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. Anyone with an interest in philosophy of language is welcome!
3 February
Paul Pietroski (Rutgers)
10 February
Brian Leahy (Harvard)
17 February
No Workshop
24 February
Elizabeth Coppock (Boston)
2 March
Maria Biezma (UMass)
9 March
Jenn McDonald (CUNY)
16 March
No Workshop
23 March
Liina Pylkannen (NYU)
30 March
Bob Beddor (NUS)
6 April
Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini (Rutgers Newark)
13 April
Masha Esipova (Princeton)
20 April
Nate Charlow (Toronto)
27 April
Eric Tracy (City College)
4 May
Dilip Ninan (Tufts)
11 May
Jim Pryor (NYU)
This paper considers Cornelius Castoriadis’s articulation of social imaginary significations with an emphasis on their link to the radical imaginary. Castoriadis wrote on social imaginary significations for more than thirty years, and his understanding of them changed significantly during this time, yet this is not reflected in debates on his work. The paper argues that there are three distinct phases in his reflections. The first phase can be dated 1964-1970. This early phase is characterized by Castoriadis’s break from Marx and subsequent settling of accounts with Marxism. Central to Castoriadis’s critique of Marx was the recognition of history (or: the social-historical) as the domain of meaning and unmotivated creation as the work of the radical imaginary. Importantly, Castoriadis also considered the intertwining of the imaginary with the symbolic, on the one hand, and with social doing, on the other. Castoriadis’s approach in this early phase can be considered phenomenological in the broad sense that Merleau-Ponty gave it in the Phenomenology of Perception. The second phase is dated 1970-1975; that is, the period in which Castoriadis wrote the second part of The Imaginary Institution of Society wherein he announced his turn to ontology. This is his most self-contained and systematic articulation of social imaginary significations. Castoriadis extends and develops his notion of magma in relation to social imaginary significations and emphasizes the social imaginary creation of a world ex nihilo as an ontological creation, whilst the radical imaginary is presented as a part of his emergent general ontology of à-être. The third ‘kaleidoscopic’ phase is dated 1976-1997 and may be understood as a period of consolidation and expansion. Although his basic understanding of social imaginary significations did not dramatically alter (although further developments are visible), his thought went in a myriad of different directions and patterns – hence kaleidoscopic — that nonetheless shaped a wider background against which his elucidation of social imaginaries were configured. His reconsideration of the sacred, the ‘ground power’ of institutions, and the development of a poly-regional ontology of the for-itself were key to this changing background. The paper will conclude with a critical engagement with the implications of the changing permutations of the imaginary element for Castoriadis’s thought.
Dr. Suzi Adams is Senior Lecturer in the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at Flinders University and permanent External Fellow at the East-Central European Institute for Philosophy, Charles University (Prague). She is a founding co-ordinating editor of the Social Imaginaries refereed journal and book series, and from October-December 2019, was an inaugural Senior Research Fellow at the Humanities Centre for Sustainable Futures at the University of Hamburg. She has published widely in the social imaginaries field, including most recently Social Imaginaries: Critical Interventions (Eds. Suzi Adams and Jeremy Smith), 2019, Rowman and Littlefield International, London. She is currently writing a monograph entitled Castoriadis and the Imaginary Element (forthcoming with Rowman and Littlefield International).
Presented by Metro Area Philosophers of Science
Spring 2020 Schedule:
Anthony Aguirre (UCSC) – “Entropy in long-lived genuinely closed quantum systems”
6:30-8:30pm Tuesday Feb 4; NYU Philosophy Department (5 Washington Place), 3rd floor seminar room.
David Papineau (King’s College London & CUNY) – “The Nature of Representation”
4:30-6:30pm Tuesday March 3; CUNY Graduate Center (365 5th Ave, NYC), room 5307.
Jim Holt (Author of Why Does the World Exist?) – “Here, Now, Photon: Why Newton was closer to EM than Maudlin is”
4:30-6:30pm Tuesday April 7; CUNY Graduate Center (365 5th Ave, NYC), room 5307.
Deborah Mayo (Virginia Tech)
4:30-6:30pm Tuesday April 28; CUNY Graduate Center (365 5th Ave, NYC), room 5307.
Contact Stephen Grimm for more information.
February 5
Hayley Clatterbuck (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
“Learning Incommensurable Concepts”
February 19
Andy Egan (Rutgers University)
“What Kind of Relativism is Right for You?”
February 26
Benjamin Vilhauer (City College, CUNY)
“Free Will and the Asymmetrical Justifiability of Holding Morally Responsible”
March 4 · Marx Wartofsky Memorial Lecture
Tommie Shelby (Harvard University)
“What’s Wrong with the Prison-Industrial Complex? Profit, Privatization, and the Circumstances of Injustice”
Note: colloquium held in Martin E. Segal Theatre, GC
March 11 · Jerrold Katz Memorial Lecture
Robert Stalnaker (MIT)
“Fragmentation and Singular Propositions”
March 18
Steve Ross (Graduate Center, Hunter College, CUNY)
“Two Conceptions of Objectivity, and How Morality is Objective When It Is”
March 25
Karen Green (University of Melbourne)
“Did Tarski Refute Frege?”
