What True Education Looks Like

What Thinking Looks Like: Lessons from Art in the Age of AI

Could it be that art holds the key to figuring out who we want to become in the age of AI? This program of three talks by ISU’s award-winning philosopher Scott Samuelson explores what we can learn from how artists have portrayed and embodied active minds engaged with the world. Everybody knows Rodin’s famous Thinker. Everybody has seen the clichés of head scratching and lightbulb a-ha’s. It’s time to delve deeper into art and thinking!

What Education Looks Like: Lessons from the Renaissance

Plato is pointing upward while conversing with Aristotle who’s motioning with his hand to bring things back down to earth—it’s one of the most famous images of philosophy, a detail from The School of Athens by the Renaissance painter Raphael. When one examines the whole fresco, which was created in close consultation with leading thinkers of the day, one finds a powerful philosophy of education. This program decodes the secrets in the imagery to argue that we can learn a lot about learning from the Renaissance.