7. Systems: Conflict and Cooperation
 
 

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Slide 1:  The Event Structure (Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 1999)

Slide 2: Aristotle's four causes: Material, Formal, Efficient, and Final define a deterministic world with predictable linkages to forces and purposes, there is no direct link between how we conceptualize causality and how we structure events as having causes and purposes.

Slide 3: Human beings structure events as if we could perceive their causes, see logical linkages that reveal purposes. Although we live in a complex world that is unpredictable and mostly unknown to us, we effortlessly assign causes to things that happen, intent to traces, and purposes to changes, as if, when we perceive and event we can immediately know 'why' it happened.

Slide 4: The pyramids' existence is actually unpredictable and improbable. Aristotle's causes provide a linear, rational explanation, a world built brick on brick, with no gaps. However, to understand how and why these pyramids exist begin by thinking of them as arising within a complex social system in a specific environment with multiple influences.

Slide 5: Piero Della Francesca's, Resurrection was painted as a fresco in the Council Building of Borgo Santo Sepolcro, Italy. It was commissioned to celebrate a new era for the town brought about when the Pope freed the town from being governed by Florence in 1459. Although the Resurrection appears to present a composition of Christ rising from the tomb with four sleeping soldiers, there is a density of inter-connected narratives that range from Adam's shame to Peter's transformation, with related referrences to the Crucifixion and the Last Judgement. 

Slide 6: Massacio's Expulsion shows Adam with his fingers in his eyes, a gesture that the Benedictine Order believed indicated shame.

Slide 7: Four Soldiers Sleeping or a complex narrative that goes from Adam to Peter?

Slide 8: The Event Structure is how we define and structure causal connections in our world. However, there is no direct link between our attribution of forces, causes, changes, and purposes to the events we experience and how we narrate events as bounded regions (as things we can talk about), and what happens.

Slide 9: Leonardo da Vinci's wave studies were being done as he worked on the Last Supper. He was interested the flow of water in rivers and in large bodies of water, he is the father of fluid dynamics, before the discipline existed.

Slide 10: Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, 1494-99 is composed as if waves of energy were braking away from the center like a pebble tossed into a lake. Christ's words disrupt the gathering when he says, "One of you will betray me."

Slide 11: Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, 1508-1512, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is an art of bodies that are solid and full of agency and purposeful energy. 

Slide 12: Sistine Chapel is the ripple effect of this disruption; the creation of us.

Slide 13: Michelangelo's last drawings before he died in 1564 are are ethereal and the opposite of solid, they are the opposite of the vital bodies of the Sistine Chapel, these figures are being erased, they are becoming light -- they are disappearing. 

Slide 14: Even Structure Metaphors.