Each colloquium is held on Wednesday at 4:15 P.M. All colloquia will take place at the Graduate Center in rooms 9204/9205 except as otherwise noted. Please call (212) 817-8615 for further information.
February 7th • Jerrold Katz Memorial Lecture
David Papineau (CUNY Graduate Center | King’s College London)
“Kinds and Essences: Taming Metaphysical Modality”
February 14th
Jane Friedman (NYU)
“The Epistemic and the Zetetic”
February 21st
Muhammad Ali Khalidi (York U)
“Are Sexes Natural Kinds?”
February 28th
Laurie Paul (UNC)
“De Se Truth and Epistemic Revolution”
March 7th • Marx Wartofsky Memorial Lecture
Steven Lukes (NYU)
Title TBD
March 14th
Collin O’Neill (CUNY Lehman College)
“Consent and Third-Party Coercion in Medicine and Research”
March 21st
Edouard Machery (Pittsburgh)
TBD
March 28th
Greg Restall (Melbourne)
“Accommodation, Inference, Generics and Pejoratives”
April 4th: No Colloquium (Spring Recess)
April 11th: No Colloquium (CUNY Friday Schedule)
April 18th
Shaun Nichols (Arizona)
“The Wrong and the Bad: On the Rational Acquisition of Moral Rules”
April 25th
Quayshawn Spencer (UPenn)
“A Radical Solution to the Race Problem”
May 2nd
Tim Crane (CEU)
“Putnam’s Ant: On the Reduction of Meaning and Intentionality”
May 9
Kathryn Tabb (Columbia)
“Locke on the Complexity of Ideas and the Ethics of Belief”
Download an interactive PDF version of the schedule here.
In a famous passage from Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Sextus Empiricus presents four different accounts of the conditional in increasing strength. Contemporary analogues have been identified (subject to various degrees of controversy) for the first three, but the last, which even fails to satisfy A>A, has proved elusive. In this talk, I discuss ways of modeling this heterodox conditional. Taking a cue from Sextus, I regard the characteristic feature of this conditional as one of proper (conceptual) containment and approach it using the framework of containment logic. Different implementations of this approach are discussed and evaluated both for their historical and technical merits. In the course of the talk, I will discuss (among other things) the relationship between Sextus’ third and fourth accounts, how Kripke semantics can be and has been used to deepen our understanding of various ancient conditionals, and how ancient notions of containment might yield interesting new (old) perspectives on contemporary containment logic.
Saul Kripke Center, Young Scholars Series: Yale Weiss, “Sextus Empiricus’ Fourth Conditional and Containment Logic”
SWIP-Analytic Schedule for Spring 2018
Here is a sneak peak at our exciting line-up of speakers and events for Spring 2018. Some times and rooms TBA.
Elanor Taylor, February 8, CUNY Graduate Center, The Committee for Interdisciplinary Science Studies, Room 5307, 4:00-6:00pm
Virginia Aspe Armella and Ma. Elena García Peláez Cruz (co-sponsored with SWIP-Analytic Mexico), March 2, NYU Room 202, 2:00-4:30pm
Round Table Women in Philosophy: Publishing, Jobs, and Fitting In (co-sponsored with NYSWIP), March 8, CUNY Graduate Center, The Committee for Interdisciplinary Science Studies, Room 5307, 4:30-7:30pm
Graduate Student Essay Prize Winner Presentation, April 12
Sophie Horowitz (UMass, Amherst), April 26
Working Papers in Ethics and Moral Psychology is a speaker series conducted under the auspices of the Icahn School of Medicine Bioethics Program. It is a working group where speakers are invited to present well-developed, as yet unpublished work. The focus of the group is interdisciplinary, with an emphasis on topics in ethics, bioethics, neuroethics, and moral psychology. The meetings begin with a brief presentation by the invited speaker and the remaining time is devoted to a discussion of the paper. The speakers will make their papers available in advance of their presentation to those who sign up for the Working Papers mailing list.
