https://www.facebook.com/events/495653777253176/

The Oxford Guild is very excited to welcome Larry Hirst CBE, former Chairman of IBM EMEA, to speak on Thursday 7th May. This will be an incredibly insightful talk and is not one to be missed, especially for anyone interested in technology, business, or issues of diversity and inclusion in the workplace. The event will include a Q&A session open to the floor, and promises to cover a wide range of topics, as Larry discusses his high-profile and varied career. ALL ARE WELCOME!

DATE: Thursday 7th May 2015 (2nd Week)
TIME: 6:40pm
VENUE: Habakkuk Room, Jesus College
REGISTER YOUR INTEREST HERE: http://tinyurl.com/LarryHirstIBMGuildTalk

Until his retirement from IBM in July 2010, Larry Hirst was chairman of IBM Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA). He represented IBM to the European Commission and other authorities such as NATO and the EDA on issues of international public policy and business regulation. During his time as Chairman, IBM EMEA revenues grew to $35bn, with a workforce of 110,000 people. Previous roles in his 33-year career included Chairman of IBM Netherlands (2002-2010), the leadership of IBM’s business in the UK, Ireland, Netherlands and South Africa (2002-2008).
Larry is passionate about the issues of diversity and inclusion and is an Ambassador to the Everywoman company (https://www.everywoman.com/) and Black British Business Awards (http://www.thebbbawards.com/), as well as a supporter of groups including the Asian Business Networks Association, the European Women’s Achievement Award, the Afro Caribbean Group, Stonewall, Whitehall in Industry, Asian Business Women, and Investors in Diversity.
Larry was appointed C.B.E. in 2006, in recognition of Services to the IT industry.

This event will be particularly insightful for anyone considering a career in technology or business, and there will be a Q&A session as part of the event.

We look forward to seeing you there!

The Aptness of Anger – Dr Amia Srinivasan
Ancient and contemporary philosophers alike have argued that we ought not get angry, even when facing injustice, because doing so is harmful to ourselves. Christian mystics and theologians seem to agree. But isn’t anger a tool with which to tackle injustice and a source of moral insight? And cannot anger be a justified response to the world even if it has bad effects? Dr Amia Srinivasan will explore anger’s relationship with reason and what happens when we lose our capacity to get angry. Part of a series ‘On Anger’.

Part of Book at Lunchtime, a fortnightly series of bite size book discussions, with commentators from a range of disciplines. Free, all welcome – no booking required. Join us for a sandwich lunch from 12:45, with discussion from 13:00 to 13:45.

Anna Marmodoro (Fellow in Philosophy, Corpus Christi, University of Oxford) will discuss her book Aristotle on Perceiving Objects with:

Ophelia Deroy (Associate Director, Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study and Senior Researcher, Centre for the Study of the Senses)
Richard Sorabji (Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, King’s College London)
Rowland Stout (Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Oxford)

About the book

How can we explain the structure of perceptual experience? What is it that we perceive? How is it that we perceive objects and not disjoint arrays of properties? By which sense or senses do we perceive objects? Are our five senses sufficient for the perception of objects?

Aristotle investigated these questions by means of the metaphysical modeling of the unity of the perceptual faculty and the unity of experiential content. His account remains fruitful-but also challenging-even for contemporary philosophy.

This book offers a reconstruction of the six metaphysical models Aristotle offered to address these and related questions, focusing on their metaphysical underpinning in his theory of causal powers. By doing so, the book brings out what is especially valuable and even surprising about the topic: the core principles of Aristotle’s metaphysics of perception are fundamentally different from those of his metaphysics of substance. Yet, for precisely this reason, his models of perceptual content are unexplored territory. This book breaks new ground in offering an understanding of Aristotle’s metaphysics of the content of perceptual experience and of the composition of the perceptual faculty.

As part of this year’s community outreach program, Oxford Brookes University’s 150th anniversary, and as a way showing our appreciation to all participants, clinicians, researchers, members of the public and organisations that have supported our work, we will be holding an open day on Saturday, 30th of May 2015. Over the past decade, the Movement Science Group, which now falls within the Centre for Rehabilitation at Oxford Brookes University, has conducted extensive research on a variety of topics related to rehabilitation and physical activity. Topics include measuring and understanding movement in those with movement difficulties, exercising benefits in people with neurological conditions, and developing novel rehabilitation strategies.

Amy Hollywood (Harvard) delivers a series of lectures on “The real, the true, and the mystical” in Oxford. At 7pm will be a play on Derrida in Oxford by John Schad and Fred Dalmasso.

Tickets 8£/ 5£ reduced for students and Lecture attendants.

Amy Hollywood (Harvard) delivers a series of lectures on “The real, the true, and the mystical” in Oxford.

