The Vanishing Point of Existence: Kierkegaard and the Ethics of the Novel.
Presented by: Yi-Ping Ong, Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Thought and Literature, Johns Hopkins University.
Presented by Liberal Studies at The New School of Social Research
Selected speakers:
According to a pervasive and widespread literature, we came, whether we want it or not, to surround our existences with all sorts of narratives: retrospective interpretations of what came before us and how we were born, anticipative stories about what is to come and what we should expect, and, most of all, restless attempts to describe what our present is made of so that we know how to make sense of it. First-person narratives occupy a central position amongst these varieties of narratives, as they give each of us a chance to provide meaning to our lives and achieve some kind of self-understanding.
Taking a resolutely opposite stance, Sartre (in)famously declared through the voice of the main character of his novel La Nausée that stories cannot but betray the lives they claim to describe, and necessarily fail to be faithful to the very experiencing of life that constitutes its specific grain and texture. In which sense is this failure a failure? In which sense must we consider it a failure, if narratives are the privileged device we use to make sense of existences in general, and ours in particular? Wouldn’t it be both tragic and ironical, from that perspective, that we live our lives in a way that remains impervious to our attempts to bring some meaning over our existence, and that first-person narratives should be regarded as fundamentally inadequate to account for life as we live it?
This paper will address these questions in light of the definition of ‘tragic irony’ that Richard Moran draws from his interpretation of Sartre, understanding tragedy as a clash between forms of significance displayed by incompatible perspectives. We will examine in particular the problem raised by first-person narratives, which conflate the seemingly incompatible perspectives of the narrator and of the character of the story. I will argue that Moran’s view fails to show in which sense the failure of first-person narratives are also, according to Sartre, the condition of their success, and that the irony of life might rely first and foremost on its ability to succeed even when and where it fails. After all, isn’t it the most ironical of it all that Sartre, notwithstanding his harsh critique of the fundamental inadequacy of life narratives, ended his literary career with the publication of his most acclaimed autobiography?
Bio:
Pierre-Jean Renaudie is Assistant Professor of philosophy (phenomenology and contemporary German philosophy) at the University of Lyon. He is the author of a book on Husserl’s theory of knowledge (Husserl et les categories. Langage, pensée et perception, Paris, Vrin, 2015), co-edited a book on phenomenology of matter (Phénoménologies de la matière, with C.V. Spaak, Paris, CNRS Editions, 2020) and published many articles, in French and in English, on the phenomenological tradition and its connection with contemporary issues in philosophy of mind. He is a member of the Institut de recherches philosophiques de Lyon (IRPHIL) and an associate member of the Husserl Archives in Paris.
The Politics department at the New School for Social Research will host its 1st Graduate Conference in Political Theory on March 6-7th, 2020.
We are launching this event to provide graduate students in the history of political thought, political theory and political philosophy an opportunity to present and receive feedback on their work. A total of six (6) papers will be accepted and each of them will receive substantial comments from a New School graduate student, to be followed by a general discussion. We welcome submissions from all traditions, but we are particularly interested in providing a venue for those students working on critical approaches. We would also like to encourage applications from under-represented groups in the field.
We are delighted to announce that Professor Robyn Marasco (Hunter College, City University of New York) will deliver the inaugural keynote address.
Submissions for the conference are due by December 10th, 2019. Papers should not exceed 8,000 words (excluding footnotes and bibliography) and should be sent in PDF format with the help of the electronic form provided below. Papers should be formatted for blind review with no identifying information. Abstracts will not be accepted. A Google account is needed in order to sign-in to the submission form; if you don’t have one, please email us. Papers will be reviewed over the winter break and notifications will be sent out early January 2020.
For any questions, please contact NSSRconferencepoliticaltheory@gmail.com
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfqJWRPS5DBI-zlmS4-3m-FpZA3suckmInHSIlvayKoibzQYg/viewform
https://philevents.org/event/show/77746
The NYU Center for Bioethics is pleased to welcome submissions of abstracts for its 1st Annual Philosophical Bioethics Workshop, to be held at NYU on Friday, April 3, 2020.
We are seeking to showcase new work in philosophical bioethics, including (but not limited to) neuroethics, environmental ethics, animal ethics, reproductive ethics, research ethics, ethics of AI, data ethics, and clinical ethics.
Our distinguished keynote speaker will be Frances Kamm.
There will be four additional slots for papers chosen from among the submitted abstracts, including one slot set aside for a graduate student speaker. The most promising graduate student submission will be awarded a Graduate Prize, which includes coverage of travel expenses (up to $500, plus accommodation for two nights) as well as an award of $500. Please indicate in your submission email whether you would like to be considered for the Graduate Prize.
Please submit extended abstracts of between 750 and 1,000 words to philosophicalbioethics@gmail.com by 11:59 pm EST on Friday, January 24, 2020. Abstracts should be formatted for blind review and should be suitable for presentation in 30-35 minutes. Notification of acceptance will take place via email by Friday, February 14, 2020.
When submitting your abstract, please also indicate whether you would be interested in serving as a commentator in the event that your abstract is not selected for presentation. We will be inviting four additional participants to serve as commentators.
NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH PHILOSOPHY GRADUATE CONFERENCE
Keynote Speakers: Cary Wolfe (Rice) and Lori Gruen (Wesleyan)
This conference seeks to explore the relationship between animals and their environs, as well as the philosophical traditions that speak to these complex notions. We invite participants to question if and how philosophy’s treatment of animals and their environs can help us make sense of our current ecological situation. How have considerations of habitat, dominion, and domesticity determined the (ethical, ontological, rhetorical) status of animals? Conversely, how have presuppositions about “the animal” informed what environs are proper to “man”? What would it mean for an animal to be “at home” in the current world? Can philosophical approaches to animals be more than an instrumentalizing procedure? How will climate change alter not only the vitality of a species but the very grounds from which it lays claim to a home?
We welcome paper submissions of no more than 2500 words, that are prepared for a blind review, and suitable for a 15-20 minute long presentation.
Email your submission (in PDF format) to tns.animalhouse@gmail.com with “Animalhouse Submission” in the subject line. In your email, please include the following details: (a) author’s name; (b) paper title; (c) institutional affiliation; (d) contact information; and (e) abstract of no more than 250 words. Please do not include your name on the paper you are submitting. The deadline for submissions is December 31, 2019. Accepted speakers will be notified by February 1, 2020.
Questions can be directed to Aaron Neber at tns.animalhouse@gmail.com.
For updated program information and full CFP, see: https://animalhouse2020.weebly.com/
https://philevents.org/event/show/77650
Since Plato, western philosophy has been set down a path paved by a disavowal of the sensuous, bracketed material bodies, and delimited aesthetic conceptions, leaving human beings and their built environments separated from the natural world. Such exclusions have left philosophy ill-equipped to deal with the various environmental crises we currently face, as economic rationality and utilitarian logic further de-animate the world and sharpen the human/nature distinction. Even the concept “environment” often, and ironically, brings with it implicit anthropocentric assumptions, conceptualizing, and thereby separating, the human as independent from the surrounding world and reinforcing the human/nature divide. As a result, our (mis)understandings of “nature” and “environment” may make us insensitive to and perpetuate, rather than address, climate change and other environmental catastrophes. To avoid ambiguities and clarify our understanding, we must ask: what role does Nature play within our theories and practices concerning so-called Environmental Philosophy? Furthermore, what spaces, practices, and questions are made possible when we broaden our understanding of “environment” to include a more robust conceptualization of the natural world and how the human being ought to be contextualized within it?
This conference asks how we might reorient the language and practices of philosophy in a way that can enable us to adequately respond to ongoing environmental crises. As a starting point, we propose a need to reimagine the concepts “human,” “nature,” and “environment,” as well as the reciprocal relations that constitute them. To recognize humans as natural organisms, we must reevaluate the sensuous, the material, and the aesthetic and the roles they play in our attempts to construct, understand, and preserve our environment(s). How should we make sense of our practices and our relations to those with whom we share our surroundings? How can we re-situate the human with/in the environment? Do we have the right tools to guide these investigations? How might philosophy look beyond itself—to literature, architecture, music, film, design—to better bring Environment, and thus the world, into view? In the spirit of this, we invite paper as well as project submissions from current graduate students in any discipline.
Possible Topics:
● Environmental Aesthetics: Re-Considering Beauty + the Sublime
● Environmental Justice + Restorative Justice + Transformative Justice
● Environmental Ethics + Sustainable Practices
● Diversity + Biodiversity
● Capitalism and Climate
● Eco-phenomenology
● Eco-deconstruction
● Environmental Racism/Racist Environments
● Ecofeminist conceptions of nature
● Land Rights and Property Relations
● Posthumanism + Object Ontologies
● Afrofuturism + Technological Utopias
● Environmental Ethics In Narratives
● Mastery of Nature in Philosophy
● Anarcho-primitivism
● Queer and Trans Ecologies
● Local and Global Ecologies
● Regionalisms and Globalisms in the Ecological Imagination
Confirmed Conference Keynotes:
Sandra Shapshay, CUNY Graduate Center, New York
Emanuele Coccia, École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris
Dates and Location:
This conference will be held at the New School for Social Research in New York City from Thursday, April 14, to Saturday, April 16. While we (tentatively) plan to hold the conference primarily in-person we would also like to provide a hybrid option for those who would prefer to participate remotely. Following the conference, on Sunday, April 17, all participants and attendees are invited to participate in a conference hike in Cold Spring, NY (about an hour and a half north of NYC and accessible by the Metro North commuter train).
Call for Papers: Submission Procedure:
Please submit complete papers (Word Limit: 3500) and an abstract of 250 words or less by January 1st in the form of a Word attachment (.docx) or PDF to WithInEnvironments@gmail.com. Please prepare your submission for blind review by removing any identifying information from the body of the paper. In your email please include your name, affiliation, and paper title. Notification of acceptance will be sent by January 15.
Call for Projects: Submission Procedure:
Please submit a project description (Word Limit: 1000) by December 1st in the form of a Word attachment (.docx) to WithInEnvironments@gmail.com, as well as:
For Visual Arts projects: submit 5 images of your work as .jpeg.
