Philosopher Ian Hacking, cognitive science expert Douglas Hofstadter, and theorist Elizabeth Grosz convene this week to discuss the nature of reality for “Get Real,” the latest installment of Guggenheim Forum, an online discussion series.

The panel, moderated by The Economist’s Alison Goddard, will delve into the question of how we decide what is “real” in an increasingly mediated age. As the immaterial threatens to displace the material how do we determine what “really” exists? Is reality based more in material or code, social agreement or spirit?

The group’s discussion will unfold over one week a part of the Guggenheim Forum, the museum’s ongoing series of moderated online discussions catalyzing intelligent conversation on the arts, architecture, and design. Several times each year, experts from a variety of fields inquire into and debate topics related to the museum’s exhibition program. “Get Real” will include a one-hour live chat with members of our panel and is presented in concert with the exhibition Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity, on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, through September 28, 2011.

“Get Real” includes as participants an exemplary group of thinkers from the worlds of critical theory, philosophy, and cognitive science. Elizabeth Grosz is an Australian-born philosopher who teaches at Rutgers University in the Women's and Gender Studies Department. She has written widely on corporeality, temporality, and spatiality and has more recently turned her attention to rethinking art in relation to animal sexuality.

Ian Hacking is a philosopher, now retired from a chair at the Collège de France, Paris, and a University Professorship at the University of Toronto. His numerous books frequently interrogate science. Douglas Hofstadter, College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor at Indiana University, Bloomington, is an award-winning author and translator whose research, described in the book Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies, focuses on analogy’s ubiquity in thought.

Moderator Alison Goddard is the author of a forthcoming biography of environmentalist and green activist Luc Hoffmann.