Dear All, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held tomorrow (Tuesday 15 October). We are delighted to welcome Nick Denyer (Cambridge), who will be giving a talk entitled 'Euclid, Plato, and Aristotle on What Geometry is About'. Here is the abstract for his talk:
Euclid’s *Elements* astonished and astonishes by its way of making claims that are general (“in *every* triangle”) and exact (“the interior angles sum to *two* right angles”), and then giving those claims rigorous proofs. I look at the place in the *Elements* of the so-called ‘postulates’, in which - as I will argue - Euclid invites us to imagine an idealised drawer of geometrical diagrams, whom I will call ‘Valentina’. I will look at how postulating Valentina helps Euclid solve a problem posed by Plato: what can be the bearing of particular, temporary, and changing diagrams on general, everlasting, and stable truths? In showing how Euclid’s solution works, I borrow a lot from Aristotle. The key ideas are that we may identify the existence of a geometrical object with the possibility of drawing such an object, that we may prove it possible to draw an object by actually drawing it, and that for this purpose drawing the object in our imagination can be — if our imagination is suitably disciplined — as good as drawing it on the board. Postulating Valentina turns out to be a marvellous way of disciplining our imagination: imagining her to draw a geometrical object will indeed show that the object can be drawn, and therefore that it exists eternally. The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com) by midday on Monday 14th. This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details closer to the time. Best wishes, -- Alex Horne, Roxane Noel and Zoe Walker Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
