NOTE: This course concluded in May 2023.
Course Description
The Maurin Academy’s Bryant Macfarlane will lead a four-meeting short series on understanding classical and more modern theories on individual and social motivation. Meeting April 12, April 19, April 26, and May 3 from 7 – 8:30 p.m. US Central Time. Those who sign up for the April 12 session will gain admittance to all other sessions, and so on. Those who sign up after April 12 will also receive video recordings from previous sessions. In each session, Bryant will discuss some of the ways others have confronted conceptions of beauty and our experience with the world that surrounds us all and will leave time for Q & A and discussion. Sessions will be recorded and disseminated to all who register.
Macfarlane will discuss the observations on the elusive concept of “the sublime” for thinkers like Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and David Nye focus in on the modern technological sublime, and discuss how this concept relates to modern ideology-building and propaganda. In our pursuit of the extraordinary experience of the sublime, has humanity stumbled into the trap of being manipulated by our own ability and need to create and re-create the sublime experience in a modern, high-tech world where nature and God are not good enough? Perhaps by confronting the conceptions of beauty, we can learn more about ourselves and the world in which we live today.
Bryant Macfarlane, a retired soldier, a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Kansas State University, and museum curator, is one of the founders of the Maurin Academy.