Phillips to speak on bridging sciences and humanities

The value - and exhilaration - of bridging the divide between the sciences and the humanities will be the subject of the sixth annual Jon Ramsey Honors Forum Lecture at Skidmore College. Titled "How Many Cultures?", the lecture will begin at 5 p.m. Monday, Feb. 22, in Gannett Auditorium. Flip Phillips, associate professor of psychology and director of the College's neuroscience program, is the speaker.

The springboard for Phillips's talk is C.P. Snow's famous 1959 lecture, "The Two Cultures," in which the British scientist and novelist described an ever-widening divide between the sciences and the humanities. "Snow railed at the growing incompatibility and lack of communication between the two cultures and the larger impact this clash had on the 'big problems' of the world and society," said Philllips, noting that these issues are still being worked through. "Recently, various authors have proposed both consolidation of Snow's thesis (i.e., narrowing it down to one culture) and expansion to three cultures."

"This talk will not strictly focus on Snow and his descendants," added Phillips, "but rather on my own trajectory through both cultures, or, as this lecture might be subtitled, 'Why I gave up a six-figure job at a famous animation company to go back to grad school in architecture and became a vision scientist by accident'.I want to show students that there are an infinite number of trajectories through the arts and sciences."

Phillips's own career trajectory began in the early 1980s, in the school of architecture atOhio State University, which he attended at a time when, he said, "it was a birthplace of computer graphics." Attracted to architecture for its cross-disciplinary combination of art, engineering, and science, Phillips was dazzled by computer graphics when the architecture firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill gave a campus demonstration of a computer fly-through of Chicago. Inspired, he created his own self-designed major in computer art and earned a B.F.A. degree in 1986. "Back then, the artists were taking inspiration from the scientists and vice versa," explained Phillips. "Since then, computer graphics has become a trade, but in the 1980s, to work in computer graphics you had to be an artist who knew science or a scientist who understood art."

After earning his bachelor's degree, Phillips taught and researched computer-graphic applications to medicine before finding work as an animator and technical director at the new animation studio Pixar?at the time, another hotbed of interdisciplinary inspiration. When the studio began to become both more successful and more specialized, Phillips returned to Ohio State University for an M.A. and Ph.D. in psychology. There his early interest in architecture led him to specialize in aesthetics, vision, and perception, seeking empirical evidence to underpin the human perception of beauty.

Phillips is a past editor of The Mathematica Journal, which focuses on computer mathematics across the spectrum of science, art, and social and economic modeling. He has written and edited books, journal articles, and reviews on subjects ranging from vision science ("The effects of three-dimensional complexity on the perception of two-dimensional depictions of objects") to an iPhone app designed to help organize scholarly desktop files.A member of the Skidmore faculty since 1998, he teaches such courses as quantitative and experimental psychology, perception, and computational neuroscience. Currently, his research centers on the perception of solid shape, perception of texture, and the psychology of aesthetics.

The annual Honors Forum Lecture, launched in 1999, was renamed in 2004 in honor of newly retired Skidmore English professor and administrator Jon Ramsey. In nearly three decades at Skidmore, Ramsey served as associate dean and dean of studies and as director of student academic affairs; he was instrumental in creating the Honors Forum and the Office of International Programs.  According to David Vella, professor of mathematics and director of the Honors Forum, selecting the annual Ramsey Lecture speaker is a student-driven process and "an opportunity for the Honors Forum students to hear Skidmore faculty members talk about their academic passions."

In addition to the lecture, first-year students who made the Dean's List for the fall semester will be recognized at the event. Light refreshments will be served at the conclusion.