All speakers:
9/28/2017:
Eric Chwang
/Rutgers University-Camden
11/2/2017:
Phoebe Friesen
/CUNY Graduate Center
12/14/2017:
Adam Kolber
/Brooklyn Law School
2/8/2018:
Paul Cummins
/Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
3/8/2018:
Elizabeth Victor
/William Paterson University
4/19/2018:
Melissa Moschella
/Columbia University
5/24/2018:
Camil Golub
/Rutgers University-Newark
JOIN THE WORKING PAPERS MAILING LIST AND RSVP TO:
nada.gligorov@mssm.edu
The United States, supposedly founded on the “self-evident” principle of human equality, has in fact been a profoundly racially unequal society from the start. Yet for many years the striving for racial justice and racial equality has been obscured by an evasive discourse of “diversity.” Particularly with the recent rise of white nationalism, however, it has become urgently important to recognize and address the ongoing inequalities of race. This 2-day interdisciplinary conference will bring together 18 theorists from a wide array of subjects—philosophy, political theory, ethnic studies, critical psychology, urban studies, gender theory, and anthropology—to look from their distinctive perspectives at the enduring problem of racial inequality, and how it is perpetuated in a democratic society.
SPEAKERS:
Alia Al-Saji (Philosophy: McGill University)
Bernard Boxill (Philosophy: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, emeritus)
Derrick Darby (Philosophy: University of Michigan)
Michelle Fine (Critical Psychology: CUNY Grad Center)
Mark Golub (Politics: Scripps College)
Juliet Hooker (Political Science: Brown University)
Frank Kirkland (Philosophy: Hunter College & CUNY Grad Center)
Nelson Maldonado-Torres (Latino & Caribbean Studies: Rutgers University)
Howard McGary (Philosophy: Rutgers University)
José Mendoza (Philosophy: University of Massachusetts-Lowell)
Naomi Murakawa (African-American Studies: Princeton University)
Michael Paris (Political Science & Global Affairs: CUNY Staten Island)
Tommie Shelby (Philosophy: Harvard University)
Falguni Sheth (Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies: Emory University)
Stephen Steinberg (Urban Studies: Queens College & CUNY Grad Center)
Ronald Sundstrom (Philosophy: University of San Francisco)
Andrew Valls (Political Science: Oregon State)
Gary Wilder (Anthropology: CUNY Grad Center)
Co-organizers: Charles W. Mills and Linda Martín Alcoff.
Free and open to the public, the conference will take place on Friday, March 9th in the Skylight Room (9100) and Saturday, March 10th in the Elebash Recital Hall.
Co-sponsored by the PhD Program in Philosophy and the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
February 9: Jessie Munton Philosophy, New York University “How Long Is ‘a’ Visual Experience?”
March 9: Taylor Webb Neuroscience Institute and Cognitive Science, Princeton University Title TBA
April 13: Eleni Manolakaki Philosophy and History of Science, University of Athens “Propositions as Measures of Mind”
For spring 2018, the CUNY Cognitive Science Speaker Series will meet once a month. We’ll return to weekly talks in fall 2018.
All talks are at the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, room 7-102, Fridays, 1-3 pm. http://bit.ly/cs-talks
Does art have anything interesting to do with pleasure? The aesthetic hedonist answers positively, claiming that the value of artworks qua artworks lie in their power to please those who are properly engaged with them. Recent critics of hedonism answer the question in the negative, arguing that the power to please cannot properly explain the value of artworks. In this paper, I point to a blind spot in the dialectic between the hedonic orthodoxy and its recent critics: though the hedonist is wrong to claim that artworks are valuable because they are endowed with the power to please, the contemporary critic of hedonism mistakenly disconnects art from pleasure. The bulk of the paper consists in a challenge to the two assumptions that underlie this dialectic: (1) the assumption that pleasure is merely subjective and so incapable of disclosing the value of its object, and (2) the assumption that pleasure can be connected to art only hedonically, as the answer to the question “what makes artworks valuable?” By undermining these assumptions, I carve out space for a neglected alternative between aesthetic hedonism and its non-affective denial: this is the view that, though pleasure does not constitute the value of artworks, it does constitute proper aesthetic evaluation. On this neglected alternative, pleasure is connected to artworks insofar as it is the proper response merited by their value, value that the pleasure discloses. It is the value of artworks that gives us reasons to feel pleasure rather than the feeling of pleasure that gives us reasons to attribute value to them.
