Philosophers and artists often see the everyday as a site of great aesthetic, ethical, and social significance. Professor John Gibson from the University of Louisville uses Fellini and Wittgenstein to motivate a way of thinking about the promise of the everyday, and the radical techniques artists and philosophers must employ for making it available to thought. Fellini’s Le notti di Cabiria (1957), he argues, is especially important to this discussion, because it amounts to an artistic answer to a problem that inevitably appears in philosophical defenses of the everyday: How can we affirm the value of the everyday when the ordinary conditions of one’s life are in fact intolerable?

John Gibson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Louisville and writes on issues in aesthetics and the philosophy of literature. He is the author of Fiction and the Weave of Life (Oxford), editor of The Philosophy of Poetry (Oxford), and coeditor of Wittgenstein & Literary Studies (Cambridge), and is currently completing a book on poetry, metaphor, and the self.

Please join us Wednesday April 26th in Hebert 201 at 5:00pm for Professor Gibson's lecture, followed by a reception in HE 200.