For Performing Arts projects: submit video/ audio of your work in .mp4 format
Please prepare your submission for blind review by removing any identifying information. In your email please include your name, affiliation, and project title. Notification of acceptance will be sent by January 15.
If you have any questions please email WithInEnvironments@gmail.com
A two-day conference on the philosophy of deep learning, organized by Ned Block (New York University), David Chalmers (New York University) and Raphaël Millière (Columbia University), and jointly sponsored by the Presidential Scholars in Society and Neuroscience program at Columbia University and the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at New York University.
About
The conference will explore current issues in AI research from a philosophical perspective, with particular attention to recent work on deep artificial neural networks. The goal is to bring together philosophers and scientists who are thinking about these systems in order to gain a better understanding of their capacities, their limitations, and their relationship to human cognition.
The conference will focus especially on topics in the philosophy of cognitive science (rather than on topics in AI ethics and safety). It will explore questions such as:
- What cognitive capacities, if any, do current deep learning systems possess?
- What cognitive capacities might future deep learning systems possess?
- What kind of representations can we ascribe to artificial neural networks?
- Could a large language model genuinely understand language?
- What do deep learning systems tell us about human cognition, and vice versa?
- How can we develop a theoretical understanding of deep learning systems?
- How do deep learning systems bear on philosophical debates such as rationalism vs empiricism and classical vs. nonclassical views of cognition.
- What are the key obstacles on the path from current deep learning systems to human-level cognition?
A pre-conference debate on Friday, March 24th will tackle the question “Do large language models need sensory grounding for meaning and understanding ?”. Speakers include Jacob Browning (New York University), David Chalmers (New York University), Yann LeCun (New York University), and Ellie Pavlick (Brown University / Google AI).
Conference speakers
- Cameron Buckner (University of Houston)
- Rosa Cao (Stanford University)
- Ishita Dasgupta (DeepMind)
- Nikolaus Kriegeskorte (Columbia University)
- Brenden Lake (New York University / Meta AI)
- Grace Lindsay (New York University)
- Tal Linzen (New York University / Google AI)
- Raphaël Millière (Columbia University)
- Nicholas Shea (Institute of Philosophy, University of London)
Call for abstracts
We invite abstract submissions for a few short talks and poster presentations related to the topic of the conference. Submissions from graduate students and early career researchers are particularly encouraged. Please send a title and abstract (500-750 words) to phildeeplearning@gmail.com by January 22nd, 2023 (11.59pm EST).
https://philevents.org/event/show/106406
Yejin Choi is Wissner-Slivka Professor and a MacArthur Fellow at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. She is also a senior director at AI2 overseeing the project Mosaic and a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford. Her research investigates if (and how) AI systems can learn commonsense knowledge and reasoning, if machines can (and should) learn moral reasoning, and various other problems in NLP, AI, and Vision including neuro-symbolic integration, language grounding with vision and interactions, and AI for social good. She is a co-recipient of 2 Test of Time Awards (at ACL 2021 and ICCV 2021), 7 Best/Outstanding Paper Awards (at ACL 2023, NAACL 2022, ICML 2022, NeurIPS 2021, AAAI 2019, and ICCV 2013), the Borg Early Career Award (BECA) in 2018, the inaugural Alexa Prize Challenge in 2017, and IEEE AI’s 10 to Watch in 2016.
The violence already systematically inflicted on other earth beings (animals and the environment), and intensifying today intensified through ecological collapse and climate change, is ‘in plain sight’. Yet entrenched epistemic and institutional barriers impede its being registered in ways proportionate to its gravity. While in recent years, philosophers and social theorists have done a good job at explaining why, to use two familiar example, glass walls to abattoirs don’t stop people eating meat, and data on climate change does not catalyse mass mobilization, we have been less adept at delivering our analysis in ways that both illuminate and transform the many sites of dangerous inertia.
Through the experience of living through the Black Summer wildfires, Danielle Celermajer decided to philosophize the impact of climate catastrophe on animals and the environment through the genre of creative non-fiction. The result was Summertime; Reflections on a Vanishing Future, a book that grounds arguments about what ethics and responsibility to other earth beings means in the era of climate catastrophe in the immediate experiences of the members of the multispecies community with whom she lives. In this conversation, Celermajer and Professor Alice Crary will take Summertime as their starting point to reflect on questions of ethics, language, and the responsibility of theorists in the midst of ecological collapse.
Bios:
Danielle Celermajer is Professor of Sociology at the University of Sydney, Deputy Director of the Sydney Environment Institute and leads the Multispecies Justice project. Her books include Sins of the Nation and the Ritual of Apology and The Prevention of Torture, A Cultural History of Law in the Modern Age, The Subject of Human Rights, and Institutional Transformations. Through the experience of living through the black summer bushfires with a multispecies community, she began writing about a new crime of our age, Omnicide. Her book Summertime; Reflections on a Vanishing Future (Penguin Random House, 2021) considers the more-than-human experience of climate catastrophe.