Mar
5
Thu
Overdoing Democracy: Robert B. Talisse in conversation with Oliver Burkeman @ CUNY Grad Center, Segal Theater
Mar 5 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

The fate of democracy is increasingly in doubt, in America and around the world. But what if the greatest danger for democratic societies comes from within? In his insightful new book, philosopher Robert B. Talisse reports that he has seen the enemy and it is us: we are overdoing democracy, making every issue a political issue and every human engagement a political interaction. If we hope to save democracy, Talisse argues, we need to put politics in its place. Please join us for this essential discussion as Talisse is joined by The Guardian columnist Oliver Burkeman.

Presented by the Gotham Philosophical Society

Co-Sponsored by the CUNY Academy for the Humanities and Sciences

Robert B. Talisse is W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. His latest book, Overdoing Democracy: Why We Must Put Politics in its Place, argues that when citizen allow their political divides to infiltrate the entirely of the social worlds, they actually erode their capacities for competent democratic citizenship.

Oliver Burkeman is a New York based columnist for The Guardian and the author of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking.

Mar
6
Fri
1st Graduate Conference in Political Theory @ Politics Dept. New School
Mar 6 – Mar 7 all-day

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

Mar
10
Tue
Social and Political Philosophy Workshop @ Lowenstein, Plaza View Room (12th Floor)
Mar 10 @ 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”
Mar
26
Thu
Zōē, Politics, and Human Animality: Aristotle contra Agamben. Sara Brill @ Wolff Conference Room, D1103
Mar 26 @ 6:00 pm

A recent spate of critical engagements with Giorgio Agamben’s construction of the zōē, /bios distinction calls for renewed evaluation of the political valence of zōē in Aristotle’s political theory. While there may be ways of responding to these criticisms from within Agamben’s work, I am more interested in proposing an alternative account of zōē, one that better accommodates the breadth of Aristotle’s thinking about living beings, the context of ancient Greek conceptions of life, and a genealogical task that could be of service to a variety of strands of contemporary critical theory. Taking Aristotle’s treatment of zōē as an object of desire as my point of origin, I locate this orientation toward life within a broader conception of power as generativity and an alienated approach to the material conditions of human birth. I then trace the model of politics, zōē-politics, that arises from this framework.

Bio:
Sara Brill is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Fairfield University. She works on the psychology, politics, and zoology of Plato and Aristotle as well as contemporary feminist and political theory. She is the author of Plato on the Limits of Human Life (Indiana 2013), Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life (forthcoming from Oxford University press in May 2020), co-editor of Antiquities beyond Humanism (Oxford 2019), and has published numerous articles on Plato, Aristotle, Greek tragedy, and the Hippocratic corpus.

Apr
7
Tue
Social and Political Philosophy Workshop @ Lowenstein, Plaza View Room (12th Floor)
Apr 7 @ 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”
Apr
10
Fri
9th Annual Radical Democracy Conference “Radical Ecologies” @ Department of Politics, The New School for Social Research
Apr 10 – Apr 11 all-day

The 9th annual Radical Democracy conference, sponsored by the Department of Politics at The New School for Social Research, will convene theorists and practitioners around the theme of Radical Ecologies. In the year that “climate strike” was named word of the year by Collins Dictionary, we seek to explore what opportunities for democratic resistance can be found in a multiplicity of ecologies. The conference will provide a platform for dialogue on the urgent question of our future in a post-climate change world.

Against the backdrop of increasingly visible and devastating climate disasters, resurgent environmental movements are embracing divergent visions and methods of struggle to realize change. As such, it is timely to ask, What makes an ecology radical? A multitude of intersecting traditions have sought to answer this question. An eco-feminist might approach this through the lens of social reproduction. An eco-socialist might frame radical ecology in terms of a mode of production beyond capitalism that can sustain and replenish nature. Indigenous perspectives can draw on centuries of resistance to extractive colonial capitalism. The conference will consider how a radical ecological praxis can be pursued within this plurality of histories, cosmologies and schools of thought, and, crucially, examine what we can learn from the work of activists on the frontline. We therefore call on both scholars and activists to engage in a fruitful dialogue on the still unsettled relationship between politics and the environment.

