One Picture Is Worth 727,644 Words

All welcome to Social Sciences Seminar! 

The seminar will take place in room M101 and will also be streamed here.

Giorgio Baruchello Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences will deliver the talk:

One Picture Is Worth 727,644 Words: An Introduction to the Book Series Humor and Cruelty

Co-authored by Profs Giorgio Baruchello, a philosopher, and Ársæll Már Arnarsson, a biological psychologist, the four-tome book series entitled Humour & Cruelty (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022–2024) explores and examines the characterisations and mutual relations of the titular cluster concepts, as these have been tackled and theorised about in both the Western humanities and the world’s social and medical sciences. The result being a comprehensive account and assessment of the intellectual history of these two notions (Volume 1), the ways in which humour and cruelty can be said to assist each other (Volume 2), and those in which they can be said to be in conflict with each other (Volume 3, in two parts). The whole enterprise has been synthesised in a work of art by the Italian painter Lorenzo Biggi, which is presented to the public upon the occasion of the present Forum in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Born in Genoa, Italy, Giorgio Baruchello is an Icelandic citizen and has been a teacher at the University of Akureyri since 2003, where he launched Iceland’s first full open-access scholarly e-journal in 2005, Nordicum-Mediterraneum, which he still edits. Giorgio read Philosophy in Genoa and Reykjavík, and he holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Guelph, Canada. He has published more than two hundred academic works, including ten books. His areas of research encompass social philosophy, theory of value, and intellectual history, and have focussed on the themes of death, cruelty, economic justice, rhetoric, religion, and humour.

All welcome!