Calendar

Dec. 4–Alexander Altonji, M.A. student at the New School for Social Research, “Self Knowledge and our Capacity for Conscious Reflection: How Finkelstein can Respond to Boyle,” 6 E. 16th St, room 1101

In the early 2000s two Wittgensteinian inspired books on self-knowledge and first-person authority appeared: Richard Moran’s Authority and Estrangement and David Finkelstein’s Expression and the Inner.  Finkelstein is critical of Moran’s predominant concern with issues of beliefs (and intentions and attitudes), while ignoring the ‘authority’ with which we speak about, say, sensations.  In his Kantian inspired defense of Moran, Boyle reads Finkelstein (and others) as subscribing to the ‘uniformity assumption’, i.e., to account for first-person authority in the same basic way.  As a result of this assumption, Boyle argues that Finkelstein is insensitive to our representational (in contrast to ‘manifestation’) capacities.  In the paper to be presented, I challenge Boyle’s reading and criticisms of Finkelstein by arguing that Finkelstein is neither committed to the uniformity assumption nor is he insensitive to our representational capacities.

Steve G. Lofts (Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, King’s University College at the University of Western Ontario), presents: Toward a Groundwork of the Cultural-Event: A Rethinking of Cassirer and Heidegger and the Implications for Radical Politics.

There are three parts to this paper.

First, it interprets Cassirer’s critique of culture and Heidegger’s thinking of the event as belonging-together by conjoining the event of being with the transcendental structures of cultural signification. In other words, the paper sets out the paradoxical antinomy of what professor Steve Lofts calls the cultural-event as an Auseinandersetzung of thinking and being: “In Auseinandersetzung, a world comes to be.” But, what is the foundation, the groundwork, of this cultural-event?

Second, the paper argues that for both Cassirer and Heidegger, the groundwork of the cultural-event is not some originary-ground (Urgrund), some pure act, be it God, Being, or the subject, but the Un-ground (Ungrund) of pure-possibility (possibility not mixed with a necessary relation to actualization). It is the thinking and naming of this Ungrund of pure possibility that is the source of pure creativity and thus of pure freedom.

Third, the paper ends by way of some reflections on the implications of this view for the project of radical politics by uncovering a deeper sense of freedom that is other than simply a “freedom from” or a “freedom to.”

Sponsored by the New School for Social Research

Wolff Conference Room, Albert and Vera List Academic Center, D1103 6 East 16th Street, New York, NY 10011, Room D1103

Robin Celikates (Humanities Department, Philosophy and Public Affairs Group, University of Amsterdam), will give a lecture titled:

“Epistemic Injustice, Looping Effects, and Ideology Critique”

How should we think about and criticize ideology today? In this talk, Professor Robin Celikates will first sketch three challenges— normative, methodological and explanatory—any critical theory of society has to face if it seeks to retain the concept of ideology. In a second step, he will discuss prominent recent suggestions about how to conceptualize ideology (especially in the work of Miranda Fricker, Sally Haslanger, and Jason Stanley). While providing partial answers to these challenges, as he will show, these approaches exhibit common shortcomings that make it necessary to introduce a more social-theoretical account of the structural dimension of ideology. In the final section, he will outline an understanding of ideology critique as second-order critique that acknowledges the structural dimension of ideology and is able to address the three challenges.

Sponsored by the New School for Social Research

Ursula Renz, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria, gives a lecture entitled “The Value of Thinking for Oneself: Epistemic Autonomy in Spinoza and Kant”

In her talk, Renz discusses the views of Spinoza and Kant on epistemic autonomy. Departing from a brief sketch of Descartes’ epistemic individualism, she will argue that while both Spinoza and Kant dismissed Descartes’ views on concept formation, they remain loyal to his reasons for epistemic individualism. She will conclude by showing how these reasons may help us to understand why enlightenment, understood as a philosophical and not just historical concept, essentially relies on the exercise of individual judgments, requiring epistemic autonomy rather than only freedom of speech and thought.

About the speaker:

Ursula Renz is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria, where she teaches classes in Theoretical Philosophy (epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy) and Early Modern Philosophy.