We seek abstracts and panel proposals that grapple with this issue across a broad range of perspectives and disciplines, including, but by no means limited to:

  • environmental social movements past, present and future;
  • indigenous, subaltern, decolonial and posthuman perspectives and strategies of resistance;
  • the urgency of converging ecological crises, and strategic possibilities and limitations of confronting it within existing political systems;
  • the theoretical and ontological underpinnings of environmentalism in the global North, and critiques thereof;
  • networks of alliance across geographical space, disciplinary boundaries, and patterns and institutions of oppression;
  • materialist analyses of winners and losers in the clean energy transition and ecological sustainability movement;
  • questions of future(s) and intergenerational ethics;
  • meditations on the relations between aesthetics, activism, and the nonhuman.

The conference will take place over two days, the structure of which will include graduate-student panels, an indigenous activist-scholar roundtable, and a keynote address.

For individual paper proposals, please submit a one-page abstract (max. 300 words) that includes institutional affiliation, academic level and contact information. Complete panel proposals with up to four papers are strongly encouraged.

Please submit your paper or panel abstracts by February 1st, 2020, to radicaldemocracy@newschool.edu. Selected participants will be notified March 1st, 2020. Full conference papers are due by April 5, 2020.

https://philevents.org/event/show/78134

Apr
23
Thu
Animalhouse: Animals and Their Environs. @ Philosophy Dept., New School
Apr 23 – Apr 24 all-day

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

Sep
2
Thu
Colloquium in Legal, Political, and Social Philosophy @ Lester Pollock Colloquium Room, Furman Hall, 9th floo
Sep 2 @ 4:00 pm – 7:00 pm

The Colloquium in Legal, Political, and Social Philosophy was founded by Ronald Dworkin and Thomas Nagel in 1987. It is the original model for all of NYU Law’s colloquia. The Colloquium is now convened by Liam Murphy, Samuel Scheffler, and Jeremy Waldron, two of whom will host in any given year.

Each week on Thursday a legal theorist or moral or political philosopher presents a paper to the group, which consists of students, faculty from the Law School and other departments of NYU, and faculty from other universities. The choice of subject is left to the paper’s author, within the general boundaries of the Colloquium’s subjects, and the discussions are therefore not connected by any structured theme for the term as a whole, though in past years certain central topics were canvassed in several weeks’ discussion. The Colloquium aims, not to pursue any particular subject, but to explore new work in considerable depth and so allow students to develop their own skill in theoretical analysis.

Each week’s paper is posted at least a week in advance on this page, and participants are expected to have read it.

The public sessions of the colloquium will take place on Thursdays, in Lester Pollock Colloquium Room, Furman Hall, 9th floor,  from 4:00 to 7:00 pm.

Colloquium 2021

Professors Liam Murphy and Samuel Scheffler

September 2nd
Kim Ferzan, University of Pennsylvania, Law

Rethinking Credit for Time Served

September 9th
Liam Murphy, NYU

International Responsibility for Global Environment Harm: Collective and Individual

September 17th ( Friday 2.00-5.00)
Moshe Halbertal, NYU

On Being Human

September 23rd
Jeff McMahan, Oxford

September 30th
Emma Kaufman, NYU Law

October 7th
Rick Pildes, NYU Law

October 14th
Samuel Scheffler, NYU

October 21st
Steve Darwall, Yale, Philosophy

October 28th
Chris Kutz, University of California, Berkeley, Law

November 4th
Anthony Appiah, NYU

November 11th
Johann Frick, University of California, Berkeley, Philosophy

November 18th
Teresa Bejan, Oxford

December 2nd
Ruth Chang, Oxford

Sep
9
Thu
Colloquium in Legal, Political, and Social Philosophy @ Lester Pollock Colloquium Room, Furman Hall, 9th floo
Sep 9 @ 4:00 pm – 7:00 pm

The Colloquium in Legal, Political, and Social Philosophy was founded by Ronald Dworkin and Thomas Nagel in 1987. It is the original model for all of NYU Law’s colloquia. The Colloquium is now convened by Liam Murphy, Samuel Scheffler, and Jeremy Waldron, two of whom will host in any given year.

