The Creative Process · Arts, Culture & Society: Books, Film, Music, TV, Art, Writing, Creativity, Education, Environment, Th The Creative Process

“The creation of roads is this process that's sort of innate to all beings. You know, we're all sort of inclined to create and follow trails. We just do it at a much vaster and more permanent and destructive scale. I think we need to reconceive how we think about roads in some ways, right? I mean, we think about roads, certainly here in the U. S., as these symbols of movement and mobility and freedom, right? There's so much about the romance of the open road and so much of our popular culture going back to the mid-20th century when the interstate highway systems were built and writers like Jack Kerouac were singing the praises of the open highway. And certainly, roads play that role. I like driving. The iconic Western American road trip is kind of this wonderful experience, but you know, I think the purpose of this book is to say: Yes, roads are a source of human mobility and freedom, but they're doing precisely the opposite for basically all other forms of life, right? They're curtailing animal movement and mobility and freedom, both by killing them directly in the form of roadkill, but also by creating these kinds of impenetrable walls of traffic that prevent animals from moving around the landscape and accessing big swaths of their habitat. Right? So, that's kind of the mental reconfiguration we have to go through, which is to recognize that, hey, roads aren't just forms of mobility and freedom for us. They're also preventing that mobility in basically all other life forms.”

Every year, humanity's footprint casts a deadly shadow over our skies and landscapes, claiming the lives of billions of birds and other wildlife. What is road ecology? How are our roads driving certain species towards extinction? And what can we do about it?

“Philosophy is both an academic discipline and also something that everybody does. Everybody has to have reflective views about what's significant. They also have to justify to themselves why it's significant or important. The nature of justice itself, and the various opinions that have been written about in philosophy about justice, can get to a very high level. So there's this unusual connection between philosophy and human life. We've inherited from the Middle Ages, this incredible tradition that's now developed into a chance for young people to spend four or five years, in a way, released from the pressures of life. The idea to pursue your ideas a little further in these four years you have, exempt from the pressures of social life, allows philosophy to have a kind of position unique in the academy. In confronting what the best minds in the history of the world have had to say about these issues, the hope is that they provide for the people who are privileged enough to confront philosophy a better and more thoughtful approach to these fundamental questions that everybody has to confront.”

What is the importance of philosophy in the 21st century as we enter a post-truth world? How can we reintroduce meaning and uphold moral principles in our world shaken by crises? And what does philosophy teach us about living in harmony with the natural world?
Robert Pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago where he teaches in the College, Committee on Social Thought, and Department of Philosophy. Pippin is widely acclaimed for his scholarship in German idealism as well as later German philosophy, including publications such as Modernism as a Philosophical Problem, and Hegel’s Idealism. In keeping with his interdisciplinary interests, Pippin’s book Henry James and Modern Moral Life explores the intersections between philosophy and literature. Pippin’s most recent published book is The Culmination: Heidegger, German Idealism, and the Fate of Philosophy.

“We've got four billion years of biological accidents that created all of the intricate aspects of everything about life, including consciousness. And it's about what's going on in each of those cells at the time that allows it to be connected to everything else and for the information to be understood as it's being exchanged between those things with their multifaceted, deep, complex processing.”

How does the brain process emotions? How are emotional memories formed and stored in the brain, and how do they influence behavior, perception, and decision-making? How does music help us understand our emotions, memories, and the nature of consciousness?

Joseph LeDoux is a Professor of Neural Science at New York University at NYU and was Director of the Emotional Brain Institute. His research primarily focuses on survival circuits, including their impacts on emotions, such as fear and anxiety. He has written a number of books in this field, including The Four Realms of Existence: A New Theory of Being Human, The Emotional Brain, Synaptic Self, Anxious, and The Deep History of Ourselves. LeDoux is also the lead singer and songwriter of the band The Amygdaloids.