The Athens Philosophy Seminar (APS) is a course held every summer which aims introduce students to graduate level work and expose them to the latest research in philosophy. Each APS focuses on one philosophical topic and culminates into a week-long engagement with a distinguished philosopher, who will be presenting their latest research on the topic.

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The topic of this year’s APS is Philosophy & Film with the distinguished guest, Professor Robert B. Pippin, Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor of Social Thought, Philosophy, and in the College at the University of Chicago.

He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, of the American Philosophical Society, and the German National Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina. Robert Pippin has contributed to the study of Kant, Hegel, modernism, political philosophy, self-consciousness, freedom, but also literature and philosophy and film and philosophy. Robert Pippin will give five lectures with the title: Film as a Moving Image of Skepticism.

In the first part of the seminar (3 weeks), students will be acquainted with the philosophical issues discussed in the lectures. Exploring the works of Hegel, Rousseau, Wittgenstein, C. Taylor, S. Cavell, R. Pippin, R. Moran, V. Perkins, R. Wood, etc.

From Hitchcock to Polanski

In the second part of the seminar (final week) Robert Pippin himself will lecture on four masterpieces of the American Cinema:

1. Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, 1958
2. John Ford’s The Searchers, 1956 (possibly also Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life 1959)
3. Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place, 1950, and
4. Roman Polanski’s Chinatown 1974, (possibly also Hitchcock’s Rear Window 1954)

For more information visit the APS course page

See the Event Calendar 

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Last Year’s APS

In 2017, Dr. John Hyman from the University of Oxford gave lectures on his book “Action, Knowledge, and Will” presenting his latest research at the cutting edge of contemporary philosophy, deeply informed by historical scholarship. Students studied the works of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Wittgenstein, Davidson, Anscombe, and contemporary philosophers of action and knowledge and presented their own papers. Throughout the course, students also participated in on-site classes at Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum and attended the William Kentridge “More Sweetly Play the Dance” visual arts project which was part of the Athens and Epidaurus Festival.

Students also had the option to attend the international conference on Reflection and Non-Positional Self-Consciousness at the University of Patras with John McDowell, Jim Conant, Adrian Haddock, Matt Boyle and Sebastian Roedl among others.