Thank you very much for that kind introduction, Diane, which I appreciate very much.
It is a great pleasure to welcome all of you to this virtual event to celebrate the official launch of Emeritus Professor Chris Mortensen's wonderful new book "The Impossible Arises: Oscar Reutersvärd and his Contemporaries."
And it is a very special pleasure to do so, as Chris is one of my very oldest friends. I have known Chris, and his wife, the eminent art historian Professor Cathy Speck, who is also on this call, for nearly 50 years dating back to January of 1974!
Chris had a long and distinguished career as a philosopher and mathematician, primarily at the University of Adelaide, until his retirement in 2005. But I use the word "retirement" advisedly, as Chris has remained just as professionally active since that date as he was before it. He also spent a number of shorter periods at the Australian National University while I was there, and I am sure we both remember the memorable logic seminars held there where some of the themes explored in Chris' book were first seriously explored.
"The Impossible Arises" is at one level a long overdue corrective to the view that it was Maurits Cornelius Escher around the mid-1950s who founded the impossible figures movement and the artistic representation of such figures. In fact, Chris is able to demonstrate indisputably that it was in fact Oscar Reutersvärd nearly 20 years earlier who did so, thanks to the superb Reutersvärd collection that IU’s wonderful Lilly Library acquired. Chris' book is, as well, liberally illustrated with many of Reutersvärd's images rarely seen before, as well as images from other members of the impossible figures movement.
But that is only, as I said, at one level. At a deeper level Chris' book is a sustained analysis of the concept of contradiction and consistency, illustrated by the art and the philosophical and psychological ruminations of Reutersvärd and others. As Chris says, "… the main philosophical message of the book … [is] … that the human imagination escapes not only the possible, but even the logically consistent; that humans play with contradictory concepts without intellectual collapse."
He elaborates on this later in the book where he ends his chapter on Escher by concluding "… we can say that our minds have contradictories among their contents; whereas, in contrast, it can be argued that the contents of the world are no more than consistent states of affairs. In short, our minds contain more than the world contains or could possibly contain, our minds transcend even the possible." And he stresses that none of this implies any ontological commitment, that is commitment in the real or physical world, to impossibility.
In many ways then, this book can be seen as bringing together some of the main intellectual problems with which Chris has wrestled and on which he has published during his long career—the problems of consistency in logic, mathematics, and geometry, and the inadequacy of the classical Boolean account of these; cognition and mental representation; and the fundamental problem in aesthetics of what constitutes art.
Mind you, even this wide spread of intellectual fields does not do justice to the remarkable breadth of Chris' intellectual interests encompassing other fields such as the philosophy of space/time, ancient Greek philosophy, Buddhism, and philosophy and the martial arts.
So again, I am delighted to be the host for this event to mark the official launch of "The Impossible Arises" and—with all Chris' colleagues and friends—congratulate him on yet another splendid intellectual and scholarly achievement.
Let me also congratulate the Indiana University Press and its director, Gary Dunham, on the publication of this fine book that continues to uphold their long traditions of publishing excellence. And let me also thank most sincerely the IU Libraries, Dean Dallis-Comentale, and Lilly Library Director Joel Silver for their great foresight and support in acquiring the papers and artwork of Oscar Reutersvärd, continuing IU's great scholarly traditions in the arts and humanities.
Now it is a pleasure to invite Chris to make some comments on his book.