Mar
2
Sat
NYC Workshop in Early Modern Philosophy: Freedom and Evil @ Fordham Lincoln Center
Mar 2 – Mar 3 all-day

The workshop, which is now in its 9th year, aims to foster exchange and collaboration among scholars, students, and anyone with an interest in Early Modern Philosophy. This year’s workshop will focus on the topic of “Freedom and Evil” in Early Modern Philosophy (roughly the period from 1600-1800).

We welcome submissions on the conference topic, which may be broadly construed to include the problem of free will, theodicy, political and social liberty, and evil practices and institutions. For consideration, please submit abstracts of 250-300 words to newyorkcityearlymodern@gmail.com no later than December 31, 2018.

Keynote speakers:

(unaffiliated)
Boston University

Organisers:

(unaffiliated)
Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan
Fordham University
Mar
12
Tue
Social and Political Philosophy Workshop @ Law School rm 8-01
Mar 12 @ 5:30 pm – 6:45 pm
Meetings are held on Tuesdays at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus in Manhattan in the Plaza View Room, 12th Floor, Lowenstein Building (113 W. 60th St). We meet from 5:30 to 6:45 and papers are read in advance. If interested in attending, contact sahaddad@fordham.edu or jeflynn@fordham.edu.
  • September 18 – Cristina Beltrán (NYU)
  • October 9 – Jennifer Scuro (New Rochelle) – “Mapping Ableist Biases: Diagnoses and Prostheses”
  • November 6 – Lillian Cicerchia (Fordham)
  • March 12 – Rahel Jaeggi (Humboldt)
  • April 9 – Ann Murphy (New Mexico), “Hunger on Campus: Continental Philosophy and Basic Needs”
  • April 16 – Rahel Jaeggi (Humboldt/IAS), “Criticism and Its Discontents: A Defense of an Immanent Critique of Forms of Life”
  • February 12 May 7 – Robin Celikates (Amsterdam/IAS), “Radical Civility? Civil Disobedience and the Ideology of Non-Violence”
Mar
26
Tue
Epistemology and Ethics Workshop @ Plaza View Room, 12th Floor
Mar 26 @ 5:30 pm – 6:45 pm

AY 2018 – 19 Workshop Schedule

September 25th – Avery Archer (GWU)

October 16th – Daniel Singer (Penn)

November 13th – Ariel Zylberman (SUNY Albany)

February 26th – Vita Emery (Fordham)

March 26th – Kathryn Tabb (Columbia)

April 23rd – Carol Hay (UMass Lowell)

The Epistemology and Ethics group is composed of faculty and graduate students at Fordham and other nearby universities. Papers are read in advance, so the majority of the time is devoted to questions and discussion.

Location: Plaza View Room, 12th Floor, Lowenstein Bldg., 113 West 60th Street. If interested in attending, email dheney[at]fordham[dot]edu.

Mar
29
Fri
Bjorndahl: The Epistemology of Nondeterminism. Logic, Probability, and Games Seminar @ Faculty House, Columbia U
Mar 29 @ 4:00 pm

Propositional dynamic logic (PDL) is a framework for reasoning about nondeterministic program executions (or, more generally, nondeterministic actions). In this setting, nondeterminism is taken as a primitive: a program is nondeterministic iff it has multiple possible outcomes. But what is the sense of “possibility” at play here? This talk explores an epistemic interpretation: working in an enriched logical setting, we represent nondeterminism as a relationship between a program and an agent deriving from the agent’s (in)ability to adequately measure the dynamics of the program execution. More precisely, using topology to capture the observational powers of an agent, we define the nondeterministic outcomes of a given program execution to be those outcomes that the agent is unable to rule out in advance. In this framework, determinism coincides exactly with continuity: that is, determinism is continuity in the observation topology. This allows us to embed PDL into (dynamic) topological (subset space) logic, laying the groundwork for a deeper investigation into the epistemology (and topology) of nondeterminism.

