Berkeleyan
Graduate Council Lectures showcase Freeman, Heilbron, and Dretske
24 October 2007
The Graduate Division has announced the first Graduate Council Lectures for 2007-08, bringing distinguished scholars in economics, history, and philosophy to campus between now and mid-November.
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 Richard Freeman |
In addition to the endowed chair he holds at Harvard, Freeman is Labor Studies Program director at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), faculty director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, and a professorial research fellow at the London School of Economics' Centre for Economic Performance. He has written more than 300 articles and written or edited more than 30 books in his areas of interest, which include the growth and decline of unions; self-organizing non-unions in the labor market; international labor standards; Chinese labor markets; employee-involvement programs; and the job market for scientists and engineers.
The Jefferson Memorial Lectureship was established in 1944; previous lecturers have included James B. Conant, Archibald Cox, Peter Gay, Richard Hofstadter, Sidney Hook, and Austin Ranney, among others.
This year's two Hitchcock Lectures (the lectureship was endowed in 1885) will bring Berkeley Professor Emeritus of History John Heilbron to campus to address the topic "Physics and History: Links Between Two Cultures."
 John Heilbron |
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A native of San Francisco, and the recipient of three degrees from Berkeley (two in physics and a Ph.D. in history), Heilbron served on the faculty here between 1967 and his retirement in 1994. In addition to creating the Office for the History of Science and Technology (and directing it for 21 years), he served as vice chancellor (similar to today's executive vice chancellor and provost) under Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien and chaired the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate between 1988 and 1990.
Heilbron's writings include a history of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a book about the use of cathedrals as solar observatories, and The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science. Since his retirement, he has been a visiting professor at Caltech, Yale, and Berkeley. He now lives in Oxford, England, where he is an Honorary Fellow of Worcester College.
Previous Hitchcock Lecturers have included Claude Lévi-Strauss, Linus Pauling, Freeman Dyson, Hans Bethe, and Robert Oppenheimer.
On Wednesday, Nov. 14, the annual Howison Lecture in Philosophy will be delivered by Fred Dretske, professor emeritus of philosophy at Stanford. His lecture, titled "What We See," will be held in the Toll Room of Alumni House at 4:10 p.m.
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 Fred Dretske |
Dretske, an epistemologist and philosopher of mind, is currently engaged in research into the nature of conscious experience and the problem of understanding how knowledge of one's own conscious states is possible. His writings include the influential Seeing and Knowing (1969) as well as Naturalizing the Mind (1995) and Perception, Knowledge, and Belief (2000). He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Minnesota, teaching thereafter at the University of Wisconsin for 30 years and at Stanford (1990-98). He has been a senior research scholar at Duke University since 1999.
The Howison Lectures were first endowed at Berkeley in 1919; previous lecturers have included John Dewey, Michel Foucault, and Noam Chomsky.
Graduate Council Lectures are held each fall and spring. For information, visit grad.berkeley.edu/lectures. Audio and video recordings of a number of past Graduate Council Lectures are online at www.grad.berkeley.edu/lectures/multimedia/uctv.shtml.