Each week on Thursday a legal theorist or moral or political philosopher presents a paper to the group, which consists of students, faculty from the Law School and other departments of NYU, and faculty from other universities. The choice of subject is left to the paper’s author, within the general boundaries of the Colloquium’s subjects, and the discussions are therefore not connected by any structured theme for the term as a whole, though in past years certain central topics were canvassed in several weeks’ discussion. The Colloquium aims, not to pursue any particular subject, but to explore new work in considerable depth and so allow students to develop their own skill in theoretical analysis.

Each week’s paper is posted at least a week in advance on this page, and participants are expected to have read it.

The public sessions of the colloquium will take place on Thursdays, in Lester Pollock Colloquium Room, Furman Hall, 9th floor,  from 4:00 to 7:00 pm.

Colloquium 2021

Professors Liam Murphy and Samuel Scheffler

September 2nd
Kim Ferzan, University of Pennsylvania, Law

Rethinking Credit for Time Served

September 9th
Liam Murphy, NYU

International Responsibility for Global Environment Harm: Collective and Individual

September 17th ( Friday 2.00-5.00)
Moshe Halbertal, NYU

On Being Human

September 23rd
Jeff McMahan, Oxford

September 30th
Emma Kaufman, NYU Law

October 7th
Rick Pildes, NYU Law

October 14th
Samuel Scheffler, NYU

October 21st
Steve Darwall, Yale, Philosophy

October 28th
Chris Kutz, University of California, Berkeley, Law

November 4th
Anthony Appiah, NYU

November 11th
Johann Frick, University of California, Berkeley, Philosophy

November 18th
Teresa Bejan, Oxford

December 2nd
Ruth Chang, Oxford

Sep
17
Fri
Colloquium in Legal, Political, and Social Philosophy @ Lester Pollock Colloquium Room, Furman Hall, 9th floo
Sep 17 @ 2:00 pm – 5:00 pm

The Colloquium in Legal, Political, and Social Philosophy was founded by Ronald Dworkin and Thomas Nagel in 1987. It is the original model for all of NYU Law’s colloquia. The Colloquium is now convened by Liam Murphy, Samuel Scheffler, and Jeremy Waldron, two of whom will host in any given year.

Each week on Thursday a legal theorist or moral or political philosopher presents a paper to the group, which consists of students, faculty from the Law School and other departments of NYU, and faculty from other universities. The choice of subject is left to the paper’s author, within the general boundaries of the Colloquium’s subjects, and the discussions are therefore not connected by any structured theme for the term as a whole, though in past years certain central topics were canvassed in several weeks’ discussion. The Colloquium aims, not to pursue any particular subject, but to explore new work in considerable depth and so allow students to develop their own skill in theoretical analysis.

Each week’s paper is posted at least a week in advance on this page, and participants are expected to have read it.

The public sessions of the colloquium will take place on Thursdays, in Lester Pollock Colloquium Room, Furman Hall, 9th floor,  from 4:00 to 7:00 pm.

Colloquium 2021

Professors Liam Murphy and Samuel Scheffler

September 2nd
Kim Ferzan, University of Pennsylvania, Law

Rethinking Credit for Time Served

September 9th
Liam Murphy, NYU

International Responsibility for Global Environment Harm: Collective and Individual

September 17th ( Friday 2.00-5.00)
Moshe Halbertal, NYU

On Being Human

September 23rd
Jeff McMahan, Oxford

September 30th
Emma Kaufman, NYU Law

October 7th
Rick Pildes, NYU Law

October 14th
Samuel Scheffler, NYU

October 21st
Steve Darwall, Yale, Philosophy

October 28th
Chris Kutz, University of California, Berkeley, Law

November 4th
Anthony Appiah, NYU

November 11th
Johann Frick, University of California, Berkeley, Philosophy

November 18th
Teresa Bejan, Oxford

December 2nd
Ruth Chang, Oxford