The seminar is concerned with applying formal methods to fundamental issues, with an emphasis on probabilistic reasoning, decision theory and games. In this context “logic” is broadly interpreted as covering applications that involve formal representations. The topics of interest have been researched within a very broad spectrum of different disciplines, including philosophy (logic and epistemology), statistics, economics, and computer science. The seminar is intended to bring together scholars from different fields of research so as to illuminate problems of common interest from different perspectives. Throughout each academic year, meetings are regularly presented by the members of the seminar and distinguished guest speakers.

details tba

02/08/2019 Faculty House, Columbia University
4:00 PM

03/29/2019 Faculty House, Columbia University
4:00 PM

04/19/2018 Faculty House, Columbia University
4:00 PM

Apr
9
Tue
Social and Political Philosophy Workshop @ Law School rm 8-01
Apr 9 @ 5:30 pm – 6:45 pm
Meetings are held on Tuesdays at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus in Manhattan in the Plaza View Room, 12th Floor, Lowenstein Building (113 W. 60th St). We meet from 5:30 to 6:45 and papers are read in advance. If interested in attending, contact sahaddad@fordham.edu or jeflynn@fordham.edu.
  • September 18 – Cristina Beltrán (NYU)
  • October 9 – Jennifer Scuro (New Rochelle) – “Mapping Ableist Biases: Diagnoses and Prostheses”
  • November 6 – Lillian Cicerchia (Fordham)
  • March 12 – Rahel Jaeggi (Humboldt)
  • April 9 – Ann Murphy (New Mexico), “Hunger on Campus: Continental Philosophy and Basic Needs”
  • April 16 – Rahel Jaeggi (Humboldt/IAS), “Criticism and Its Discontents: A Defense of an Immanent Critique of Forms of Life”
  • February 12 May 7 – Robin Celikates (Amsterdam/IAS), “Radical Civility? Civil Disobedience and the Ideology of Non-Violence”
Apr
16
Tue
Social and Political Philosophy Workshop @ Law School rm 8-01
Apr 16 @ 5:30 pm – 6:45 pm
Meetings are held on Tuesdays at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus in Manhattan in the Plaza View Room, 12th Floor, Lowenstein Building (113 W. 60th St). We meet from 5:30 to 6:45 and papers are read in advance. If interested in attending, contact sahaddad@fordham.edu or jeflynn@fordham.edu.
  • September 18 – Cristina Beltrán (NYU)
  • October 9 – Jennifer Scuro (New Rochelle) – “Mapping Ableist Biases: Diagnoses and Prostheses”
  • November 6 – Lillian Cicerchia (Fordham)
  • March 12 – Rahel Jaeggi (Humboldt)
  • April 9 – Ann Murphy (New Mexico), “Hunger on Campus: Continental Philosophy and Basic Needs”
  • April 16 – Rahel Jaeggi (Humboldt/IAS), “Criticism and Its Discontents: A Defense of an Immanent Critique of Forms of Life”
  • February 12 May 7 – Robin Celikates (Amsterdam/IAS), “Radical Civility? Civil Disobedience and the Ideology of Non-Violence”
Apr
23
Tue
Epistemology and Ethics Workshop @ Plaza View Room, 12th Floor
Apr 23 @ 5:30 pm – 6:45 pm

AY 2018 – 19 Workshop Schedule

September 25th – Avery Archer (GWU)

October 16th – Daniel Singer (Penn)

November 13th – Ariel Zylberman (SUNY Albany)

February 26th – Vita Emery (Fordham)

March 26th – Kathryn Tabb (Columbia)

April 23rd – Carol Hay (UMass Lowell)

The Epistemology and Ethics group is composed of faculty and graduate students at Fordham and other nearby universities. Papers are read in advance, so the majority of the time is devoted to questions and discussion.

Location: Plaza View Room, 12th Floor, Lowenstein Bldg., 113 West 60th Street. If interested in attending, email dheney[at]fordham[dot]edu.

