The Wonder of the World: Merleau-Ponty, Cézanne, & the Meaning of Painting

Speaker Name: Bro Adams
Department: Former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities
University or Organization: University of Georgia

Throughout his career, the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty maintained an intense interest in painting, and especially in the painting of Paul Cézanne. Merleau-Ponty saw Cézanne as a fellow explorer in the primordial land of perception, a pioneer in the archaeology of the visible world. This talk explores Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical interest in the “mute thinking” of painting against the background of the contemporary explosion of scientific and technical knowledge and the steady erosion of the place of the arts and humanities in the education landscape in the United States and beyond.

William “Bro” Adams served as tenth chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities (2014-2017), appointed by President Barack Obama, through which role he launched a widespread initiative in public humanities called, “The Common Good: Humanities in the Public Square.” Adams has served as president of Colby College, 2000-2014, and of Bucknell University 1995–2000. A Vietnam veteran, Adams has held positions as a professor of political philosophy at Santa Clara University and UNC-Chapel Hill, and coordinated the Great Works in Western Culture program at Stanford University.