We are excited to announce that the first workshop of the semester will take place in person on Friday, September 23rd from *4-6pm* (please note the change in the usual time). Robert Stern (University of Sheffield) will be giving a talk entitled, “Found or Sought? Hegel vs MacIntyre on the Good Life and the Virtues.” Please note that the talk will take place at The New School, Room M104 (The Bark Room), Sheila C. Johnson Design Center (The Sheila C. Johnson Design Center is on the southwest corner of 5th ave and 13th street)

To attend the talk in person you will need to be up-to-date with vaccinations and boosters and set up a CLEAR Health Pass account in advance. Directions for visitor access are below.

The event has been organized by the Wittgenstein Workshop.

Abstract: This paper draws a contrast between Hegel and MacIntyre, treating both as post-Kantian perfectionists. The claim is that while Hegel treats the good life as something found, and to be implemented in the rational state, MacIntyre treats it as something to be sought. This difference, it is argued, is reflected in their respective accounts of the virtues: for Hegel, the key virtue becomes rectitude, whereas for MacIntyre a wider range of virtues is required, to make this quest for the good achievable. Using the characters of Walt and Travis from Paris, Texas to illustrate the argument, it is suggested that the MacIntyrean option is to be preferred.

GUEST AND VISITOR ACCESS AND VACCINATION POLICY

Guests and visitors must be up-to-date with their COVID-19 vaccinations, including a booster when eligible.

Beginning Monday, August 15, The New School will use CLEAR’S Health Pass, an online tool that safely and simply verifies proof of COVID-19 vaccination, to issue guest passes. The CLEAR Health Pass replaces on-site manual vaccination checking and physical guest passes. CLEAR accounts should be set up in advance of arrival on campus and will remain active for a month, requiring only a selfie to reactivate. Details and instructions about creating and setting up a CLEAR account can be found on our website.

The Welcome Center Visitors Desk will remain open in a limited capacity to support the guests who may not be able to use CLEAR.

Before coming to campus, guests must verify vaccination records with the university.

If visitors are all of the below:

• 18 years of age or older.
• Or, are under 18 years of age and visiting campus with someone over 18.
• Have access to a mobile device.
• Have proof of vaccination accepted by CLEAR
• Domestic: Pictures of CDC card and Smart QR Codes
• International: EU Digital COVID Certification (DCC) and UK National Health Service (NHS) COVID Pass.
• Have a picture ID with the name matching the name on the vaccination record.

If visitors are at least one of the below:

• Under 18 years of age coming alone.
• Do not have access to a mobile device.
• Have proof of vaccination that is not accepted by CLEAR (e.g., other countries than the US, UK, EU).
• Do not have a picture ID with the name matching the name on the vaccination record.
• Cannot create or use a CLEAR account.

Use CLEAR to verify vaccination records and receive a guest pass in the app. 

We recommend creating and verifying your account in advance of coming to campus.

Abstract:

As a specific form of rights insecurity the revocability of reproductive rights manifests contradictory understandings (privative and productive) of the political status of pregnancy.

I ask how and why we should understand reproductive rights as revocable, giving a broad meaning to the term “revocability,” and suggesting a conjoined vocabulary that includes conditionality, exceptionality, and disqualifying qualification.

I ask: what kind of grammar might help us understand more specifically how the concurrent action of conflicting combinations of power (such as sovereignty, discipline, security, necropower, and neoliberal expectation) coordinate together in relation to reproductive rights-bearing, and how heterogeneous combinations of power also produce a mutual disruptiveness, even auto-critique, manifesting as conflictual embodiment.

External visitors must comply with the university’s guest policy as outlined here: https://www.newschool.edu/covid-19/campus-access/?open=visitors.

Audience members must show proof of a full COVID-19 vaccination series (and booster if eligible), ID, and remain masked at all times.

Book panel:  Anat Matar, The Poverty of Ethics  (Verso books 2022)

Participants:

Anat Matar (Senior Lecturer of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University)

Simon Critchley (Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at NSSR)

Raef Zreik (Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School, and Associate Professor of Jurisprudence at Ono Academic College)

Abstract:

It is a common assumption that ethics must serve as the cornerstone of politics. Yet abstract moral arguments have always been used for justifying all kinds of atrocities; ethical sensitivity and compassion have been expressed towards particular kinds of victims, while totally ignoring others.

