Calendar

A NIGHT OF PHILOSOPHY AND IDEAS is an all-night marathon of philosophical debate, performances, screenings, readings, and music.

Join us and be a part of this FREE 12-HOUR EXCHANGE OF IDEAS, featuring top philosophers from around the world.

FROM SATURDAY February 2 AT 7PM TO SUNDAY February 3, 2019 AT 7AM at Central Library, 10 Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, NY

Co-presented by Brooklyn Public Library and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy.

Check back for more details in the coming weeks. The full schedule will appear here on January 10.

In preparation for the next transnational feminist strike on March 8th, we will have a discussion about the new feminist wave with some of its protagonists and organizers from around the world and a conversation around Arruzza, Bhattacharya, Fraser, “Feminism for the 99%. A Manifesto” (Verso 2019).

Program:

4:00 p.m.:  Welcome and Opening Remarks: William Milberg (Director of the Heilbroner Center for Capitalist Studies) and Cinzia Arruzza (NSSR)

4:15–6:00 p.m.: The New Feminist Wave

Speakers:

• Ximena Bustamante (IWS)
• Julia Cámara (National Coordination 8M, Spain)
• Luci Cavallero (Ni Una Menos, Argentina)
• Mayra Cotta De Souza (NSSR)
• Chair: Meg Beyer (IWS and NSSR)

6:00–6:15 p.m.: Break

6:15–8:00 p.m.: Feminism for the 99%. A Manifesto

Speakers:

• Cinzia Arruzza
• Tithi Bhattacharya
• Nancy Fraser
• Barbara Smith (founder of the Combahee River Collective)
• Chair: Michelle O’Brien (IWS)

Cosponsored by Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies (New School for Social Research) and International Women’s Strike

Strict/tolerant logic is a formally defined logic that has the same consequence relation as classical logic, though it differs from classical logic at the metaconsequence level. Specifically, it does not satisfy a cut rule. It has been recommended for use in work on theories of truth because it avoids some objectionable features arising from the use of classical logic. Here we are not interested in applications, but in the formal details themselves. We show that a wide range of logics have strict/tolerant counterparts, with the same consequence relations but differing at the metaconsequence level. Among these logics are Kleene’s K3, Priest’s LP, and first degree entailment, FDE. The primary tool we use is the bilattice. But it is more than a tool, it seems to be the natural home for this kind of investigation.

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will be meeting on Mondays from 4:15 to 6:15 in room TBD of the Graduate Center, CUNY (365 5th Avenue). The (provisional) schedule is as follows:

Feb 4. Melvin Fitting, CUNY

Feb 11. Benjamin Neeser, Geneva

Feb 18. GC CLOSED. NO MEETING

Feb 25. Achille Varzi, Columbia

Mar 4. Eric Bayruns Garcia, CUNY

Mar 11. Romina Padro, CUNY

Mar 18. Jeremy Goodman, USC

Mar 25. Kit Fine, NYU

Apr 1. Elena Ficara, Paderborn

Apr 8. Chris Scambler, NYU

Apr 15.  Jenn McDonald, CUNY

Apr 22. GC CLOSED. NO MEETING

Apr 29. Tommy Kivatinos, CUNY

May 6. Daniel Durante, Natal

May 13. Martina Botti, Columbia

May 20. Vincent Peluce, CUNY

We’re a community of philosophers of language centered in New York City. We have a meeting each week at which a speaker presents a piece of their own work relating to the philosophy of language.

28 January
Luca Incurvati (ILLC/Amsterdam)

4 February
Dan Hoek (NYU)

11 February
Peter Klecha (Swarthmore)

25 February
Ginger Schultheis (NYU/Chicago) and
David Boylan (Rutgers)

4 March
Chris Tancredi (Keio University, Tokyo)

11 March
TBD

25 March
Yael Sharvit (UCLA)

1 April
Thony Gillies (Rutgers)

8 April
Yale Weiss (CUNY)

15 April
Friederike Moltmann (CNRS)

22 April
Amir Anvari (Institut Jean Nicod, ENS)

29 April
David Balcarras (MIT)

6 May
Nadine Theiler (ILLC, Amsterdam)

13 May
Valentine Hacquard (Maryland)

Massimo Pigliucci’s talk has been rescheduled, for personal reasons outside of his control. It will be rescheduled for a later date: here.

Science is by far the most powerful approach to the investigation of the natural world ever devised. Still, it has limits, and there are many areas and questions where the scientific approach is ill suited, or at best provides only pertinent information rather than full answers. The denial of this modest attitude about science is called scientism, which declares science to be the only form of human knowledge and understanding, attempting to subsume everything else, including all the humanistic disciplines, into “science” very broadly (mis-)construed. In this talk, I argue that this is a mistake, and that it moreover has the potential to undermine public trust in science itself.

Presented by Metro Area Philosophers of Science

Our topic for Spring 2018 will be Formal Frameworks for Semantics and Pragmatics. We’ll be investigating a range of questions in semantics and/or pragmatics which involve or are relevant to the choice between different kinds of overall structure for theories in these areas.

In most sessions, the members of the seminar will receive a week in advance, copies of recent work, or work in progress from a thinker at another university. After reading this work, students discuss it with one of the instructors on the day before the colloquium. Then at the Tuesday colloquium, the instructors give a summary review and raise criticisms or questions about the work. The author responds to these, and also to questions from the audience.

Meetings

The main seminar meetings are on Tuesday from 4-7, in the second floor seminar room of the Philosophy Department. Additionally, there will be a supplementary meeting open to all students participating in the seminar (whether enrolled or not) on Mondays from 4-5, in the same location in the fifth-floor seminar room.

This seminar is open to all interested parties.

