‘Chaos and the Birth of Form’
4pm, 23 April
Dalhousie Building 2F14
University of Dundee
Or online
Form has occupied the very top of the great chain of being throughout nearly all ancient and modern thought. In much of this tradition, however, form ultimately has no birth. And yet, birth is precisely what defined the shape of things for thousands of years throughout the longer and older mythopoetic traditions around the world which preceded the philosophical obsession with form. Why did this change and what theories of form have been lost to time as a result? This lecture proposes to tell the story of the birth of form along with what we are still largely missing today in our theories of form: chaos.
Thomas Nail is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver. His many books include Lucretius 1: An Ontology of Motion (2018), Being and Motion (2018), Theory of the Image (2019), and The Philosophy of Movement (2024).