The liberal West, in particular, continually manifests such blindness. It is horrified by non-Western oppressive methods, but turns a blind eye to their Western equivalents.

The gratification of holding the moral high ground consistently serves as a political instrument in the hands of those seeking to shore up the existing order.

In The Poverty of Ethics, philosopher and activist Anat Matar argues for the conceptual primacy of political discourse over ethics and claims that only the political force which stands for equality, justice and democracy – the Left – can provide the coordinates for an ethical life under conditions of global injustice.

Appealing to philosophical ideas on the essence of language, Matar shows how the ethos of the Left, as it has evolved over years, underlies and gradually forms the basis for ethics.

Struggles against slavery, racism, colonization and militarization, protests against exploitation and the capitalist order, the feminist movement, global demands for climate action – all these are primarily motivated by a deep understanding of Left heritage rather than by abstract ethical requirements or by airy sensitivities. They, in turn, shape and reshape our notion of moralit

15 Feb, 4pm:

James Kreines (Claremont McKenna)

From Shapeless Abyss Towards Self-Developing Thought: Taking Hegel on Spinoza Seriously

@ The New School, Room L502, at 2 W 13th Street

Guests and visitors policies at the New School can be accessed via this website. You will have to download CLEAR and upload proof of vaccination or the results of a rapid test. Please try to arrive 15 minutes earlier so we can help you in case of complications.

Feb 24:

Georg Spoo (Freiburg)

Grounds and Limits of Immanent Critique: Kant, Hegel, Marx

@ Columbia

Mar 3:

Heikki Ikaheimo

Hegel, Humanity, and Social Critique

@ Zoom

Mar 24:

Stephen Howard (KU Leuven)

Kant’s Late Philosophy of Nature: The Opus Postumum

@ Columbia

Apr 11:

Karin de Boer

Does Kant’s Antinomy of Pure Reason Amount to an A Priori History of Rational Cosmology?

@ Columbia

Apr 15, 4pm:

Eva von Redecker

Co-sponsored by the New School Graduate Student Conference

@ The New School

Apr 21:

Giulia Battistoni

NAture, Life, Organizm: The Legacy of Romanticism and Classical German Philosophy in Jonas’ Philosophical Biology

@ The New School

15 Feb, 4pm:

James Kreines (Claremont McKenna)

From Shapeless Abyss Towards Self-Developing Thought: Taking Hegel on Spinoza Seriously

@ The New School

Feb 24:

Georg Spoo (Freiburg)

Grounds and Limits of Immanent Critique: Kant, Hegel, Marx

@ Columbia

Mar 3:

Heikki Ikaheimo

Hegel, Humanity, and Social Critique

@ Zoom

Mar 24:

Stephen Howard (KU Leuven)

Kant’s Late Philosophy of Nature: The Opus Postumum

@ Columbia

Apr 11:

Karin de Boer

Does Kant’s Antinomy of Pure Reason Amount to an A Priori History of Rational Cosmology?

@ Columbia

Apr 15, 4pm:

Eva von Redecker

Co-sponsored by the New School Graduate Student Conference

@ The New School

Apr 21:

Giulia Battistoni

NAture, Life, Organizm: The Legacy of Romanticism and Classical German Philosophy in Jonas’ Philosophical Biology

@ The New School

15 Feb, 4pm:

James Kreines (Claremont McKenna)

From Shapeless Abyss Towards Self-Developing Thought: Taking Hegel on Spinoza Seriously

@ The New School

Feb 24:

Georg Spoo (Freiburg)

Grounds and Limits of Immanent Critique: Kant, Hegel, Marx

@ Columbia

Mar 3:

Heikki Ikaheimo

Hegel, Humanity, and Social Critique

@ Zoom

Mar 24:

Stephen Howard (KU Leuven)

Kant’s Late Philosophy of Nature: The Opus Postumum

@ Columbia

Apr 11:

Karin de Boer

Does Kant’s Antinomy of Pure Reason Amount to an A Priori History of Rational Cosmology?

