Seeking big answers
As a PhD student in philosophy, Rebecca Millsop is working on doctoral research that’s a little different than most at MIT. “It’s thinking, writing, talking to people, doing some more thinking, and reading every once in a while,” she says with a laugh. However, for her this process has been a highly fruitful one that has led her to successfully address a highly contentious question in philosophy: How do we define art? Combining art and logic After high school, Millsop enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute, where she studied conceptual art. She and her classmates spent their time creating art and critiquing each other’s work, and it was this process that pushed her to start thinking about the definition of art. “My second year I started considering the fact that I'm not going to be able to make art unless I know what it is,” she recalls. “So I decided to drop out of...