Nov
8
Fri
Conference on Issues in Modern Philosophy: Normativity @ Kimmel Center, Room 914
Nov 8 – Nov 9 all-day

Speakers and Commentators

Buddhism and Politics in Korea @ International Affairs Building, Room 918
Nov 8 @ 1:00 pm – 5:30 pm

Abstracts:

“Giving as Spending and Spending as Giving: Buddhism and the Politics of Spending during the Chosŏn Dynasty”
Juhn Ahn, University of Michigan

The impact of the Koryŏ-Chosŏn transition on the Buddhist establishment in Korea is generally understood in current scholarship to have been a negative one. It is all too often assumed that Buddhist monasteries, who enjoyed great economic prosperity under Koryŏ’s culture of giving, were forced to undergo a radical reduction in size and number and their wealth confiscated to replenish the empty royal fisc. There is also a tendency to assume that this systematic restructuring of the Buddhist establishment, often dubbed its “decline,” was orchestrated and executed by a small group of reform-minded Neo-Confucian scholar-officials who saw Buddhism as an economic parasite and cause of unnecessary spending. It is true that the Buddhist establishment never again enjoyed the kind of wealth that it once did during the Koryŏ, but this paper argues that we should not take this as a sign of decline or the necessary outcome of state suppression. Instead, this paper will turn its attention to the politics of spending that continued to shape and reshape the Chosŏn court and show that the politics of spending provided the Buddhist establishment with an opportunity—an opportunity that it did in fact use—to redefine the conditions of its existence.

“Court Lady Ch’ŏn Ilch’ŏng (1848 – 1934) in the Making of Modern Korean Buddhism”
Hwansoo Kim, Yale University

In this talk, I will introduce the work of a forgotten Korean Buddhist laywoman who served as one of the highest-ranking ladies in the court of the late Chosŏn dynasty. I will demonstrate that Court Lady Ch’ŏn (1848 – 1934) was as integral to modernizing Korean Buddhism during the pre-colonial and colonial era as the Korean Buddhist monastics with whom she worked. By examining Ch’ŏn’s seminal role in the incipient stage of modern Korean Buddhism, the history of female Buddhist leadership can be extended.

Ch’ŏn primarily worked with the Korean monk and leader Yi Hoegwang (1862-1933), drawing on a wide network of relationships both inside and outside the court to help him establish the first modern institution of Korean Buddhism, build the first modern temple in central Seoul, and open a Buddhist clinic. However, because Yi was later condemned by historiography as the worst of Buddhists who had collaborated with Korea’s colonizer, Ch’ŏn’s leadership and legacy were likewise stigmatized and sidelined. This talk seeks to restore Ch’ŏn’s centrality as a Buddhist modernizer, thereby giving balance to a largely male-centered and ethno-centric history and lengthening the lineage of lay female leadership in the transformation of Korean Buddhism in the early twentieth century.

“Buddhism and State Violence in Modern Korea”
Jin Y. Park, American University

Historically, Korean Buddhism has been known as “State Protection Buddhism” (護國佛敎). The seemingly positive character of this description also points to the limitations of Korean Buddhism’s role in the broader context of society. A state should exist to protect its members, but history has witnessed that the state can and did exercise its power against its members. Which members did the Korean government support, and which were sacrificed in the process? What role did Korean Buddhism play in the unfolding of that history?

This presentation deals with Buddhism’s response to state violence in modern Korea. Through an analysis of a specific instance of state violence and Korean Buddhism’s response, the presentation tries to gauge Korean Buddhism’s capacity to engage with the socio-political milieu of human existence.

Co-sponsored by
The Academy of Korean Studies, Seoul Korea; Weatherhead East Asian Institute; the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures; The Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life; The Department of Religion;  The Center for Buddhism and East Asian Religion

Improvising Illocutions and Passionate Perlocutions: Why Sexual Scripts are Insufficient. Lisa McKeown @ New School, rm D906
Nov 8 @ 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm

Recently, Rebecca Kukla – among others – has argued that consent language is too narrow to adequately capture the ethical obligations and failures arising in the context of sex. Instead, she offers more nuanced scripts for the kinds of communication that occur throughout sex, not just at the beginning. I agree with Kukla that consent language is too narrow; however, I argue that she overlooks the fact that intimate personal communication requires an emotional attunement to context precisely because it cannot be fully scripted. To demonstrate this I turn to Cavell’s category of the passionate utterance which gestures at this dynamic dimension of performatives, but doesn’t deliver a detailed account. In this paper I will expand on Cavell’s idea of the passionate exchange in order to shed light on the active interpretive role of the audience, and how it contributes to performative success.

