Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature and the Arts

Thursday 12 October, R0.04, 5-7pm

Heather Altfeld and Troy Jollimore: ‘Dreams and Journeys: Two California Writers’

Heather Altfeld is a poet and essayist. She teaches in the Honors Program and for the Department of Comparative Religion and Humanities at California State University, Chico. Altfeld's first book, The Disappearing Theatre, won the 2015 Poets at Work Prize. She is the 2017 recipient of the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America and the 2015 recipient of the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Conjunctions Magazine, Aeon, Orion Magazine, Narrative, ZYZZYVA, Poetry Northwest, and others.

Altfeld's second book of poems, Post-Mortem, was selected for the 2019 Orison Prize. Spanning ages and species and cultures, it pays tribute to the passing glory of this planet and all that our hands have made. Eric Pankey writes, "Post-Mortem is a brilliant, baroque, and word-crazed collection of poems. While the primary mode of the poems is elegiac (many taking as their forms obituaries, autopsies, and kaddishes), one cannot help but delight in Altfeld's reverie and in the breadth and depth of her inquiry, her exploration, her katabasis as she leads us like Virgil through a stunning and elaborate posthumous world."

Troy Jollimore is the author of three books of philosophy and four books of poetry, and the editor of the forthcoming book, The Virtue of Loyalty (Oxford University Press, 2024). He received the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry in 2007, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013; his third poetry collection, Syllabus of Errors, was selected by the New York Times as one of the ten best poetry collections of 2015. His philosophical work often centers on personal relationships and the emotional phenomena they involve, particularly as related to friendship, romantic love, and various forms of loyalty.

He has also published on topics including admirable immorality, the ethics of terrorism, practical reasoning and the nature of instrumental reason, grief, anxiety, philosophy of poetry, and the philosophical dimensions of depictions of love in such films as Her, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Rear Window, and Vertigo. In his essays and reviews for mainstream nonacademic publications he has addressed topics including relations between religion and science, questions regarding quality of life and competing conceptions of the good life, issues of political resistance and individual conscience in morally imperfect societies, the value of humanities-based education, and the increasing glorification of strictly quantitative, "data-driven" evaluative practices at the expense of qualitative evaluation and appreciation.

Heather and Troy will read from their work, followed by a conversation.

Eve Poirer will present 'Plausible Abstractions: The role of fiction, truth and history in Genealogy and State of Nature Philosophy'. Everyone welcome!

Abstract

What is the place of historical truth in Genealogy? Why appeal to State of Nature stories even when we know they could never have happened? How far can philosophy abstract from reality while still having explanatory relevance? Pulling from Bernard Williams, Nietzsche, Nozick, Foucault and others, I will attempt to tackle some of these questions: exploring broadly the interaction between supposedly true historical happenings and fictional abstractions in Genealogies and State of Nature stories. I will discuss the purposes for which Genealogy is employed, the way in which State of Nature stories attempt to abstract from history, and the importance of 'plausibility' or 'conceivability' in the explanatory relevance or effectiveness of Genealogy. From this, I hope to suggest some conclusions about the appropriate and inappropriate use of Genealogy. That said, this is a work very much in progress on a very broad topic, so I hope that there will be further conclusion to be found in the discussion.

Teams link

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