29 January
Gillian Russell (UNC)
5 February
Mandy Simons (CMU)
12 February
(No Workshop)
19 February
(No Workshop)
26 February
Daniel Rothschild (UCL)
5 March
Chris Kennedy (UChicago)
12 March
Rachel Sterken (Oslo)
19 March
No Workshop (NYU Spring Break)
26 March
Andreas Stokke (Uppsala)
2 April
Rebekah Baglini (Stanford)
9 April
Henry Schiller (UT Austin)
16 April
Gary Ostertag (CUNY)
23 April
Manuel Križ (Jean Nicod)
30 April
Maria Aloni (ILLC/Amsterdam)
7 May
Alexis Wellwood (USC)
Our topic for Spring 2018 will be Formal Frameworks for Semantics and Pragmatics. We’ll be investigating a range of questions in semantics and/or pragmatics which involve or are relevant to the choice between different kinds of overall structure for theories in these areas.
In most sessions, the members of the seminar will receive a week in advance, copies of recent work, or work in progress from a thinker at another university. After reading this work, students discuss it with one of the instructors on the day before the colloquium. Then at the Tuesday colloquium, the instructors give a summary review and raise criticisms or questions about the work. The author responds to these, and also to questions from the audience.
Meetings
The main seminar meetings are on Tuesday from 4-7, in the second floor seminar room of the Philosophy Department. Additionally, there will be a supplementary meeting open to all students participating in the seminar (whether enrolled or not) on Mondays from 4-5, in the same location in the fifth-floor seminar room.
This seminar is open to all interested parties.
There is a googlegroups mailing list for the class. If you want to receive announcements, please add yourself to that list. (To be able to access the mailing list’s web interface, you’ll need to log into Google’s systems using an identity Google recognizes, like a Gmail address, or a NYU email address because of how NYU’s authentication systems are connected to Google. But there’s no real need to see the mailing list’s web interface. You just need some email address to be added to list, then any messages we send to the list will get forwarded to all the email addresses then registered on the list. If you want us to add an address to the list that you can’t log into Google’s systems with, just send us a message with the address you want registered.)
Schedule and Papers
Papers will be posted here as they become available. Some may be password-protected; the password will be distributed in class.
- 23 Jan
- Introductory session (no meeting on Monday 22 Jan), Jim’s handoutSome people asked for more background reading. Here are two useful textbooks: Heim & Kratzer, then von Fintel & Heim. Here is a survey article about different treatments of pronoun anaphora. Here is a course page with links to more reading.
- 30 Jan
- Jim Pryor (NYU, web, mail), “De Jure Codesignation“
- 6 Feb
- Mandy Simons (CMU, web, mail), “Convention, Intention, and the Conversational Record” and (with Kevin Zollman) “Natural Conventions and the Semantics/Pragmatics Divide“(Mandy is also speaking in the NYPL on Monday 5 Feb at 6:30.)
- 13 Feb
- Paul Pietroski (Rutgers, mail), “Semantic Typology and Composition“
- 20 Feb
- Karen Lewis (Columbia/Barnard, web, mail)
- 27 Feb
- Daniel Rothschild (UCL, web, mail)(Daniel is also speaking in the NYPL on Monday 26 Feb at 6:30.)
- 6 Mar
- John Hawthorne (USC, mail)
- 13 Mar
- Spring Break
- 20 Mar
- Lucas Champollion (NYU, web, mail)
- 27 Mar
- Matthew Mandelkern (Oxford, web, mail)
- 3 Apr
- Paolo Santorio (UC-San Diego, web, mail)
- 10 Apr
- Una Stojnić (Columbia, web, mail)
- 17 Apr
- Seth Yalcin (UC-Berkeley, web, mail)
- 24 Apr
- Stephen Schiffer (NYU, web, mail)
- 1 May
- Maria Aloni (ILLC and Philosophy/Amsterdam, web, mail)(Maria is also speaking in the NYPL on Monday 30 Apr at 6:30.)
The Minorities and Philosophy (MAP) Chapters of Columbia, The New School, Rutgers, CUNY, NYU, and Princeton invite submissions from graduate students and postdoctoral fellows from underrepresented groups for a workshop series (NY-MAPWorks) in spring 2018.
Dates: Jan 30th (NYU), Feb. 20th (New School), March 6th (CUNY), April 17th (Columbia), May 8th (NYU), 7-9:30pm.
