Philosophy Club Meeting
Please join us at this week's meeting of the University of Hartford Philosophy Club Wednesday, Oct. 20 from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. in Room 420 Auerbach Hall at the University of Hartford. You can also join the meeting online by clicking on the WebEx link below.
This week, Power Boothe, Professor of Painting and Drawing at the Hartford Art School of the University of Hartford, will discuss Leibniz’s notion of the monad in relationship to Lee Smolin’s conceptualization of the universe in Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution (2019).
https://hartford.webex.com/hartford/j.php?MTID=m41d9f7fef15de4bb58eebaf6645a1ffe
Note: If the link above is not functional, then cut and paste it into your search line or URL line and hit “enter”.
Meeting Password: Alive CwqT3MBG33 Toll-free call-in number: 1-877-668-4493
Meeting Number (in case calling in): 171 628 0135
In Power’s own words:
My question to the Philosophy Club is what does it mean to think in terms of Leibniz’s Monad?
Last summer, I read the physicist, Lee Smolin’s book, Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution (2019), where he drew a strong connection between Leibniz’s concept of the monad and quantum mechanics. Here is the insight that sparked my interest:
We shall call the elements of a relational model of the universe nads because they are only partially in accord with Leibniz’s elements, which he called monads. Nads have two kinds of properties, which depend on several of the nads. A nadic universe may be pictured as a graph, with relational properties represented by labels on links that connect pairs of nads. It is not a coincidence that so far this picture accords with the description of the world given in loop quantum gravity. There, a state of the world is described by a graph with labels on it, each nad has a view of the universe, which summarizes its relations with the rest…. Let us posit that our relational universe obeys Leibniz’s principle of the identity of indiscernibles. Leibniz posited that the actual universe is distinguished from many possible universes by “having as much perfection as possible. …what Leibniz is doing is positing that there is some observable quantity which is larger in the real universe than in all the other possible universes. This is shockingly modern, as it anticipates a method for formulating laws of nature that was developed later and only came into fruiting during the twentieth century. The Quantity that is maximized, which Leibniz called “perfection,” we call action” (Smolin 2019, 242-243).
This led me to read Maria Rosa Antognazza’s biography of Leibniz (2009), after which, I contacted Brian to ask for his help. I needed to understand more about Leibniz’s monad. Leibniz wrote Monadology in 1714, two years before he died. It was intended to explain an idea, which is amazingly complex. (See attached for full document and bibliography.)
Power Boothe is an abstract painter who exhibits with the Fred Giampietro Gallery in New Haven. Between 2001 and 2010 he served as Dean of the Hartford Art School where he is now Professor of Painting.
Boothe grew up the San Francisco Bay Area where he studied painting at the California College of the Arts and the San Francisco Art Institute. He received a BA from Colorado College and moved to New York in 1967 as a student in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program (ISP). He remained in New York City for the next 30 years where he exhibited paintings, designed avant-garde dance, theater and firms, and in 1977 he began teaching at the School of Visual arts. He also served as Co-Director of a graduate program at the Maryland Institute for five years and lecturer in the Humanities at Princeton University for six years.
As an artist he has had over 20 one-person exhibitions and his work is represented in numerous private and public collections including the Metropolitan Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art. In Connecticut his work is in the collections of the Wadsworth Atheneum, the New Britain Museum, and the Florence Griswald Museum. He has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, four National Endowment for the Arts Grants, and a Pollock/Krasner Foundation Fellowship.
In 1989 Boothe was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Arts degree from Colorado College and in 2016 a PhD in Philosophy from the Independent Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA) program at Brown University, RI. Power Boothe is currently on sabbatical working on a book with the philosopher, Mark Johnson titled, Embodiment and the Visual Arts.
An ongoing weekly tradition at the University since 2001, the University of Hartford Philosophy Club is a place where students, professors, and people from the community at large meet as peers. Sometimes presentations are given, followed by discussion. Other times, topics are hashed out by the whole group.
Presenters may be students, professors, or people from the community. Anyone can offer to present a topic. The mode of presentation may be as formal or informal as the presenter chooses.
Please be a part of us as we continue this great tradition live and online.
Brian D. Skelly, Philosophy
413-273-2273