The Ernest Becker Foundation
Events Where's Sheldon? Sheldon Solomon at UW April 27, 2011
| Sheldon Solomon at UW April 27, 2011 |
“John Locke’s Errors: Why Left and Right Are Both Beside the Point!”
He who understands baboon will do more toward metaphysics than Locke.* In line with this excursion into political science, philosophy and psychology, the lecture is co-sponsored and hosted, thank you very much, by the Department of Communication and being promoted in the three other Arts and Sciences departments noted above. Note also Sheldon’s updated bio. It seems that finally we EBF people are not the only ones aware of the gift we have in this tousled wit in the tie-dyed shirt and patrol boots: Sheldon Solomon is Professor of Psychology at Skidmore College. He is an experimental social psychologist, with interests focusing on the nature of self, consciousness, and social behavior. His work exploring the effects of the uniquely human awareness of death on individual and social behavior has been supported by the National Science Foundation and Ernest Becker Foundation and was featured in the award winning documentary film Flight from Death: The Quest for Immortality. He is co-author of In the Wake of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror (2003, American Psychological Association Books) and co-founder of The World Leaders Project. Dr. Solomon is a Fellow in the American Psychological Society and the Society for Experimental Social Psychology, a 2007 recipient of an American Psychological Association Presidential Citation, and 2009 recipient of a Lifetime Career Award by The International Society for Self and Identity. Henry Richards, our Executive Director, like Sheldon, is also a psychologist but from the abnormal side (of psychology that is). As the designated discussant for Sheldon’s talk, his job will be to catch some of the high arching balls that Sheldon will be batting into the stands and fire them back to home plate before our heroic speaker slides to score with new profound utterances. HR will be wearing two intellectual catcher’s mitts: on the Right hand he’ll be wielding tragic, low-down Depth Psychology and on the Left hand he’ll sport Emergence and Transcendence in highfalutin comic play. With two mitts will he manage to catch Sheldon’s curveballs? *Baboon in the singular is the correct quote. |
Becker on Otto Rank"Rank's thought always spanned several fields of knowledge: when he talked about, say, anthropological data and you expected anthropological insight, you got something else, something more. Living as we do in an era of hyperspecialization we have lost the expectation of this kind of delight: the experts give us manageable thrills—if they thrill us at all." From the preface to Denial of Death more on Otto Rank here |