Beyond the Pluralism Dilemma — A Constitutional Reconstruction of Confucian Democracy. Kim Sungmoon @ Columbia University Religion Dept. 101
Nov 8 @ 5:30 pm – 7:30 pm

Recently, a group of scholars has challenged the moral legitimacy of Confucian democracy from a liberal philosophical standpoint. According to these scholars, including political liberals and moderate perfectionists, any attempt to create a Confucian democratic theory inevitably confronts a dilemma—let us call this the pluralism dilemma—with the following two horns: (a) a free society is characterized by the plurality of mutually incompatible, often conflicting, moral, philosophical, and religious doctrines that guide an individual’s conception of the good life and a truly democratic theory is required to accommodate as many reasonable conceptions of the good and comprehensive doctrines as possible and (b) a Confucian democratic theory gives a privileged normative standing to Confucianism over other competing comprehensive doctrines. This paper defends Confucian democracy against this pluralism challenge by articulating its political purpose and constitutional structure, which are commonly dismissed in the critics’ analytical frameworks.

With responses from: OMAR DAHBOUR  (Hunter College & Graduate Center, CUNY)


The Fall dates for the Comparative Philosophy seminar:

September 20 – Justin Tiwald (San Francisco State University)
October 11 – Richard Kim (Loyola University, Chicago
November 8 – Sungmoon Kim (City University of Hong Kong)
December 6 – Paul R. Goldin (University of Pennsylvania)

More details (such as titles, abstracts, and respondents) to follow. Looking forward to seeing you soon.

Hagop Sarkissian
Associate Professor & Chair, Department of Philosophy, The City University of New York, Baruch College
Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, CUNY Graduate Center 
Co-Director, Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy

https://www.cbs.columbia.edu/cscp/

Comparative Philosophy Seminar @ Columbia University Religion Dept. 101
Nov 8 @ 5:30 pm – 7:30 pm

The Fall dates for the Comparative Philosophy seminar:

September 20 – Justin Tiwald (San Francisco State University)
October 11 – Richard Kim (Loyola University, Chicago
November 8 – Sungmoon Kim (City University of Hong Kong)
December 6 – Paul R. Goldin (University of Pennsylvania)

More details (such as titles, abstracts, and respondents) to follow. Looking forward to seeing you soon.

Hagop Sarkissian
Associate Professor & Chair, Department of Philosophy, The City University of New York, Baruch College
Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, CUNY Graduate Center 
Co-Director, Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy

https://www.cbs.columbia.edu/cscp/

Nov
11
Mon
Talking about Reification (Martin Pleitz) @ CUNY Grad Center, 7314
Nov 11 @ 4:15 pm – 6:15 pm

Reification is the systematic association of a non-object with an object that encodes it. Therefore the reificationist must be a trans-objectist – i.e., anyone who thinks that there are instances of reification must also think that some items are not objects. As exemplified by Frege’s puzzle of the concept horse, non-objects and reification are notoriously difficult to talk about. Therefore I will begin my presentation by outlining a formal language that enables the trans-objectist and the reificationist to speak in a way that is not self-undermining. I will go on and employ the framework to give a uniform diagnosis of the set theoretic and semantic paradoxes in terms of static reification that is an alternative to Graham Priest’s Inclosure Schema, and sketch how dynamic reification can provide a uniform solution to the paradoxes as well as a general account of the constitution of abstract objects. In order to achieve this it will be crucial to import some tools of Procedural Postulationism, a dynamic account of the ontology of mathematics developed by Kit Fine.


