Public Humanities Faculty Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Jackman Humanities Institute, looks back to Ancient Greece to pinpoint remarkable similarities of anti-intellectualism between then and now, and draws on what Ancient Greek philosophers and mathematicians had to say in defense of the intellectual.

Bio:

Jacqueline Feke is the Visiting Public Humanities Faculty Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Jackman Humanities Institute; Associate Professor in the School of Social, Political, and Historical Research at the University of Waterloo; and Senior Fellow at Massey College in the University of Toronto. Prior to her current appointments, she held postdoctoral fellowships at Stanford University, the University of Chicago, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany, as well as a visiting professorship at l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France. Feke’s research examines the history, philosophy, and rhetoric of the ancient Greek sciences, and her monograph, Ptolemy’s Philosophy: Mathematics as a Way of Life (Princeton University Press: 2018), was shortlisted for the British Society for the History of Science’s Pickstone Prize.