Here Learning barters not her paper store,
Nor measures land and sea from pole to pole;
She chains not reason in scholastic lore,
Nor teaches planets in their orb to roll.
Thy sons, O Wisdom, boast but little good,
They scan the world, yet to themselves are blind;
By them is pleasure poison’d, not subdu’d,
And life is dull to feelings too refin’d.
Here all live well, by simple Nature led;
Alone the heart directs and not the toiling head.

       – Albert von Haller ‘The Alps’ (1732)

ALP:Research brings together aesthetics, poetry and German idealist philosophy in the hopes to ignite a conversation between academic disciplines about the nature of art and it’s place in the world – both of people and of nature itself. Inspired by Haller’s great poem the Alps, of which Kant was reputedly a great admirer, ALP:Research takes from the spirit of the age the notion that in some fundamentally yet perhaps inarticulable manner, the various threads that separate out into philosophy, science and the arts are deeply connected. What might this inarticulable connection and our striving toward it have to do with you current age? What might history tell us about the present? How might poetry philosophise and philosophy poetise?