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Maria Balaska hosts

Maria Balaska is currently a research fellow at the University of Hertfordshire and at Åbo Akademi University and author of Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit: meaning and astonishment. Her second, forthcoming monograph, focuses on wonder and anxiety as encounters with nothing.

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Mind, Maps and Reality

Quassim Cassam, Hilary Lawson, Lisa Feldman Barrett. Maria Balaska hosts.

Be it in the stars, in tea leaves, or in our naming of the botanical world, humans are drawn to finding patterns everywhere. Many of these are hugely valuable, finding our way about depends after all on recognising patterns, but our attachment to pattern can also limit creativity. And worse, it can encourage tribal thinking, bigotry, witch hunts, and conspiracy theori...

The unsayable

Can language adequately capture reality?

Speakers: Joanna Kavenna, Raymond Tallis, Hilary Lawson

The return of metaphysics

Should we return to grand stories about reality?

Speakers: Hilary Lawson, Galen Strawson, Patricia Churchland

The search for certainty

Should we give up the dream of certainty?

Speakers: Hilary Lawson, Simon Blackburn, Ruth Chang

Biography

Maria Balaska is currently a research fellow at the University of Hertfordshire and at Åbo Akademi University. Her publications include the monograph Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit: meaning and astonishment, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019 and the edited collection Cora Diamond on Ethics, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Her second and forthcoming monograph focuses on wonder and anxiety as encounters with nothing that can offer an ontological insight; it brings together Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Kierkegaard.