April 1
Prospective Students Day
TBA
April 22
Hagop Sarkissian (Graduate Center, Baruch College, CUNY)
“Self-Knowledge and Effective Moral Agency”
April 29
Iakovos Vasiliou (Graduate Center, CUNY)
“Eudaimonism and Moral Theory”
May 6
Serena Parekh (Northeastern University)
“Global Refugee Crisis as a Structural Injustice”
May 13
Shannon Spaulding (Oklahoma State University)
“Beliefs and Biases”
Download a PDF version of the schedule here.
2/7: Uriah Kriegel Philosophy, Rice University
2/21: Megan Peters Bioengineering, University of California, Riverside Cognitive Sciences, University of California, Irvine
2/28: Iris Berent Psychology, Northeastern University
3/6: Michael Glanzberg Philosophy, Rutgers University
3/20: Sam Coleman Philosophy, University of Hertfordshire
4/3: Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini Philosophy, Rutgers University
4/26: Nicholas Shea Institute of Philosophy, University of London Philosophy, University of Oxford
5/8: Diana Raffman Philosophy, University of Toronto
One of the central questions facing human beings is how we should respond to the humanity of others. Since the enlightenment, secular Western ethics has gravitated towards two kinds of answer: we should care for others’ well-being, or we should respect them as autonomous agents. Largely neglected is an answer we can find the religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Buddhism: we should love all. Analytic philosophers have started to pay more attention to love. But unlike those working within religious traditions, for whom an ideal of love for all serves as the central, organizing ideal in ethics, most of these philosophers see love as confined to the domain of intimate relationships between friends, family, romantic partners and the like. This paper argues that an ideal of love for all, of agape, can be understood apart from its more typical religious contexts and moreover provides a unified and illuminating account of the the nature and grounds of morality. Against challenges to the idea that love for all is possible, I offer a novel account of what it would be to love all. I go on to argue that while it is possible to love all, most of us should not, as doing so would rule out the possibility of loving particular friends and families. Instead, we should approximate love for all. I argue that the minimal approximation of love for all is, surprisingly, respect, deriving the basic, structural features of deontological ethics (including anti-welfarism and anti-aggregation) from my account of love for all.
Reception to follow.
Philosophy-in-Manhattan
Sunday, February 9 at 2:00 PM
CUNY philosophy PhD candidate Liam Ryan will lead us. Over the last few decades, or centuries, or millennia, have societies (as a whole) made social p…
Price: 16.00 USD
I explore the implications of the Tense Phrase deletion operation known as sluicing (Ross 1969) for the semantic and pragmatic literature on the Free Choice effect (Kamp 1973, von Wright 1969). I argue that the time-honored ‘I don’t know which’-riders on Free Choice sentences, traditionally taken to show that the effect is pragmatic, are sensitive to scope. Careful attention to such riders suggests that these sluices do not show cancellation on Free Choice antecedents in which disjunction scopes narrower than the modal.
Logic and Metaphysics Workshop Spring 2020
Feb 3 Hartry Field, NYU
Feb 10 Melissa Fusco, Columbia
Feb 17 GC CLOSED NO MEETING
Feb 24 Dongwoo Kim, GC
Mar 2 Alex Citikin, Metropolitan Telecommunications
Mar 9 Antonella Mallozzi, Providence
Mar 16 Mircea Dimitru, Bucharest
Mar 23 Jenn McDonald, GC
Mar 30 David Papineau, GC
Apr 6 ? Eoin Moore, GC
Apr 13 SPRING RECESS NO MEETING
Apr 20 Michał Godziszewski, Munich
Apr 27 Michael Glanzberg, Rutgers
May 4 Matteo Zichetti, Bristol
May 11 Lisa Warenski,GC
May 18 PROBABLY NO MEETING
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. Anyone with an interest in philosophy of language is welcome!
3 February
Paul Pietroski (Rutgers)
10 February
Brian Leahy (Harvard)
17 February
No Workshop
24 February
Elizabeth Coppock (Boston)
2 March
Maria Biezma (UMass)
9 March
Jenn McDonald (CUNY)
16 March
No Workshop
23 March
Liina Pylkannen (NYU)
30 March
Bob Beddor (NUS)
6 April
Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini (Rutgers Newark)
13 April
Masha Esipova (Princeton)
20 April
Nate Charlow (Toronto)
27 April
Eric Tracy (City College)
4 May
Dilip Ninan (Tufts)
11 May
Jim Pryor (NYU)