Sep
6
Fri
Seminar in Logic, Games and Language @ CUNY Grad Center, 4421
Sep 6 @ 4:15 pm – 6:15 pm

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.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/social-choice/

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

Sep
24
Tue
Social and Political Philosophy Workshop @ Lowenstein, Plaza View Room (12th Floor)
Sep 24 @ 5:30 pm – 6:45 pm

Meetings are held on Tuesdays at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus in Manhattan in the Plaza View Room on the 12th floor of the 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, swhitney@fordham.edu, or jeflynn@fordham.edu.

2019-20

  • September 24 – Rosaura Martínez (UNAM) “Alterability and Writing. Rethinking an Ontology of Dependency”
  • October 15 – Jesús Luzardo (Fordham) “The Wages of the Past: Whiteness, Nostalgia, and Property”
  • November 19 – Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson (Syracuse) “Conceptualizing Terrorism ‘From Below’: Lynching as Racial Terrorism”
  • February 11 – Jill Stauffer (Haverford)
  • March 10 – Sina Kramer (Loyola Marymount), “How to Read a City: Toward a Political Epistemology of Gentrification.”​
  • April 7 – David Lay Williams (DePaul) “’Too much abundance in one or a few private men’: Hobbes on Inequality and the Concentration of Wealth”
Sep
26
Thu
How To Be An Anti-Capitalist in the 21st Century: A Conference in Memory of Erik Olin Wright @ Wolff Conference Room
Sep 26 all-day

ERIK OLIN WRIGHT spent the last years of his life thinking about ways to challenge and transform capitalist societies. He distilled his thinking in a book, How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21st Century (Verso, 2019). The symposium is designed to launch a debate about the strengths and weaknesses of Wright’s approach. We seek to both honor our colleague’s memory and assure that his ideas become part of current discussions of socialism and socialist strategy. The event will consist of three panels during the day and an evening session that will include tributes to Wright and a keynote by his friend, Ira Katznelson.

For full program and to RSVP please visit capitalismstudies.org/anti-capitalist/
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Schedule
9:00 – 9:30 am | Welomc
William Milberg, The New School for Social Research
Magali Sarfatti-Larson, Temple University
9:30 – 11:30 am | Session 1: Conceptualizing Capitalism
Vivek Chibber, NYU
Stephanie Mudge, University of California, Davis
Michael Dawson, University of Chicago
Discussant: Gianpaolo Baiocchi, NYU
1:00 – 2:45 pm | Session 2: Oppositional discourses and strategies
Stephanie Luce, City University of New York
Glen Coulthard, University of British Columbia
Teresa Ghilarducci, The New School for Social Research
Discussant: Angela Harris, University of California, Davis
3:15 – 5:00 pm | Session 3: Socialism, Human Rights, and Sites of Contestation
Nancy Fraser, The New School for Social Research
Cesar Rodriguez-Garavito, University of los Andes
Sabeel Rahman, Brooklyn Law School
Discussant: TBA
7:00 – 8:00 pm | Remarks on E.O. Wright’s Legacy
Friends and colleagues of Erik Olin Wright will deliver
remarks on his legacy.
8:00 – 9:30 pm Keynote
Ira Katznelson, Columbia University

 

This event is co-sponsored by the Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies at The New School for Social Research, and the journal, Politics & Society.

 

Sep
28
Sat
Isaac Levi Conference and Memorial @ Columbia University, Philosophy rm tba
Sep 28 all-day

Conference Schedule

10AM       Teddy Seidenfeld – Conditional Probability, Conditionalization, and Total Evidence

11AM       Eleonora Cresto – Beyond Indeterminate Utilities. The Case of Neurotic Cake-Cutting

11:20AM  Ignacio Ojea Quintana – Unawareness and Levi’s Consensus as Common Ground

11:40AM  Rush Stewart – Uncertainty, Equality, Fraternity

1PM         Nils-Eric Sahlin – Levi’s Decision Theory: Lessons Learned

1:45PM    Wilfried Sieg – Scientific Theories as Set-Theoretic Predicates?

2:45PM    Panel Discussion – Learning from Levi

Abstracts available in attached documents under “Supporting material.”

Memorial

A memorial service will be held at 5PM at St. Paul’s Chapel on the Columbia campus. Reception to follow on the 7th floor of Philosophy Hall.


https://philevents.org/event/show/75850

Oct
7
Mon
Slavoj Žižek: Disorder Under Heaven @ NYU Skirball Center
Oct 7 @ 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm

Our situation is dangerous, there are uncertainties and elements of chaos in our environment, in international relations, in biotechnology, in sexual relations… But it is here that we should remember Mao’s old motto: “There is great disorder under heaven, so the situation is excellent!” Let’s not lose nerves, let’s exploit the confusion as a chance to propose a new radical vision. In January 2019, an international team of scientists proposed “a diet it says can improve health while ensuring sustainable food production to reduce further damage to the planet.” We are talking about a radical reorganization of our entire food production and distribution—so how to do it? Is it not clear that a strong global agency is needed with the power to coordinate such measures? And is not such an agency pointing in the direction of what we once called “Communism”? And does the same not hold for other threats to our survival as humans? Is a similar global agency not needed also to deal with the problem of increasing numbers of refugees and immigrants, with the problem of digital control over our lives? Let’s not be afraid to tackle the problem of the new order that the ongoing disorder is calling for.

Slavoj Žižek will be introduced by Xudong Zhang, Professor of Comparative Literature & East Asian Studies, and Director of China House at NYU.