There is a googlegroups mailing list for the class. If you want to receive announcements, please add yourself to that list. (To be able to access the mailing list’s web interface, you’ll need to log into Google’s systems using an identity Google recognizes, like a Gmail address, or a NYU email address because of how NYU’s authentication systems are connected to Google. But there’s no real need to see the mailing list’s web interface. You just need some email address to be added to list, then any messages we send to the list will get forwarded to all the email addresses then registered on the list. If you want us to add an address to the list that you can’t log into Google’s systems with, just send us a message with the address you want registered.)

Schedule and Papers

Papers will be posted here as they become available. Some may be password-protected; the password will be distributed in class.

23 Jan

Introductory session (no meeting on Monday 22 Jan), Jim’s handoutSome people asked for more background reading. Here are two useful textbooks: Heim & Kratzer, then von Fintel & Heim. Here is a survey article about different treatments of pronoun anaphora. Here is a course page with links to more reading.

30 Jan

Jim Pryor (NYU, web, mail), “De Jure Codesignation“

6 Feb

Mandy Simons (CMU, web, mail), “Convention, Intention, and the Conversational Record” and (with Kevin Zollman) “Natural Conventions and the Semantics/Pragmatics Divide“(Mandy is also speaking in the NYPL on Monday 5 Feb at 6:30.)

13 Feb

Paul Pietroski (Rutgers, mail), “Semantic Typology and Composition” (minor updates posted on Friday 9 Feb at 1:06 AM).

20 Feb

Karen Lewis (Columbia/Barnard, web, mail), “Anaphora and Negation” and “Discourse dynamics, pragmatics, and indefinites“

27 Feb

Daniel Rothschild (UCL, web, mail), “A Trivalent Approach to Anaphora and Presupposition” and (with Matt Mandelkern) “Projection from Situations“(Daniel is also speaking in the NYPL on Monday 26 Feb at 6:30.)

6 Mar

John Hawthorne (USC, mail), (with Cian Dorr) Selections from If… : A Theory of Conditionals

13 Mar

Spring Break

20 Mar

Lucas Champollion (NYU, web, mail), (with Dylan Bumford and Robert Henderson) “Donkeys under discussion”
Lucas suggests that readers who are short on time might skip or skim section 6, which is exclusively devoted to discussion of previous work.

27 Mar

Matthew Mandelkern (Oxford, web, mail), “Bounded Modality“

3 Apr

Paolo Santorio (UC-San Diego, web, mail), “Conditional Excluded Middle in Expressivist Semantics” (primary) and “Nonclassical counterfactuals” (secondary)

10 Apr

Una Stojnić (Columbia, web, mail), “Discourse and Argument“

17 Apr

Seth Yalcin (UC-Berkeley, web, mail), “Conditional Belief and Conditional Assertion” and “Notes on iffy knowledge“

24 Apr

Stephen Schiffer (NYU, web, mail), “When Meaning Meets Vagueness (Accommodating Vagueness in Semantics and Metasemantics)” (revised 20 April)

1 May

Maria Aloni (ILLC and Philosophy/Amsterdam, web, mail), “FC disjunction in state-based semantics“(Maria is also speaking in the NYPL on Monday 30 Apr at 6:30.)

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.

Download an interactive PDF version of the schedule here.

February 6 • Jerrold Katz Memorial Lecture
Ned Block (New York University)
“Perception is Non-Propositional, Non-Conceptual and Iconic”

February 13
Francesco Pupa (Nassau Community College)
“Determiners are Phrases”

February 20
Robert Rupert (University of Colorado, Boulder)
“There Is No Personal Level: On the Virtues of a Psychology Flattened from Above”

February 27
Reed Winegar (Fordham University)
“Kant on Infinity”

March 6 • Marx Wartofsky Memorial Lecture
David Schweickart (Loyola University Chicago)
TBD

March 13
Manolo Martinez (University of Barcelona)
“A Rate-Distortion Theory of Concepts”

March 20
Vanessa DeHarven (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
“The Distinctness of the Three Distinct Goods in Republic II”

March 27
Eli Friedlander (University of Tel Aviv)
“The Intuitive Intellect from Kant to Goethe”

April 3 • Prospectives’ Day
CUNY GC Faculty Panel

April 10
Daniel Harris (CUNY Hunter College)
“Indirect Communication”

April 17 • Logic Panel

• Romina Padro (CUNY Graduate Center)
  “The Adoption Problem in Logic”
• Saul Kripke (CUNY Graduate Center)
  “The Adoption Problem and the Quinean Conception of Logic”
• Michael Devitt (CUNY Graduate Center)
  “The Adoption Problem: A Quinean Picture”

April 24 — No Colloquium (Spring Recess)

May 1
Arindam Chakrabarti (SUNY Stony Brook)
“Some Problems Concerning Touch, Touching and the Self-Aware Body”

May 8
Briana Toole (CUNY Baruch College)
“The Not-So-Rational Racist: Articulating a New Epistemic Duty”

In Philosophy in the Library, philosophers from around the world tackle the big questions. In February, we hear from Ethan Hallerman.

None of us today can avoid reflecting on the way our thoughts and habits relate to the tools we use, but interest in how technologies reshape us is both older and broader than contemporary concerns around privacy, distraction, addiction, and isolation. For the past hundred years, scholars have investigated the historical role of everyday technologies in making new forms of experience and senses of selfhood possible, from at least as early as the invention of writing. In recent years, philosophers have considered how our understanding of agency and mental states should be revised in light of the role that the technical environment plays in our basic activities. Here, we will look at how some models of the mind illuminate the results of the philosophy of technology to clarify the relationship between technology and the self.

Ethan Hallerman is a doctoral student in philosophy at Stony Brook University. He lives in New York where he prowls the sewers at night, looking for his father.