She is author of Die Rationalität der Kultur: Kulturphilosophie und ihre transzendentale Begründung bei Cohen, Natorp und Cassirer (2002), Die Erklärbarkeit der Erfahrung: Realismus und Subjektivität in Spinozas Theorie des menschlichen Geistes (2010), editor of Self-Knowledge. A History (forthcoming 2017) and coeditor of the Handbuch Klassische Emotionstheorien (2008, second edition 2012) and Baruch de Spinoza: Ethica more geometrico demonstrata. A Collective Commentary. She has written numerous articles on Early Modern Philosophy (Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Shaftesbury), Kant, the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism (Cohen, Natorp, Cassirer), on meta-philosophy and the history of philosophy, and more recently, also on self-knowledge, testimony and the problem of epistemic trust.

Her book Die Erklärbarkeit der Erfahrung has been awarded the Journal of the History of Philosophy Book Prize 2011, and from 2014-2015, she received an Humboldt Fellowship for Advanced Researchers to spend three terms at the University of Konstanz. She recently received a grant from the Austrian Research Foundation (FWF) for her project on Spinoza and the Concept of the Human Life Form.

For more information see her academia page: https://uni-klu.academia.edu/UrsulaRenz

This Thursday Workshop is in cooperation with the international workshop: Spinoza and Kant. Metaphysics, Ethics, Politics

Sponsored by the Department of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research.

Todd May is Class of 1941 Memorial Professor of the Humanities at Clemson University.  He is the author of fourteen books of philosophy, most recently A Fragile Life and A Significant Life, both from University of Chicago Press.

Abstract:

Ineffability is in the air these days, and has been for some time. In many areas of Continental philosophy, it is the very ethos in which thought is conducted. I argue that the realm of the normative, at least, is deeply linguistic. In contrast to the attempt of some thinkers to remove the normative from the conceptual or the linguistic, I try to show that it is central to normativity to have a linguistic reference, a reference rooted precisely in the sense of conceptual categories that so concern thinkers of the ineffable.

Presented by The New School for Social Research (NSSR) Philosophy Department.

We often make our thoughts clear to ourselves in the process of putting them into words. In this lecture I introduce a new puzzle about this process—one that’s reminiscent of the famous paradox about inquiry in Plato’s Meno. The puzzle is that, on the one hand, coming to know what we’re thinking seems to require finding words that would express our thought; yet, on the other hand, finding such words seems to require already knowing what we’re thinking.

I consider and reject two possible solutions to this puzzle. The first solution denies that language contributes to our knowledge of our thoughts. The second solution denies that we have a fully formed thought that we try to articulate in the first place. The failure of these solutions points to a positive account of the role of language in the pursuit of self-knowledge, on which language mediates between two different “formats” or modes of thought. Among the broader implications of this account is a richer conception of the aims and methods of philosophy.

Abstract: On the standard reading, Heidegger’s account of authenticity in Being and Time amounts to an existentialist theory of human freedom. Against this interpretation, John Haugeland reads Heidegger’s account of authenticity as a crucial feature of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology: i.e., Heidegger’s attempt to determine the meaning of being via an analysis of human beings. Haugeland’s argument is based on the notion that taking responsibility for our existence entails getting the being of entities right. Specifically, Haugeland says that our ability to choose allows us to question and test the disclosure of being through which entities are intelligible to us against the entities themselves, and he adds that taking responsibility for our existence involves transforming our disclosure of being when it fails to meet the truth test. Although I agree that Heidegger’s existentialism is a crucial feature of his fundamental ontology, I argue that the details of Haugeland’s interpretation are inconsistent. My objection is that if, as Haugeland claims, entities are only intelligible via disclosures of being, then it is incoherent for Haugeland to say that entities themselves can serve as intelligible standard against which disclosures can be truth-tested or transformed. Finally, I offer an alternative to Haugeland’s truth-based take on authenticity and cultural transformation via an ends-based onto-methodological interpretation of Heidegger and Kuhn. Here I argue that the ends pursed by a specific community determine both the meaning of being and the movement of human history.

Bio: Aaron James Wendland completed his PhD at Somerville College, Oxford and he is currently Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the HSE’s Center for Advanced Studies in Moscow. Aaron is the co-editor of Wittgenstein and Heidegger (Routledge, 2013) and Heidegger on Technology (Routledge, 2018), and he has written scholarly articles on Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, and Kuhn. Aaron has also published several pieces of popular philosophy in The New York Times, Public Seminar, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He currents serves as an art critic for The Moscow Times and Dialogue of Arts. And as of January 2019, Aaron will be the Director of the Center for Philosophy and Visual Arts at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art.