Jan Cover presents on philosophical exploration of portraiture at Westwood Lecture Series

Jan Cover, professor of philosophy in the College of Liberal Arts, presented “Puzzles of Portraiture” at the Westwood Lecture Series on Oct. 28.

Abstract. One can fairly wonder what art is. Various kinds of labor on the genus, whether art historical or art critical, recommend that art’s visual species is the least ill-behaved – the most amenable to some kind of unified analysis broadly conceived. More narrowly, it is representational art that should, by now, be well-enough understood. As pictures go, one might be forgiven the thought that it is surely the portrait that is the most boring – being perhaps the oldest, and certainly the simplest and best understood of all. In this lecture, Cover will restrict his focus to the early modern period and the ubiquitous phenomena of the print portrait, utilizing photos to help the audience in appreciating why the portrait is not very well understood and, for at least the philosopher, not boring.

Bio. Jan Cover is a professor of philosophy in the College of Liberal Arts. His research interests include the history of early modern philosophy and metaphysics, as well as philosophy of science, religion and art.

Cover earned a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry and biophysics from the University of California, Davis, and a bachelor’s, master’s and PhD in philosophy from Syracuse University. His earlier-career work on Leibniz, Spinoza, causation, space and time and modality was published in such journals as Philosophical Studies, Noûs, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Synthese and Australasian Journal of Philosophy. Cover co-edited “Leibniz: Nature and Freedom” (Oxford) and “Central Themes in Early Modern Philosophy” (Hackett). He co-authored “Theories of Knowledge and Reality” (McGraw-Hill, 2nd), “Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues” (Norton, 2nd) and “Substance and Individuation in Leibniz” (Cambridge).