About the speakers:

Slavoj Žižek, Ph.D., is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and visiting professor at a number of U.S. Universities (Columbia, Princeton, New School for Social Research, New York University, University of Michigan). He obtained his Ph.D. in Philosophy in Ljubljana studying Psychoanalysis and also studied at the University of Paris. Slavoj Zizek is a Hegelian philosopher, Lacanian psychoanalyst, and Marxist social analyst. He is the author of The Indivisible Remainder; The Sublime Object of Ideology; The Metastases of Enjoyment; Looking Awry: Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture; The Plague of FantasiesThe Ticklish Subject; Disparities; and Antigone. His latest publication, Like a Thief in Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism (Seven Stories Press), will be on sale at the event by the NYU Bookstore.

Xudong Zhang is Professor of Comparative Literature and East Asian Studies at NYU, and founding director of the International Center for Critical Theory (a consortium of Peking University, New York University, University of Tokyo and Eastern China Normal University). He is also Director of China House NYU. He has published widely on critical theory and transcultural comparisons of Chinese and European modernities.

As part of NYU Skirball Talks, the NYU Department of German and Deutsches Haus at NYU present Disorder under Heaven with Slavoj Žižek.

Attendance information:

This event is free and open to the general public. Please RSVP here.

“SKIRBALL TALKS: SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: DISORDER UNDER HEAVEN” is a DAAD-supported event.

Oct
15
Tue
Social and Political Philosophy Workshop @ Lowenstein, Plaza View Room (12th Floor)
Oct 15 @ 5:30 pm – 6:45 pm

Meetings are held on Tuesdays at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus in Manhattan in the Plaza View Room on the 12th floor of the 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, swhitney@fordham.edu, or jeflynn@fordham.edu.

2019-20

  • September 24 – Rosaura Martínez (UNAM) “Alterability and Writing. Rethinking an Ontology of Dependency”
  • October 15 – Jesús Luzardo (Fordham) “The Wages of the Past: Whiteness, Nostalgia, and Property”
  • November 19 – Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson (Syracuse) “Conceptualizing Terrorism ‘From Below’: Lynching as Racial Terrorism”
  • February 11 – Jill Stauffer (Haverford)
  • March 10 – Sina Kramer (Loyola Marymount), “How to Read a City: Toward a Political Epistemology of Gentrification.”​
  • April 7 – David Lay Williams (DePaul) “’Too much abundance in one or a few private men’: Hobbes on Inequality and the Concentration of Wealth”
Oct
17
Thu
Colloquium in Legal, Political, and Social Philosophy: Pop-up Session with Joseph Raz @ NYU Law School - Vanderbilt Hall, 3rd Flr, Faculty Library
Oct 17 @ 4:00 pm – 7:00 pm

Although the Colloquium on Legal, Political, and Social Philosophy is on hiatus this year, it will convene a special “pop-up” session on Thursday, October 17 from 4-7 p.m. in the Faculty Library on the third floor of Vanderbilt Hall. Professor Joseph Raz, who has long been an important member of the Colloquium community, will present a pre-circulated paper on this occasion, which marks the end of many years during which he has taught regularly at Columbia Law School each fall. Professor Raz’s paper will be posted on the Colloquium website in due course.

Positions in Patriarchy: Retooling the Metaphysics of Gender. Robin Dembroff (Yale) @ CUNY Grad Center, rm 5307
Oct 17 @ 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Decades of feminist theory have approached the question ‘what is gender?’ with an eye to gender as a system — in particular, the system that creates and sustains patriarchy. Using this approach, feminists have proposed theories of gender focused on the social positions that persons occupy within a patriarchal system. However, these analyses almost uniformly assume a gender binary (men women), and so look for corresponding, binary social positions. In this talk, I defend the importance of position-based metaphysics of gender, but challenge the assumption that positions in patriarchy can be captured in a binary. Rather than throw out the baby with the bath water, I’ll propose an alternative position-based approach. It begins with modeling the key axes of the patriarchal ‘blueprint’, or the shared beliefs, norms, and attitudes at the core of dominant, western gender ideology. I’ll then build a framework for describing the variety of positions that persons can collectively occupy in relation to this blueprint. A central upshot is that metaphysics intended to illuminate and debunk gender as imagined within the western patriarchal system fails to sufficiently achieve this end when it presupposes the same binary framework. The categories men and women, I’ll argue, are not primarily descriptive, but rather, contested tools with the central function of reinforcing or revising social power.

Presented by SWIP-Analytic

Oct
23
Wed
Moving Up Without Losing Your Way. Jennifer Morton on Education @ Brooklyn Public Library Information Commons Lab
Oct 23 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

Upward mobility through the path of higher education has been an article of faith for generations of working-class, low-income, and immigrant college students. While we know this path usually entails financial sacrifices and hard work, very little attention has been paid to the deep personal compromises such students have to make as they enter worlds vastly different from their own. Measuring the true cost of higher education for those from disadvantaged backgrounds requires that we look at the ethical dilemmas of upward mobility—the broken ties with family and friends, the severed connections with former communities, and the loss of identity—faced by students as they strive to earn a successful place in society. Why are students from disadvantaged backgrounds disproportionately burdened with these costs? And how can institutions of higher education contend with them?

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Brooklyn Public Philosophers is a forum for philosophers in the greater Brooklyn area to discuss their work with a general audience, hosted by the Brooklyn Public Library. Its goal is to raise awareness of the best work on philosophical questions of interest to Brooklynites, and to provide a civil space where Brooklynites can reason together about the philosophical questions that matter to them.

10/23 – Philosophy in the Library: Jennifer Morton on Education @ the Brooklyn Public Library’s Information Commons Lab // 7:30-9:00 PM

11/6 – Philosophy in the Library: Asia Ferrin on Mindfulness @ the Brooklyn Public Library’s Information Commons Lab // 7:30-9:00 PM

12/4 – Philosophy in the Library: Sebastian Purcell on Aztec Philosophy @ the Brooklyn Public Library’s Information Commons Lab // 7:30-9:00 PM