May
7
Tue
Social and Political Philosophy Workshop @ Law School rm 8-01
May 7 @ 5:30 pm – 6:45 pm
Meetings are held on Tuesdays at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus in Manhattan in the Plaza View Room, 12th Floor, Lowenstein Building (113 W. 60th St). We meet from 5:30 to 6:45 and papers are read in advance. If interested in attending, contact sahaddad@fordham.edu or jeflynn@fordham.edu.
  • September 18 – Cristina Beltrán (NYU)
  • October 9 – Jennifer Scuro (New Rochelle) – “Mapping Ableist Biases: Diagnoses and Prostheses”
  • November 6 – Lillian Cicerchia (Fordham)
  • March 12 – Rahel Jaeggi (Humboldt)
  • April 9 – Ann Murphy (New Mexico), “Hunger on Campus: Continental Philosophy and Basic Needs”
  • April 16 – Rahel Jaeggi (Humboldt/IAS), “Criticism and Its Discontents: A Defense of an Immanent Critique of Forms of Life”
  • February 12 May 7 – Robin Celikates (Amsterdam/IAS), “Radical Civility? Civil Disobedience and the Ideology of Non-Violence”
May
31
Fri
Humane Understanding Conference @ Fordham Lincoln Center
May 31 – Jun 1 all-day

As work on the nature of understanding has expanded in recent years, there has been increasing interest in the question of what might be distinctive about our understanding of other people, or humane understanding.

Our conference will explore this question, and consider how recent debates might be enriched by insights from areas such as epistemology, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of social science, the hermeneutical tradition, and the “verstehen” tradition in Continental philosophy.

Confirmed Speakers:

Olivia Bailey (Tulane)

Kristin Gjesdal (Temple)

Stephen R. Grimm (Fordham)

Kareem Khalifa (Middlebury)

Michael Strevens (NYU)

Karsten Stueber (Holy Cross)

Call for Abstracts:

3-4 spots on the program will be filled via a call for abstracts. Submitted abstracts should be no longer than 500 words, and should be emailed to sgrimm@fordham.edu by December 1, 2018. Meals at the conference will be covered, but scholars whose abstracts are selected will cover their own travel and lodging costs. Abstracts should try to engage with the following questions:

How does understanding people differ from other kinds of understanding, such as the understanding of concepts, language, or natural phenomena? Do these various types of understanding bring different cognitive resources to bear, or have different epistemic profiles?

Is there a deep unity among these types of understanding, or not?

What are the distinctive ways in which the study of literature or art or history enhance our understanding of other people?

What role does the reenactment of another’s perspective play in humane understanding? Is it merely a heuristic for discovering a person’s mental states (as Hempel seemed to think) or does it play a more epistemically robust role? Is reenactment of this sort indispensable to intentional-action explanation?

How does recent research on social cognition and mindreading bear on older debates about Verstehen?

How does the hermeneutical tradition shed light on these issues? Is it engaged with different questions, or does it pursue them from a distinctively different angle?

How do we adjudicate between competing interpretations of people’s actions?

What contribution does memory make to humane understanding?

Sep
20
Fri
Black Radical Kantianism. Charles Mills (CUNY) @ 302 Philosophy, Columbia U
Sep 20 @ 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm

This essay tries to develop a “black radical Kantianism” – that is, a Kantianism informed by the black experience in modernity. After looking briefly at socialist and feminist appropriations of Kant, I argue that an analogous black radical appropriation should draw on the distinctive social ontology and view of the state associated with the black radical tradition. In ethics, this would mean working with a (color-conscious rather than colorblind) social ontology of white persons and black sub-persons and then asking what respect for oneself and others would require under those circumstances. In political philosophy, it would mean framing the state as a Rassenstaat (a racial state) and then asking what measures of corrective justice would be necessary to bring about the ideal Rechtsstaat.

Response by César Cabezas Gamarra.

Presented by the German Idealism Workshop