Seminar Quotes
It's true feathers and scales are both made of keratin, same building block, that's true. But that's where the similarity stops, okay? Actually, birds and reptiles have different lung systems. And they have different reproductive systems, different body coverings, different brains, and different circulatory systems. Thousands of differences exist between dinosaurs and birds. That could be a whole seminar by itself.
Kent Hovind
I remember well a junior seminar I gave with Paul Tillich shortly before the outbreak of the Third Reich. A participant spoke out against the idea of the meaning of existence. She said life did not seem very meaningful to her and she didn't know whether it had a meaning. The very voluble Nazi contingent became very excited by this and scraped the floor noisily with their feet. Now, I do not wish to maintain that this Nazi foot-shuffling proves or refutes anything in particular, but I do find it highly significant. I would say it is a touchstone for the relation of thinking to freedom. It raises the question whether thought can bear the idea that a given reality is meaningless and that mind is unable to orientate itself; or whether the intellect has become so enfeebled that it finds itself paralysed by the idea that all is not well with the world.
Theodor Adorno
There were four years, 1931-1935, when I was myself a member of Hayek's seminar in London; it has left a deep mark on my thinking... At the end of the discussions in that seminar ... we were, I believe, on the point of taking what now seems to me to be a decisive step. I was, at least, on the point of taking it myself. There is evidence for that in my "Value and Capital", much of the groundwork for which was done before I left London.
John Hicks
We spent too much time in the first half of the nineties pondering whether we had to become less European so we could become more Asian, whether we had to become less British so we could become more multicultural. We had this perpetual seminar on our national identity, contributed to overwhelmingly by the cultural dietitians. I never thought Australians had any doubt as to what their identity was. And I think we've moved on from all of that.
John Howard
On notable classmate was Dan Friedan. Friedan stunned me, and I think everyone else, at his Ph. D. seminar, when he showed that Einstein's equation, the basic equation of general relativity, could be interpreted in terms of one of the basic objects in QFT, the β function that governs the energy scale. I did not see what this could possibly mean, but a few years later it showed up as one of the key ideas in string theory.
Joseph Polchinski
John Tate and I were asked by Nature magazine to write an obituary for Alexander Grothendieck. Now he is a hero of mine, the person that I met most deserving of the adjective "genius". I got to know him when he visited Harvard and John, Shurik (as he was known) and I ran a seminar on "s". His devotion to math, his disdain for formality and convention, his openness and what John and others call his naiveté struck a chord with me.
David Mumford
I went to a Harvard seminar in Sydney recently and the name of the seminar was 'Family businesses: successes and pitfalls'. The lecturer there said a typical family business is one where the founder starts it, the second generation builds it up and the third generation blows it up. Now there is a lot of truth in that.
Hari Punja
In his seminar on The Ethic of Psychoanalysis, Lacan speaks of the role of the Chorus in classical tragedy: we, the spectators, came to the theatre worried, full of everyday problems, unable to adjust without reserve to the problems of the play, that is to feel the required fears and compassions - but not problem, there is a chorus, who feels the sorrow and the compassion instead of us - or, more precisely, we feel the required emotions through the medium of the chorus: 'You are then relieved of all worries, even if you do not feel anything, the Chorus will do so in your place.
Slavoj Žižek
Just as a primitive sextant functions on the illusion that the sun and stars rotate around the planet we are standing on, our senses give us the illusion of stability in the universe, and we accept it, because without that acceptance, nothing can be done.
Virginia Vidaura, pacing the seminar room, lost in lecture mode.
But the fact that a sextant will let you navigate accurately across an ocean does not mean that the suns and stars do rotate are us. For all that we have done, as a civilization, as individuals, the universe is not stable, nor is any single thing within it. Stars consume themselves, the universe itself rushes apart, and we ourselves are composed of matter in constant flux. Colonies of cells in temporary alliance, replicating and decaying, and housed within, an incandescent cloud of electrical impulse and precariously stacked carbon code memory. This is reality, this is self-knowledge, and the perception of it will, of course, make you dizzy.
Richard Morgan
Carl Schmitt in theory is one thing; confined to a few conservatives on the right and a somewhat greater number of envious postmodernists on the left, Schmitt's ideas have not reached the informed reading public. Schmitt's books are destined to be confined to the political theory seminar room for some time to come.
Alan Wolfe