Submission Guidelines:
To apply, please compete the following by December 15th, 2017:
- Send an extended abstract of 750-1,000 words (.pdf or .doc), prepared for blind review, suitable for a 25-30 minute presentation to a general philosophical audience to nymapshop@gmail.com.
- Provide your contact information by completing this google form.
Applications will only be accepted from individuals from groups underrepresented in academic philosophy.
Accepted participants will be notified by January 14th. For further details, see our philpapers posting at https://philevents.org/event/show/37294.
Each colloquium is held on Wednesday at 4:15 P.M. All colloquia will take place at the Graduate Center in rooms 9204/9205 except as otherwise noted. Please call (212) 817-8615 for further information.
February 7th • Jerrold Katz Memorial Lecture
David Papineau (CUNY Graduate Center | King’s College London)
“Kinds and Essences: Taming Metaphysical Modality”
February 14th
Jane Friedman (NYU)
“The Epistemic and the Zetetic”
February 21st
Muhammad Ali Khalidi (York U)
“Are Sexes Natural Kinds?”
February 28th
Laurie Paul (UNC)
“De Se Truth and Epistemic Revolution”
March 7th • Marx Wartofsky Memorial Lecture
Steven Lukes (NYU)
Title TBD
March 14th
Collin O’Neill (CUNY Lehman College)
“Consent and Third-Party Coercion in Medicine and Research”
March 21st
Edouard Machery (Pittsburgh)
TBD
March 28th
Greg Restall (Melbourne)
“Accommodation, Inference, Generics and Pejoratives”
April 4th: No Colloquium (Spring Recess)
April 11th: No Colloquium (CUNY Friday Schedule)
April 18th
Shaun Nichols (Arizona)
“The Wrong and the Bad: On the Rational Acquisition of Moral Rules”
April 25th
Quayshawn Spencer (UPenn)
“A Radical Solution to the Race Problem”
May 2nd
Tim Crane (CEU)
“Putnam’s Ant: On the Reduction of Meaning and Intentionality”
May 9
Kathryn Tabb (Columbia)
“Locke on the Complexity of Ideas and the Ethics of Belief”
Download an interactive PDF version of the schedule here.
In a famous passage from Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Sextus Empiricus presents four different accounts of the conditional in increasing strength. Contemporary analogues have been identified (subject to various degrees of controversy) for the first three, but the last, which even fails to satisfy A>A, has proved elusive. In this talk, I discuss ways of modeling this heterodox conditional. Taking a cue from Sextus, I regard the characteristic feature of this conditional as one of proper (conceptual) containment and approach it using the framework of containment logic. Different implementations of this approach are discussed and evaluated both for their historical and technical merits. In the course of the talk, I will discuss (among other things) the relationship between Sextus’ third and fourth accounts, how Kripke semantics can be and has been used to deepen our understanding of various ancient conditionals, and how ancient notions of containment might yield interesting new (old) perspectives on contemporary containment logic.
Saul Kripke Center, Young Scholars Series: Yale Weiss, “Sextus Empiricus’ Fourth Conditional and Containment Logic”
SWIP-Analytic Schedule for Spring 2018
Here is a sneak peak at our exciting line-up of speakers and events for Spring 2018. Some times and rooms TBA.
Elanor Taylor, February 8, CUNY Graduate Center, The Committee for Interdisciplinary Science Studies, Room 5307, 4:00-6:00pm
Virginia Aspe Armella and Ma. Elena García Peláez Cruz (co-sponsored with SWIP-Analytic Mexico), March 2, NYU Room 202, 2:00-4:30pm
Round Table Women in Philosophy: Publishing, Jobs, and Fitting In (co-sponsored with NYSWIP), March 8, CUNY Graduate Center, The Committee for Interdisciplinary Science Studies, Room 5307, 4:30-7:30pm
Graduate Student Essay Prize Winner Presentation, April 12
Sophie Horowitz (UMass, Amherst), April 26
Working Papers in Ethics and Moral Psychology is a speaker series conducted under the auspices of the Icahn School of Medicine Bioethics Program. It is a working group where speakers are invited to present well-developed, as yet unpublished work. The focus of the group is interdisciplinary, with an emphasis on topics in ethics, bioethics, neuroethics, and moral psychology. The meetings begin with a brief presentation by the invited speaker and the remaining time is devoted to a discussion of the paper. The speakers will make their papers available in advance of their presentation to those who sign up for the Working Papers mailing list.
