End Date :
Second Floor Common Room,
The Heyman Center for the Humanities
A multidisciplinary conference co-sponsored by:
The Department of English and Comparative Literature
Maison Francaise
The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
The Ph.D. Program in Theatre
The Department of French and Romance Philology
The Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures
The Department of Art History and Archaeology
The Heyman Center for the Humanities
The Institute for Comparative Literature and Society
The Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race
The Dean of Humanities
As part of the Rethinking the Human Sciences seminar series, the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society is proud to present: The Epistemology of Cave Art – a Doxic Investigation, a talk by Mats Rosengren (Philosopher and Professor of Rhetoric, School of Culture and Education, Sodertorn University, Sweden)
In the late 19th century in northern Spain and southern France, prehistoric mural paintings and engravings were discovered. This talk inquires into some of the epistemic questions that this rich and much debated material has created. Focusing on the historical and scientific circumstances and on the epistemic and perceptual problems surrounding the discovery of the Altamira cave, Rosengren traces the outline of the doxa of cave art studies and suggests, with the help of both Cornelius Castoriadis’s concept of technique and Ernst Cassirer’s notion of symbolic form, a yet untried way out of the hermeneutical impasse where the interpretation of the Paleolithic pictures finds itself today.
