Philosophy Presents Columbia University's Wolfgang Mann as Spellman Lecturer, Oct. 6

Wolfgang Mann, professor and chair of the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University, will deliver the annual Lynne and James Spellman Lecture in the History of Philosophy at 4 p.m. on Oct. 6. His talk is titled "'God' as First Principle in Plato and Aristotle" will be in Old Main 325, with a reception to follow. 

The lecture series honors the contribution of Lynne Spellman, professor emerita and long-time chair of the Department of Philosophy in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas, and her husband Jim, to the department, college and university. 

Mann joined the Columbia University Department of Philosophy in 1992. His research interests include theories of argumentation beginning with Socrates and Plato; the history of central metaphysical contrasts — e.g. corporeal/incorporeal, composite/simple, whole/part, matter/form, object/property, potentiality /actuality — throughout antiquity and the middle ages; and within ethics, treatments of the relation between rational and non-rational motivation, and accounts of freedom (e.g. those of Epictetus and Plotinus) which do not require that an agent be able to act differently (from how s/he actually does act) in order to count as free.

He has also worked on English and German Romanticism (especially, Wordsworth and Hölderlin); the reception of classical antiquity in 19th century Britain and Germany; and the historiography of philosophy.