All speakers:
9/28/2017:
Eric Chwang
/Rutgers University-Camden
11/2/2017:
Phoebe Friesen
/CUNY Graduate Center
12/14/2017:
Adam Kolber
/Brooklyn Law School
2/8/2018:
Paul Cummins
/Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
3/8/2018:
Elizabeth Victor
/William Paterson University
4/19/2018:
Melissa Moschella
/Columbia University
5/24/2018:
Camil Golub
/Rutgers University-Newark
JOIN THE WORKING PAPERS MAILING LIST AND RSVP TO:
nada.gligorov@mssm.edu
The United States, supposedly founded on the “self-evident” principle of human equality, has in fact been a profoundly racially unequal society from the start. Yet for many years the striving for racial justice and racial equality has been obscured by an evasive discourse of “diversity.” Particularly with the recent rise of white nationalism, however, it has become urgently important to recognize and address the ongoing inequalities of race. This 2-day interdisciplinary conference will bring together 18 theorists from a wide array of subjects—philosophy, political theory, ethnic studies, critical psychology, urban studies, gender theory, and anthropology—to look from their distinctive perspectives at the enduring problem of racial inequality, and how it is perpetuated in a democratic society.
SPEAKERS:
Alia Al-Saji (Philosophy: McGill University)
Bernard Boxill (Philosophy: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, emeritus)
Derrick Darby (Philosophy: University of Michigan)
Michelle Fine (Critical Psychology: CUNY Grad Center)
Mark Golub (Politics: Scripps College)
Juliet Hooker (Political Science: Brown University)
Frank Kirkland (Philosophy: Hunter College & CUNY Grad Center)
Nelson Maldonado-Torres (Latino & Caribbean Studies: Rutgers University)
Howard McGary (Philosophy: Rutgers University)
José Mendoza (Philosophy: University of Massachusetts-Lowell)
Naomi Murakawa (African-American Studies: Princeton University)
Michael Paris (Political Science & Global Affairs: CUNY Staten Island)
Tommie Shelby (Philosophy: Harvard University)
Falguni Sheth (Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies: Emory University)
Stephen Steinberg (Urban Studies: Queens College & CUNY Grad Center)
Ronald Sundstrom (Philosophy: University of San Francisco)
Andrew Valls (Political Science: Oregon State)
Gary Wilder (Anthropology: CUNY Grad Center)
Co-organizers: Charles W. Mills and Linda Martín Alcoff.
Free and open to the public, the conference will take place on Friday, March 9th in the Skylight Room (9100) and Saturday, March 10th in the Elebash Recital Hall.
Co-sponsored by the PhD Program in Philosophy and the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
February 9: Jessie Munton Philosophy, New York University “How Long Is ‘a’ Visual Experience?”
March 9: Taylor Webb Neuroscience Institute and Cognitive Science, Princeton University Title TBA
April 13: Eleni Manolakaki Philosophy and History of Science, University of Athens “Propositions as Measures of Mind”
For spring 2018, the CUNY Cognitive Science Speaker Series will meet once a month. We’ll return to weekly talks in fall 2018.
All talks are at the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, room 7-102, Fridays, 1-3 pm. http://bit.ly/cs-talks
Does art have anything interesting to do with pleasure? The aesthetic hedonist answers positively, claiming that the value of artworks qua artworks lie in their power to please those who are properly engaged with them. Recent critics of hedonism answer the question in the negative, arguing that the power to please cannot properly explain the value of artworks. In this paper, I point to a blind spot in the dialectic between the hedonic orthodoxy and its recent critics: though the hedonist is wrong to claim that artworks are valuable because they are endowed with the power to please, the contemporary critic of hedonism mistakenly disconnects art from pleasure. The bulk of the paper consists in a challenge to the two assumptions that underlie this dialectic: (1) the assumption that pleasure is merely subjective and so incapable of disclosing the value of its object, and (2) the assumption that pleasure can be connected to art only hedonically, as the answer to the question “what makes artworks valuable?” By undermining these assumptions, I carve out space for a neglected alternative between aesthetic hedonism and its non-affective denial: this is the view that, though pleasure does not constitute the value of artworks, it does constitute proper aesthetic evaluation. On this neglected alternative, pleasure is connected to artworks insofar as it is the proper response merited by their value, value that the pleasure discloses. It is the value of artworks that gives us reasons to feel pleasure rather than the feeling of pleasure that gives us reasons to attribute value to them.
Reception to follow in 6th floor lounge.