Reception to follow in 6th floor lounge.
Apology constitutes an essential part of the hard work of being an imperfect moral agent, over time and amongst others. Apology is one component of our “reparative responsibilities” (Bell 2012), of responding well to one’s past wrongdoing, and is more broadly part of the ongoing effort to come to terms with what one’s deeds will mean for one’s life (Williams 69). So how is this work achieved? In this paper I argue that the basic structure of apology is more puzzling, because more paradoxical, than has been recognized. I argue that in apologizing one must at once identify with one’s wrong action, in order to take moral responsibility for it, and at the same time dis-identify with it, in order to morally reject it. That is, I must at once own and disown what I did. While the paradox of forgiveness has been widely discussed, the paradoxicality of apology has been almost entirely overlooked. I end the paper by proposing that the paradox need not undermine the practice; rather, there is, I suggest, an internal connection between apology’s very instability and the possibility of moral change.
PhD student Mariam Matar will respond.
Presented by the NYC Wittgenstein Workshop
Feb. 9: Cat Prueitt (George Mason University)
March 9: Kin Cheung (Moravian College)
April 13: Lara Braitstein (McGill University)
May 11: David Cummiskey (Bates College)
Also, please visit our website:
http://www.cbs.columbia.edu/cscp/
Co-Chairs
Professor Jonathan Gold
Associate Professor, Princeton University, Department of Religion
Professor Hagop Sarkissian
Associate Professor, The City University of New York, Baruch College | Graduate Center, Department of Philosophy
hagop.sarkissian@baruch.cuny.edu
Rapporteur
Jay Ramesh
In a hurried letter to beleaguered brethren, Blaise Pascal (1658) confesses to a lapse of concision: “I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.” Pascal’s confession was emulated with the same warmth as philosophers now emulate the apology introduced by D. C. Mackinson’s “The Preface Paradox”. Could Pascal’s confession of superfluity be sound? Pascal thinks his letter could be conservatively abridged; the shortened letter would be true and have the exact same content. In contrast to the Preface Paradox, where Mackinson’s author apologizes for false assertions, Pascal apologizes for an excess of true assertions. He believes at least one of his remarks could be deleted in a fashion that leaves all of its consequences entailed by the remaining assertions. Pascal’s confession of superfluity is plausible even if we count the apology as part of the letter (as we should since this is the most famous part of the letter). Yet there is an a priori refutation. Any conservative abridgement must preserve the implication that there is a superfluous assertion. This means any abridged version can itself be abridged. Since the letter is finite, we must eventually run out of conservative abridgements. Any predecessor of an unabridgeable abridgement is itself an unabridgeable. So the original letter cannot be conservatively abridged.
Manuscript: for those interested, the manuscript has been available for advance reading here.
This meeting is open to all who are interested. Please feel free to pass this announcement on, or direct others to our website at logic.commons.gc.cuny.edu.
Logic & Metaphysics Workshop
Feb 26 Martin Pleitz, Muenster
Mar 5 Vera Flocke, NYU
Mar 12 Roy Sorensen, WUSTL
Mar 19 Alex Citkin, Private Researcher
Mar 26 Chris Scambler, NYU
Apr 2 SPRING RECESS. NO MEETING
Apr 9 Greg Restall, Melbourne
Apr 16 Daniel Nolan, Notre Dame
Apr 23 Mel Fitting, CUNY
Apr 30 Sungil Han, Seoul National
May 7 Andreas Ditter, NYU
May14 Rohit Parikh