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:
Organisers:
When we’re asked to give examples of philosophical questions, we’re likely to think of questions that are very, very old. Is the physical world all there is? How should I live? How do we know what we know? But some philosophical problems are quite new, made possible or urgent by new developments in science and culture. These are often the most exciting problems to think through.
On March 7th at 7:30 PM, Derek Skillings joins Brooklyn Public Philosophers to share his work on the philosophical consequences of the fact that we are holobionts – biological units composed of hosts and their associated swarms of microorganisms. If you’re interested in health, the problem of personal identity, the philosophy of biology in general, or the philosophical consequences of the fact that we’re made up of a bunch of little things which are themselves alive in particular, you’ll want to check this one out. Here’s the abstract:
“I, holobiont. Are you and your microbes a community or a single entity?”
You are a holobiont – a biological unit made up of a host and its associated microbiome (bacteria, protists, viruses and other microscopic entities). What consequences does this have for how we understand ourselves and other similar organisms? What are our spatial and temporal boundaries, and what does it mean to be a healthy holobiont? In this talk I will look at some alternatives for making sense of both holobiont individuality and “healthy holobiont/microbiome” talk. I will argue that existing accounts of human health are not appropriate for microbiomes, and that notions of ecosystem health face similar shortcomings. I will end by looking at some possibilities for understanding overall host health given the importance and ubiquity of microbiomes.
As usual, we meet at the Dweck Center at the Grand Army Plaza branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. Here’s the Facebook event! Tell everyone, please!
- 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 12May 7 – Robin Celikates (Amsterdam/IAS), “Radical Civility? Civil Disobedience and the Ideology of Non-Violence”
John Dewey, in his resistance to foundational individualism, declares that individual autonomy so conceived is a fiction; for Dewey, it is association that is a fact. In his own language: “There is no sense in asking how individuals come to be associated. They exist and operate in association.” In a way that resonates with Confucian role ethics, the revolutionary Dewey particularizes the fact of associated living and valorizes it by developing a vision of the habitude of unique, defused, relationally-constituted human beings. That is, he develops a distinctive, if not idiosyncratic language of habits and “individuality” to describe the various modalities of association that enable human beings to add value to their activities and to transform mere relations into a communicating community.
In Confucian role ethics, Dewey’s contention that association is a fact is restated in a different vocabulary by appealing to specific roles rather than unique habitudes for stipulating the specific forms that association takes within lives lived in family and community—that is, the various roles we live as sons and teachers, grandmothers and neighbors. For Confucianism, not only are these roles descriptive of our associations, they are also prescriptive in the sense that roles in family and community are themselves normative, guiding us in the direction of appropriate conduct. Whereas for both Confucianism and Dewey, mere association is a given, flourishing families and communities are what we are able to make of our facticity as the highest human achievement.
- 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 12May 7 – Robin Celikates (Amsterdam/IAS), “Radical Civility? Civil Disobedience and the Ideology of Non-Violence”
- 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 12May 7 – Robin Celikates (Amsterdam/IAS), “Radical Civility? Civil Disobedience and the Ideology of Non-Violence”
The universe plausibly has an infinite future and an infinite past. Given unlimited time, every qualitative state that has ever occurred will occur again, infinitely many times. There will thus exist in the future persons arbitrarily similar to you, in any desired respects. A person sufficiently similar to you in the right respects will qualify as literally another incarnation of you. Some theories about the nature of persons rule this out; however, these theories also imply, given an infinite past, that your present existence is a probability-zero event. Hence, your present existence is evidence against such theories of persons.
Vegan reception to follow.
- 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 12May 7 – Robin Celikates (Amsterdam/IAS), “Radical Civility? Civil Disobedience and the Ideology of Non-Violence”
Our next meeting will be on September 6 and we will go over Christian List’s survey article on Social Choice from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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