Amy Hollywood : The Unspeakability of Trauma, the Unspeakability of Joy: The Pursuit of the Real at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century

Join us on Monday for our second last event for the academic year to hear Jens Zimmerman speak on theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Christian Humanism. Jens is a philosopher and theologian who specializes in hermeneutics and the philosophical and theological roots of humanism. He currently holds the Canada Research Chair in Interpretation, Religion and Culture.

So many of us are desperately busy doing what’s immediately in front of us rather than the things that make a real difference.

Ben will tell the story of the GB men’s rowing 8+ in the build up to the 2000 Sydney Olympics, where they won the gold medal, and how they challenged everything to make the boat go faster. For Ben it was the culmination of nine years in the national team.

Ben’s story is a call to action, challenging you to examine how you spend your time in a way that ensures you are travelling in the direction that you want to go.

About the Speaker
Ben Hunt-David MBE
BEN HUNT-DAVIS MBE

Former Brookes student, Ben Hunt- Davis is a performance coach, speaker and author. Ben has been involved in five Olympic Games – three as a competitor and two as a member of the headquarters team. He was also Chairman of the Organising Committee for both the 2011 World Rowing Junior Championships and the 2013 Rowing World Cup. He now runs a performance consulting company helping companies to make their ‘boats go faster’. His first book is entitled Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?

Twenty minute talk, Q&As, and an hour of discussion. Free entry, no need to book. You’re welcome to come along just to listen, or to take part actively in the discussion.

Brian Hurwitz is D’Oyly Carte Professor of Medicine and the Arts in the Department of English. He is a medical practitioner affiliated to the Division of Health and Social Care Research, King’s College London, directs the Centre for the Humanities and Health and is a member of the Steering Advisory Board of the Centre for Life-Writing Research at King’s.

Collectively clinical case reports constitute a huge repository of medical experience. This talk will scrutinise their shape, salient features, and the nature of the hindsight from which they are composed, filtered for coherence, and turned into second order accountsof encounters, observations and reasoning about a patient or series of patients. It asks what case reports are good for and what kinds of knowledge they embody.

Two hour cycle ride with Max as he reveals some surprising facts about the science of cycling. Ride and demonstration.
Please show up 10 minutes before departure at The Story Museum. The ride will finish back at The Story Museum.

Author and cyclist Max Gaskin explores the science of cycling from hydrogen to helmets!
6.30pm – 7.30pm £8/£5 concessions

International table tennis player, broadcaster and writer, Matthew Syed will reflect on the psychology of performance.

Talk – Perspectives: Cheating

A short series of talks on cheating, fakes and frauds to accompany the exhibition by Lynn Hershman Leeson.

Speakers include:

Nigel Warburton: The Ethics of Cheating
Warburton discusses how and why we decide to cheat and if it’s ever ok to cheat.

Nigel Warburton is a freelance philosopher, podcaster and writer, described by Julian Baggini as ‘one of the most-read popular philosophers of our time’. His books include A Little History of Philosophy, Philosophy: The Basics, Philosophy: The Classics, Thinking from A to Z, The Art Question, and Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction. He is the interviewer for the popular Philosophy Bites podcast which he makes with David Edmonds and which has been downloaded nearly 19 million times, and has formed the basis of two books, Philosophy Bites and Philosophy Bites Back.

Robert Hutton: Lying
Hutton will talk about how we lie to ourselves and to each other, the sorts of lies we tell and how you can spot a lie.

Robert Hutton is a British political reporter for Bloomberg News and author of the Journalese collection Romps, Tots and Boffins and the Uncommunication guide Would They Lie To You?

Megan Aldrich: Authenticity and the Gothic Revival
Aldrich will discuss William Beckford at Fonthill Abbey, who on occasion lied about the provenance of his decorative and antiquarian objects because he was so caught up in the ‘narrative’ of what he wanted them to be. Aldrich will talk about the fashion for creating false and imagined architectural histories in England in the 19th Century.

Megan Aldrich began her career in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. She curated the exhibition on the Crace firm of decorators at the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery in Sussex in 1990 and edited the accompanying publication. She is currently Senior Fellow in Object Based Studies at Sotheby’s Institute of Art.

Free, booking essential via https://www.modernartoxford.org.uk/event/perspectives-cheating/

The Oxford Architecture Society lecture series

Lisa Finlay is coming to speak to us from Heatherwick Studio.
Established by Thomas Heatherwick in 1994, Heatherwick Studio is recognised for its work in architecture, urban infrastructure, sculpture, design and strategic thinking. At the heart of the studio’s work is a profound commitment to finding innovative design solutions, with a dedication to artistic thinking and the latent potential of materials and craftsmanship. In the twenty years of its existence, Heatherwick Studio has worked in many countries, with a wide range of commissioners and in a variety of regulatory environments.