Logic and Metaphysics Workshop

September 2 GC Closed NO MEETING

September 9 Yael Sharvit, UCLA

September 16  Ole Hjortland and Ben Martin, Bergen

September 23 Alessandro Rossi, StAndrews

September 30 GC Closed NO MEETING

October 7 Dongwoo Kim, GC

October 14 GC Closed NO MEETING

October 21 Rohit Parikh, GC

October 28 Barbara Montero, GC

November 4 Sergei Aretmov, GC

November 11 Martin Pleitz, Muenster

November 18

November 25
December 2 Jessica Wilson, Toronto

December 9 Mark Colyvan, Sydney

December 16  MAYBE A MEETING; MAYBE NOT

Philosophy of Language Workshop @ NYU Philosophy Dept. rm 302
Nov 11 @ 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm

We’re a community of philosophers of language centered in New York City. We have a meeting each week at which a speaker presents a piece of their own work relating to the philosophy of language.

Sept 9
Donka Farkas (Santa Cruz)

Sept 16
John Maackay (U Wisconsin–Madison)

Sept 23
Andrew Bacon (USC)

Sept 30
Eleonore Neufeld (USC)

Oct 7
Eli Alshanetsky (Temple)

Oct 21
Gabe Dupre (UCLA)

Oct 28
Dorit Bar-On (UConn)

Nov 4
Sam Berstler (Princeton)

Nov 11
Robert Henderson (Arizona)

Nov 18
Sam Cumming (UCLA)

Nov 25
Harvey Lederman (Princeton)

Dec 2
Sarah Fisher (Reading)

Dec 9
Michael Glanzberg (Northwestern)

Nov
13
Wed
Brown Bag Talk: Kate Bresee @ Philosophy LC Room, Collins Hall
Nov 13 @ 2:15 pm – 3:15 pm

Contact Stephen Grimm for more information.

CUNY Colloquium @ CUNY Grad Center, rm 9205/6
Nov 13 @ 4:15 pm – 6:15 pm

Each colloquium is held on Wednesday at 4:15 P.M. All colloquia will take place at the Graduate Center in rooms 9205/9206 except as otherwise noted. Please call (212) 817-8615 for further information.

Download an interactive PDF version of the schedule here.


September 11 • Jonathan Adler Memorial Lecture
Philip Kitcher (Columbia University)
“Progress in the Sciences—and in the Arts”

September 18 • Note: colloquium will begin at 5:45pm
Jason Stanley (Yale University)
“Hustle: The Politics of Language”

September 25 • Note: colloquium will be held in C201/C202
Noël Carroll (CUNY Graduate Center)
“Forget Taste”

October 2
Zoë Johnson King (New York University)
“Radical Internalism”

October 23
Michelle M. Dyke (New York University)
“Could Our Epistemic Reasons Be Collective Practical Reasons?”

October 30
Stephen Grover (CUNY Queens College | Graduate Center)
“The Problem of Ugliness”

November 6
Sari Kisilevsky (CUNY Queens College)
“The Ethics of Punishment in the Age of Mass Incarceration”

November 13
Taylor Carman (Columbia University)
“Heidegger’s Nietzsche”

November 20
Luvell Anderson (Syracuse University)Co-hosted by Minorities and Philosophy (MAP), CUNY GC Chapter
“Navigating Racial Satire”

November 27 • All-day Workshop for Practice Job Talks (Note: attendance limited to CUNY community)
TBD (CUNY Graduate Center)
TBD

December 4 • All-day Workshop for Practice Job Talks (Note: attendance limited to CUNY community)
TBD (CUNY Graduate Center)
TBD

December 11 • Alumni Day
Elvira Basevich (University of Massachusetts Lowell)
“Du Bois’s Theory of Justice”

 

In Praise of Clausius Entropy: Reassessing the Foundations of Boltzmannian Statistical Mechanics. Christopher Weaver (University of Illinois) @ NYU Philosophy Dept. rm 302
Nov 13 @ 4:30 pm – 6:30 pm

I will argue, pace a great many of my contemporaries, that there’s something right about Boltzmann’s attempt to ground the 2nd law of thermodynamics in deterministic time-reversal invariant classical dynamics, and that in order to appreciate what’s right about (what was at least at one time) Boltzmann’s explanatory project one has to fully apprehend the nature of (a) microphysical causal structure, (b) time-reversal invariance, and (c) the relationship between Boltzmann entropy and the work of Rudolf Clausius.

There will be dinner after the talk. If you are interested, please send an email with “Dinner” in the heading to nyphilsci@gmail.com (please note that all are welcome, but only the speaker’s dinner will be covered.) If you have any other questions, please email denise.dykstra@rutgers.edu.