Recording of a lecture delivered on September 13, 2024, by Graham Harman as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
Professor Harman is an alum of the Annapolis campus of St. John's. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and the Liberal Arts Co-Ordinator at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, with teaching stops around the world focused on philosophical thinking, architecture, and art. He has repeatedly been included on ArtReview’s Power 100 list of the most influential figures in the contemporary art world.
Dr. Harman gives the following description of his lecture: The title of this lecture is a riff on Alfred North Whitehead's famous remark that Western philosophy can be considered as a series of footnotes to Plato. The lecture will interpret the difference between Aristotle's Physics and Metaphysics as a difference between the continuous and the discrete, and will seek to develop further Aristotle's notion of "contact" as how two things meet (thereby bridging the gap between the continuous and the discrete).