The first OxArch workshop of the series ‘Behind Architecture: The Essentials’ is set to bring us back to the analogue process of representation. ‘Architecture in Watercolours’ presents an opportunity to begin the year with a little experimentation.

Anisha Meggi (currently studying her PhD) works with watercolour to capture the essence of a project with the physical and theoretical layering of watercolour paint and model making.

Come join us on the 4th floor of Abercrombie on Thursday at 4pm, if you’re interested in learning a new skill or pushing further what you already know about watercolour.

We will be providing some watercolour trays, watercolour paper and brushes. However, if you have you’re own watercolour sets, please feel free to bring them in.

Prices:
£7 for members
£9 for non members

Part 3 of a three-part mini-series on notation: Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic.

Part 1 was Reading Slough and London Paddington: the persistent lure of spelling reform (July 16th). Part 2 was Writing little messages in Italian: the social origins of music notation (August 20th).

Free entry, no need to book. You’re welcome to come along just to listen, or to take part actively in the discussion. The meeting room will be indicated on the display screen just inside the Town Hall entrance lobby.

Conceptions of Enlightenment is a one-day conference concluding in a public lecture at 5pm. The lecture will be delivered by Dennis Rasmussen (Tufts University, Boston), author of The Pragmatic Enlightenment (CUP, 2014).

Over the last century, historians and philosophers have used the term ‘Enlightenment’ in diverse ways. Was it primarily a philosophical movement, or did it involve a much wider change of outlook and sensibility in the course of the eighteenth century? Did its origins and centre lie in England, the Netherlands, France, or Scotland? Did it establish the human rights and freedoms we now value, or did it in practice subject humanity to rigidly rational systems of control? Did it give a voice to women and colonial subjects, or did it reinforce male domination and European hegemony over the rest of the world? Did it prepare the way for the French Revolution and the Reign of terror, or is its heritage to be found in the American Declaration of Independence?

To discuss such questions, a number of leading scholars of the Enlightenment will introduce the work of some of the historians and philosophers who have been most influential in shaping this much-debated concept.

A wine reception will follow the talk

3D character animation online with Mixamo/Adobe
On June 1st of this year Adobe announced its purchase of the company Mixamo.
This evening John Twycross – Senior Lecturer in Digital Media Production, Faculty of Technology, Design and Environment, Oxford Brookes University – will demonstrate some of the features of the current Mixamo website, look at how this currently integrates into game engines and discuss the implications of this for designers.

The Mixamo online service provides a motion capture library, character generation and automated rigging. It is exciting because it makes character animation accessible to all. It also clearly signals Adobe’s commitment to gain a foothold in the 3D character animation field and expanding Photoshop’s 3D features.

Philosopher Nigel Warburton will be discussing some of the thinkers and ideas that feature in his bestselling introductory book, A Little History of Philosophy.

Blackwell’s have recently sold our 1000th copy of the book in this shop alone, making it one of our biggest selling philosophy titles. The book has been translated into many different languages and has sold over 50,000 copies worldwide since its publication in 2012. Exploring the thinkers and ideas of the past and present in chronological order, Warburton not only makes philosophy extremely accessible but also offers inspiration to think, question and argue in the tradition of Socrates.

This interdisciplinary workshop examines the impact of music on the brain from the point of view of different disciplines (medicine/physiology, psychology, philosophy).

Following a series of short talks by St Hilda’s Fellows and expert guest speakers, there will time for questions. Tea and coffee will be available.

Professor Nick Bostrom, Director of the Future of Humanity Institute, will explore the huge technological, scientific and environmental shifts that have led to humanity’s current state, and consider the choices that will determine our long-term future.

Oxford Brookes Centre for Global Politics, Economy and Society seminar series

Professor Joseph Shear (Christ Church) will give a paper entitled ‘Heidegger on Understanding’.
Following the talk there will be drinks and a discussion. All are welcome.

Oxford Fashion Society is delighted to bring you our first speaker of the year, FELICITY HAYWARD! Join us on the 12th November for a very special event with the international model, ASOS stylist and artist. There will be top style tips, insights into her amazing world of fashion, and a chance for any questions, as well as a (FREE!) drinks reception following the event!

Felicity has had an amazing and varied career, from being ASOS’s go-to gal for all things CURVE, to gracing the cover of I-D and Noctis magazines (and countless others), to her nearly 40k followers on Instagram, and she’ll be joining us to tell us all about it! For anyone interested in modelling, styling, fashion, or just a great evening out, this event is an absoloute must!

Tickets are £3 on the door and include FREE DRINKS afterwards!
Join the Facebook event here: https://www.facebook.com/events/990444424351368/

See you all there!

OFS love X

Talk, Q&As, and discussion. You’re welcome to come along just to listen, or to take part actively in the discussion. There’s no need to book: just come along on the day.