Registration open for Oct. 28 Westwood Lecture on the philosophical exploration of portraiture

Registration is open for faculty to attend the Westwood Lecture Series on Oct. 28.

Jan Cover, professor of philosophy in the College of Liberal Arts, will present “Puzzles of Portraiture” from 4:30-5:30 p.m. at Westwood, the Purdue president’s residence.

The Westwood Lecture Series is an opportunity for Purdue faculty and those staff members engaged in the research topic to interact with colleagues on scholarly work. The program is aimed at enhancing the intellectual vibrancy of the Purdue West Lafayette campus.

Space is limited to the first 50 faculty who register online.

“Puzzles of Portraiture”

Jan Cover

Professor of philosophy

College of Liberal Arts

Abstract. One can fairly wonder what art is. Various kinds of labor on the genus, whether art historical or art critical, recommend that art’s visual species is the least ill-behaved – the most amenable to some kind of unified analysis broadly conceived. More narrowly, it is representational art that should, by now, be well-enough understood. As pictures go, one might be forgiven the thought that it is surely the portrait that is the most boring – being perhaps the oldest, and certainly the simplest and best understood of all. In this lecture, Cover will restrict his focus to the early modern period and the ubiquitous phenomena of the print portrait, utilizing photos to help the audience in appreciating why the portrait is not very well understood and, for at least the philosopher, not boring.

Bio. Jan Cover is a professor of philosophy in the College of Liberal Arts. His research interests include the history of early modern philosophy and metaphysics, as well as philosophy of science, religion and art.

Cover earned a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry and biophysics from the University of California, Davis, and a bachelor’s, master’s and PhD in philosophy from Syracuse University. His earlier-career work on Leibniz, Spinoza, causation, space and time and modality was published in such journals as Philosophical Studies, Noûs, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Synthese and Australasian Journal of Philosophy. Cover co-edited “Leibniz: Nature and Freedom” (Oxford) and “Central Themes in Early Modern Philosophy” (Hackett). He co-authored “Theories of Knowledge and Reality” (McGraw-Hill, 2nd), “Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues” (Norton, 2nd) and “Substance and Individuation in Leibniz” (Cambridge).

Upcoming fall 2024 Westwood Lecture Series events

Nov. 7: Louis Tay, the William C. Byham Chair in Industrial/Organizational Psychology in the College of Health and Human Sciences, will discuss assessing the happiness of societies. Tay’s research seeks to understand how to assess and enhance human well-being using innovative methodological and technological approaches.

Dec. 5: Mohit Tawarmalani, the executive associate dean of faculty and Allison and Nancy Schleicher Chair in Management in the Mitch Daniels School of Business, will discuss optimization beyond convexity: applications in process design, networking and pricing. Tawarmalani’s research interests are at the interface of computer science, optimization and operations research with applications in business and engineering.

About Purdue University

Purdue University is a public research institution demonstrating excellence at scale. Ranked among top 10 public universities and with two colleges in the top four in the United States, Purdue discovers and disseminates knowledge with a quality and at a scale second to none. More than 105,000 students study at Purdue across modalities and locations, including nearly 50,000 in person on the West Lafayette campus. Committed to affordability and accessibility, Purdue’s main campus has frozen tuition 13 years in a row. See how Purdue never stops in the persistent pursuit of the next giant leap — including its first comprehensive urban campus in Indianapolis, the Mitch Daniels School of Business, Purdue Computes and the One Health initiative — at https://www.purdue.edu/president/strategic-initiatives