This IHUM group will offer a space in which to stage conversations between students in the humanities and computational sciences about the intersection of philosophical questions confronting their respective fields, specifically aimed at forging an interdisciplinary inquiry into emerging limits, potentials, and modes of knowing.
The articulation of epistemic limits and structures has been a defining feature of post-Kantian humanistic inquiry. However, a recent generation of thinkers has asserted that these limits and structures are inadequate to the post-colonial experience, and begun theorizing the need for a new "episteme" to account for both the restless multiplicity of post-Eurocentric global thought, and to gesture towards a new shape for the politics of knowledge production which does not wager sovereignty against the domination of an other. Similarly, in the computational sciences, new work defining and studying the phenomenon of “computation” has led to critical questions about the epistemic status and future shape of work done in theoretical mathematics, quantum theoretical physics, and other fields being reshaped by new computational technologies.
Our group will meet monthly to discuss a pair of short, excerpted readings, one from critical theoretical inquiry on the intersection of technology and post-critical epistemology, and another from the fields of mathematics and computer science focusing on foundations of theoretical computer science. We will examine how, if at all, contemporary efforts to define epistemic, aesthetic, and critical boundaries intersect in humanistic inquiry and the frontiers of computational sciences.
Fall Schedule:
4:30-6:00 pm in 043 East Pyne
- September 4
- October 9
- November 6
- December 4
- February 5
- March 5
- April 2
- May 7
Please email [email protected] to request PDFs of the readings.