The Program in Cultures, Civilizations, and Ideas is pleased to announce our final talk in the spring semester Colloquium Series. Dr Dorothea Olkowski will present her work entitled: ” Time is Real: Creation from Chaos to Complexity.”
Date: Wednesday, May 22nd
Time: 16:30-17:30
Location: H 355
Abstract:
Philosophy, defined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, is “the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts.” More specifically, it is “the discipline that involves creating concepts,” because concepts are not ready made, and even though concepts are incorporeal, what we usually refer to as intellectual or mental – there is no heaven of concepts; they must be created. Creation rises to the level of a problem in part due to the mathematical and scientific framework which their philosophy must confront utilizing the tools offered by the mathematics and cosmology upon which we are reliant. Western philosophy of was formalized by Plato’s (4th century B.C.) and Ptolemy’s (100 A.D) models of the universe, both grounded in the idea of heavenly bodies moving in perfect circular motion. This was upended by Newton’s similarly eternal and cyclical universe (inherited by Albert Einstein) in which any event no matter how improbable must occur an infinite number of times. Therefore physics – and so philosophy – posited a world governed by deterministic laws and improbable events, and failed to describe a world in which things – corporeal and incorporeal – arise and evolve, that is, the creation of something new does not seem possible. To address this, Gilles Deleuze redefines chaos as “virtual chaos,” where virtuality is the “potential” through which states of affairs take effect. The task ahead is to connect this view of chaos to a new cosmology, one that is not situated in relation to a deterministic universe but accounts for the reality of time. This may arise through a reevaluation of the concept of continuity and the introduction of the concept of complexity in our thought.
Bio:
Dorothea Olkowski is University of Colorado Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, at CU Colorado Springs. She is the Director of Cognitive Studies, former Director of Humanities, former Chair of Philosophy, and former founding Director of Women’s Studies. Olkowski is the author of more than one hundred articles and fourteen books, including her most recent publication, Deleuze, Bergson, and Merleau-Ponty, The Logic and Pragmatics of Affect, Perception, and Creation (Indiana University Press, 2021). Her other recent publications include, Deleuze at the End of the World. An Argentinian Perspective on the Sources of his Thought, Dorothea Olkowski and Julián Ferreyra (Eds., Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of Freedom: Freedom’s Refrains, edited collection with Eftechios Pirovolakis, Routledge Press, 2019, “Continental Feminist Approaches to Philosophy of Science,” The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Philosophy,” Kim Q. Hall, ed., Oxford University Press, 2021, “Time is Real, Continuity and the Arrow of Time,” in Gilles Deleuze and Time, Daniel Smith, (ed.), Edinburgh University Press, 2022.”Deleuze’s Oedipus,” in, All About Father: Psychoanalysis, the Oedipus Complex, and the Modern Family, Lilliane Weissberg (ed.), NewYork: Palgrave McMillian, 2022. She has also written on tango and Philosophy, and her book, Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation (University of California Press, 1999), is an extensive account of the feminist art of Mary Kelly and others.