On the evening of Tuesday, October 27th, Dr. Sam Rocha delivered the annual Bishop Dollard Lecture entitled, “Imagine the Real: Fidelity, Improvisation, Witness.” Fittingly, the presentation was held in the Recital Room in McCain Hall at St. Thomas since the lecture was part talk and part musical performance. The focus of the presentation concerned the “divided self” as explored in Augustine’s Confessions.
Dr. Rocha is an accessible yet obviously knowledgable lecturer who has a fine sense of humour and an engaging self-depreciating style. His music is powerful and startling, especially in the context of an academic talk. This led me to approach him right after the lecture and ask three questions:
1. Some people consider philosophy and music, or reason and emotion, to be mutually exclusive. I assume you do not; am I correct? A: You are correct. [In retrospect this seems obvious since we are not selves split into reason and emotion, as much current research in the field of psychology and neurobiology confirms.]
2. Do you perform music in your classes? A: No, because I don’t want either the philosophy or the music to be a sideshow one to the other.
3. What got you into philosophy? A: Debating. I loved the battle and winning. This accounts for my analytic tendency that I try to resist. As an undergraduate I was taught by a student of a student of Husserl and so turned to phenomenology.
If you wish to see Dr. Rocha in action you need only search him out on YouTube (where the accompanying images were sourced) and you can see him debating and enjoy him playing his own compositions. His website is located at www.samrocha.com/. Enjoy!
