Temporality and Tragedy: Irrevocable Loss and Redemptive Love

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Temporality and Tragedy: Irrevocable Loss and Redemptive Love with Vincent Colapietro

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Temporality and Tragedy: Irrevocable Loss and Redemptive Love

with Vincent Colapietro

Saturday May 7, 2022
9:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST  |  18:00 CEST

2-hour session

The session is live and you will be sent the RECORDING.

A. N. Whitehead’s Process and Reality can be read as a sustained meditation on Locke’s characterization of time as ‘perpetual perishing.’ But he refuses to see time solely as an occasion of perishing. Colapietro will seize this occasion itself to reflect on time and tragedy. Is time by its very nature tragic, entailing the irrevocable loss of whatever emerges and, for a time, endures in its flux? Or is time a site wherein forms of ‘ immortality’ are attainable? But of even more basic concern are several different senses of time, above all, the time envisioned by the most influential physicists (including Einstein) and the conception of time implicit in the activity of physicists themselves. Are physicists in time in the same sense that they so often conceive time (specifically, time as a reversible process or even an illusory phenomenon)? That is, is the dominant understanding of time among theoretical physicists compatible with what physicists do as agents? Colapietro will argue that agential time is an irreducible phenomenon and any attempt to explain it away (or to render it illusory) is mistaken.

To see the Full Love in a Time of Crisis Program

Vincent Colapietro is Liberal Arts Research Professor Emeritus at the Pennsylvania State University. He is presently at the Center for the Humanities (University of Rhode Island). One of his main areas of research is pragmatism, with emphasis on Peirce. Though devoted to developing a semiotic perspective rooted in Peirce’s seminal work, Colapietro draws upon a number of other authors and perspectives (including Bakhtin, Jakobson, and Bourdieu as well as such movements as phenomenology, hermeneutics, and deconstruction).  He is the author of Peirce’s Approach to the Self (1989), A Glossary of Semiotics (1993), Fateful Shapes of Human Freedom (2003), and Acción, sociabilidad y drama: Un retrato pragmatista del animal humano (2020) as well as numerous essays. He has written on a wide range of topics, from music (especially jazz) and cinema to psychoanalysis and deconstruction, from art and literature to ontology and phenomenology. He has served as President of the Charles S. Peirce Society, the Metaphysical Society of America, and the Semiotic Society of America.