Origins of Form in Life, Mind, and Art

22 to 23 September 2007

This was an interdisciplinary symposium on the occasion of the 175th anniversary of Durham University - Funded by the Mind Association and the Faculty of Arts and Humanities Research Fund.

The symposium brought together philosophers, aestheticians, linguists, developmental psychologists, theoretical biologists, anthropologists, literary theorists, and musicologists to reflect on the origins of structural forms of organization in various cognitive and cultural domains such as language, music, myth, and religion.

Discussions will link up various themes from Lévi-Strauss' search for universal constraining principles of the human mind, with Kantian transcendental philosophy and its search for a categorial system underlying human experience, and with Chomsky's reflections on universal principles in the generation of linguistic forms. The aim was to understand the genesis and origins of structure, with a particular emphasis on overarching principles that not only cut across different domains of cognition, but different domains of nature as well, such as organic morphology and art.

For further details, please see the conference poster, below.

• Conference Programme (last modified: 9 May 2008)