@ Columbia

Apr 15, 4pm:

Eva von Redecker

Co-sponsored by the New School Graduate Student Conference

@ The New School

Apr 21:

Giulia Battistoni

NAture, Life, Organizm: The Legacy of Romanticism and Classical German Philosophy in Jonas’ Philosophical Biology

@ The New School

In 1931, Max Horkheimer proposed a model of interdisciplinary research that remains a benchmark for understanding how cultures function and might function better. He imagined an institute “in which philosophers, sociologists, economists, historians, and psychologists are brought together in permanent collaboration” (Horkheimer 1993, 9). The institute would not work with a single theory but would let data lead to new hypotheses (Horkheimer 1993, 10). But the work of Horkheimer and colleagues rarely lived up to the 1931 vision of an interdisciplinary, empirically grounded approach to culture. To understand why, my paper will juxtapose Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s history of humanity, as it is set out in Dialectic of Enlightenment, with current research on the development of early human cultures by Richard Wrangham, Sarah Blaffer Hardy, Kim Sterelny, Joseph Henrich and Cecilia Heyes. The comparison with recent research in anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and cognitive science reveals some of the deep conceptual commitments that limit Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s focus on instrumental reason and conceptual violence. By contrast, current approaches jointly suggest that human subjectivity is scaffolded and embedded; that cooperation is the necessary default for cultural transmission; that learning occurs in context through imitation; and that customs and institutions develop contingently and by accident through processes of cooperation and collaboration. These new insights invite a radical re-thinking of the phenomena Horkheimer and Adorno grouped together as ‘mimesis.’ The resulting picture of environmentally embedded process of cultural evolution is a first step towards revitalizing the interdisciplinary potential of the early Frankfurt School, and suggesting new, practical, productive, and sustainable routes such critique can take in the 21st century.

Bio:

Benjamin Morgan is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Worcester College. In 2019, and 2020/21 he was also Visiting Associate Professor of German at Harvard University. He is author of On Becoming God: Late Medieval Mysticism and the Modern Western Self (Fordham UP, 2013), and numerous articles on modernist literature, film, and philosophy. He edited, with Carolin Duttlinger and Anthony Phelan, Walter Benjamins Anthropologisches Denken (Rombach, 2012), and with Sowon Park and Ellen Spolsky a Special Issue of Poetics Today on “Situated Cognition and the Study of Culture” (2017).

15 Feb, 4pm:

James Kreines (Claremont McKenna)

From Shapeless Abyss Towards Self-Developing Thought: Taking Hegel on Spinoza Seriously

@ The New School

Feb 24:

Georg Spoo (Freiburg)

Grounds and Limits of Immanent Critique: Kant, Hegel, Marx

@ Columbia

Mar 3:

Heikki Ikaheimo

Hegel, Humanity, and Social Critique

@ Zoom

Mar 24:

Stephen Howard (KU Leuven)

Kant’s Late Philosophy of Nature: The Opus Postumum

@ Columbia

Apr 11:

Karin de Boer

Does Kant’s Antinomy of Pure Reason Amount to an A Priori History of Rational Cosmology?

@ Columbia

Apr 15, 4pm:

Eva von Redecker

Co-sponsored by the New School Graduate Student Conference

@ The New School

Apr 21:

Giulia Battistoni

NAture, Life, Organizm: The Legacy of Romanticism and Classical German Philosophy in Jonas’ Philosophical Biology

@ The New School

15 Feb, 4pm:

James Kreines (Claremont McKenna)

From Shapeless Abyss Towards Self-Developing Thought: Taking Hegel on Spinoza Seriously

@ The New School

Feb 24:

Georg Spoo (Freiburg)

Grounds and Limits of Immanent Critique: Kant, Hegel, Marx

@ Columbia

Mar 3:

Heikki Ikaheimo

Hegel, Humanity, and Social Critique

@ Zoom

Mar 24:

Stephen Howard (KU Leuven)

Kant’s Late Philosophy of Nature: The Opus Postumum

@ Columbia

Apr 11:

Karin de Boer

Does Kant’s Antinomy of Pure Reason Amount to an A Priori History of Rational Cosmology?

@ Columbia

Apr 15, 4pm:

Eva von Redecker

Co-sponsored by the New School Graduate Student Conference

@ The New School

Apr 21:

Giulia Battistoni

NAture, Life, Organizm: The Legacy of Romanticism and Classical German Philosophy in Jonas’ Philosophical Biology

@ The New School