Sep
27
Fri
NYC Nietzsche Group: Michael Begun (Fordham) @ Plaza View Room (12th Floor)
Sep 27 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Presented by Fordham Philosophy

Oct
10
Thu
Reconstructing Nietzsche, Contextually. Matthew Meyer @ Wolff Conference Room, D1106
Oct 10 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

I defend a contextual reconstruction of Nietzsche’s philosophical project. My contextualist reconstruction contrasts with the rationalist reconstruction predominant in contemporary Anglo-American scholarship. After discussing the differences between the two approaches, I show how the rationalist reconstruction has distorted our understanding of Nietzsche in at least two respects. First, in trying to extract theories from Nietzsche’s corpus that will be attractive to contemporary philosophers, it has caused scholars largely to neglect the nature, structure, and argument of Nietzsche’s published works. Here, I make my case by focusing on common misunderstandings of Nietzsche’s free spirit works. Second, it has caused scholars to tame Nietzsche’s project by dismissing Thus Spoke Zarathustra as mere poetry and distancing Nietzsche from controversial ideas such as the will to power and the eternal recurrence. In contrast, I argue that by reading Nietzsche as a naturalist through the lens of a historical influence like Schopenhauer, rather than anachronistically through Quine, we can begin to make sense of these essential features of his project. I close with some remarks about why a contextual reconstruction may not only be truer to Nietzsche, but also more philosophically satisfying than the rationally reconstructed Nietzsche currently on offer.

Oct
18
Fri
NYC Nietzsche Group: Dylan Bailey (Fordham) @ Plaza View Room (12th Floor)
Oct 18 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Contact Sara Pope for more information.

Nov
22
Fri
NYC Nietzsche Group: Yunus Tuncel (New School) @ Plaza View Room (12th Floor)
Nov 22 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Contact Sara Pope for more information.

Dec
5
Thu
Absolute Provability and Intuitionistic Tense. Vincent A. Peluce @ CUNY Grad Center, 9206
Dec 5 @ 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm

Well-known ties between arithmetical proof and intuitionistic logic make it natural to think of provability in terms of intuitionistic logic and hence absolute provability in terms of one of its extensions. For this reason, we propose Intuitionistic Tense Logic, or tINT, to study absolute provability. We delineate tINT models and a Hilbert-style system, and then prove soundness and completeness. We then use the tINT framework to discuss and compare ideas of absolute provability of authors in the literature.

The Saul Kripke Center is pleased to announce that Vincent A. Peluce (PhD student, Philosophy, CUNY Graduate Center) will deliver the fourth Saul Kripke Center Young Scholars Series talk on Thursday, December 5, 2019, from 2:00 to 4:00 in room 9206 of the CUNY Graduate Center.

Apr
6
Mon
Understanding Mathematical Explanation: Uniting Philosophical and Educational Perspectives @ Graduate School of Education, Rutgers
Apr 6 – Apr 7 all-day

The workshop is funded by the National Science Foundation (SES-1921688) and is aimed at bringing together academics who study the notion of mathematical explanation from philosophical and from educational/psychological perspectives. The idea is to bring together philosophers of mathematics, epistemologists, psychologists, and mathematics educators, to discuss how developments in their own fields could meaningfully contribute to the work on mathematical explanation where their fields intersect. In particular, we want to explore the ways in which mathematical explanation engenders understanding, by focusing on (1) the relationship between different types of philosophical accounts of mathematical explanation, (2) educational approaches to the characterization of effective explanations in the mathematics classroom, and (3) work at the intersection of these two perspectives.

All speakers:

Mark Colyvan
University of Sydney

Matthew Inglis
Loughborough University

Marc Lange
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Tania Lombrozo
Princeton University

Alexander Renkl
University of Freiburg

Keith Weber
Rutgers University – New Brunswick

Orit Zaslavsky
New York University

Nov
16
Thu
From Harlem to the World: Philosophy from a Center of the Black World with Questions for the 21st Century. Lewis Gordon (UConn) @ North Academic Building, rm 1/201
Nov 16 @ 6:00 pm – 7:15 pm

The speaker will be Prof. Lewis Gordon of the University of Connecticut, on “From Harlem to the World: Philosophy from a Center of the Black World with Questions for the 21st Century.” Gordon will talk about worldliness and public aspects of philosophy, placing them in the context of Harlem both at City College and the public world of Africana philosophy from Du Bois to Malcolm X to contemporaries such as Nathalie Etoke. He will conclude with a set of questions for 21st century philosophy to consider.

Lewis R. Gordon is Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy at UCONN-Storrs; Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies; Honorary Professor in the Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes University, South Africa; and Distinguished Scholar at The Most Honourable PJ Patterson Centre for Africa-Caribbean Advocacy at The University of the West Indies, Mona. He co-edits the journal Philosophy and Global Affairs, the Rowman & Littlefield book series Global Critical Caribbean Thought, and the Routledge-India book series Academics, Politics and Society in the Post-Covid World. He is the author of many books, including, most recently, Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (Routledge, 2021) and Fear of Black Consciousness (hardcover, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022; in the UK, London: Penguin Books, 2022), Picador paperback 2023. He is the 2022 recipient of the Eminent Scholar Award from the Global Development Studies division of the International Studies Association.

Feb
2
Fri
Nietzsche and Music @ Arnold Hall rm i400
Feb 2 @ 6:00 pm – 8:30 pm

Nietzsche (1844-1900) is one of the few philosophers who have an intimate connection to music. This connection has much to do with his early music education. His contemporaries testify that he was a good pianist. His musical ambition, or his musical daimon, urged him to compose music, although he had no training in this area. Most of his compositions are from his late teens; his earliest inspirations are Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Schubert, Schumann and Wagner. His compositions were gathered together and published by Curt Paul Janz in Friedrich Nietzsche, Der musikalische Nachlass. Nietzsche’s music is available in several productions. However, Nietzsche did not follow a musical path and decided to become a philologist and dedicated his life to writing and philosophy.

Nietzsche’s background in music, on the other hand, influenced his way of thinking and writing. All of these interesting areas between music, literature, and philosophy and Nietzsche’s relationship to music understood on a broad spectrum have been explored by many Nietzsche scholars including Georges Liébert, Graham Parkes, Francois Noudelmann, Stefan Lorenz Sorgner and others and in the anthology, An Anthology on Nietzsche and Music: Philosophical Thoughts and Musical Experiments, edited by the presenters of today’s event. This event is dedicated to the exploration of this relationship between Nietzsche and music.