Feb
7
Thu
Liberalism & Democracy Past, Present, Prospects @ John L. Tishman Auditorium, New School
Feb 7 – Feb 8 all-day

Liberal democratic values seem embattled as never before in the United States, and around the world. The time is right for a serious and wide-ranging exploration of the prospects for liberal democracies in a context that acknowledges the historical and contemporary tensions between democracy and liberal values, both in theory and in practice. This conference convenes a varied group of scholars, journalists, policy expert and veteran public servants, we hope to stage a real meeting of the minds, not the usual partisan sniping that occurs at most academic events – and we are trying to be as inclusive as possible, by inviting thoughtful representatives from the left, right, and center.

Though liberalism and democracy have become intertwined in some contemporary societies, they have evolved along quite distinct paths historically. Democracy is an ancient idea, liberalism a very modern one. Greek democracy was not liberal, nor was the revolutionary democracy championed by the sans-culottes in the French Revolution. To this day, there are many avowedly democratic movements and regimes, both on the left and the right, that explicitly reject liberal values. Moreover, even in liberal democratic societies, there are important tensions between the two traditions.

In this conference, we will examine the prospects for liberal democracies against the backdrop of the historical and contemporary tensions between democracy and liberalism.

Featured speakers and participants

James Miller

Helen Rosenblatt

Robert Boyers

Paul Cartledge

EJ Dionne Jr

Bill Galston

Dipayan Ghosh

Jeffrey Issac

James Kloppenberg

Bill Kristol

Yuval Levin

Marc Plattner

Aziz Rana

Rogers Smith

Michael Tomasky

T Chatterton Williams

Ben Fountain

Fedricho Finchelstein

Jennifer Roberts

Paul Krugman

Teresa Ghilarducci

T. Alexander Aleinikoff

Jessica Pissano

Deva Woodly

Natasha Lennard

Astra Taylor

Ira Katrznelson

Josh Begley

Feb
14
Thu
Carl Sachs: “Avoiding Foundationalism And Idealism: How Sellarsian Picturing Overcomes the Myth of the Given” @ Wolff Conference Room, D1103
Feb 14 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Wilfrid Sellars (1912-1989) is well-known for his “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (EPM) in which he criticizes empiricist theories of knowledge acquisition. Empiricism, he argues there, relies on what he calls “the Myth of the Given.” The Myth of the Given is often understood as a dilemma for epistemological foundationalism. However, Sellars also remarks that not even Kant and Hegel (“that great foe of immediacy” EPM §1) were entirely free of “the entire framework of givenness”). This suggests that the Myth of the Given is not limited to the epistemological foundationalism of pre-critical dogmatic metaphysics. I shall argue (following James O’Shea) that the Myth of the Given is primarily a problem about how we should account for our cognitive awareness of the categorial structure of experience. I shall then argue that Sellars should be interpreted as arguing for a non-semantic mind-world relation, which he calls “picturing”, to explain how the Myth of the Given should be overcome.
By doing so Sellars shows how to avoid both the Given and idealism, thus overcoming a long-standing opposition within the history of philosophy since Kant. This argument is also relevant for the divide between “left-wing Sellarsians” (Rorty, McDowell, Brandom, Williams) and “right-wing Sellarsians” (Churchland, Dennett, Millikan); the left-wing Sellarsians developed the criticism of the Myth of the Given and the right-wing Sellarsians developed picturing into an account of animal cognition. On my interpretation, this divide itself is unfortunate because it leads us to overlook a fundamental coherence to Sellars’s views.

Feb
21
Thu
New Fascism Mass Psychology & Financialization @ Wolff Conference Room, NSSR, D1103/ UL104
Feb 21 @ 10:00 am – 1:30 pm

What do the worlds of global finance and nationalist populism have in common? How can we understand the rise of today’s ‘new fascisms’ through the prism of financialization? This one-day workshop brings together scholars from across disciplines to debate  these key questions for our understanding of contemporary capitalism. The workshop is part of Public Seminar’s Imaginal Politics initiative and is organised jointly with the Department of Social Science, University College London. The workshop will include three panel discussions and will close with a talk by Judith Butler on ‘Anti-gender ideology and the new fascism’.

Organised by Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou (University College London) and Chiara Bottici (The New School)

10-11.45am – Panel 1 (Wolff Conference Room, D1103)

Julia Ott (The New School)
Arjun Appadurai (NYU)
Saskia Sassen (Columbia)
Moderator:  Jeffrey Goldfarb

12.-1.30pm -Panel 2 (Wolff Conference Room, D1103)

Nancy Fraser (New School)
Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou (UCL)
Moderator: Rahel Jaeggi 
1.30 – 2.30pm -lunch-

2.30-4.15pm – Panel 3 (UL104, University Center)
Eli Zaretsky (The New School) 
Jamieson Webster (Psychoanalyst, DU)
Chiara Bottici ( The New School)
Moderator: Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou

4.30-6pm – Closing plenary & discussion (UL104, University Center)

Judith Butler (UC Berkeley)
‘The New Fascism of the Anti-Gender Ideology Movement’ 
Moderator: Cinzia Arruzza
Please note that this event takes place in two different locations. 
6 E 16 Street Room D1103 (Wolff) and 63 5 Ave Room UL104.
Feb
22
Fri
Matters of Love: A Conference @ Wolff Conference Room, D1103
Feb 22 all-day

9:15 – 9:30 Coffee & Opening Remarks

9:30 – 10:50 Anna Katsman: Freighted Love

11:00 – 12:20 Federica Gregoratto: Eros and Freedom Today

12:20 – 1:30 Lunch Break

1:30 – 2:50 Sara Macdonald: The Art of Friendship: Hegel and Plato

3:00 – 4:20 Gal Katz, “Love’s Rage Is Shame”: Hegel on Sex

4:20 – 4:45 Break

4:45 – 6.05 Paul Kottman: Love as Human Freedom

 

New York German Idealism Workshop

A joint undertaking of the philosophy departments of Columbia University & the New School for Social Research presents:

MATTERS OF LOVE: A CONFERENCE

NYC Wittgenstein Workshop presents Zed Adams on the digital/analogue distinction. @ New School, rm D1106
Feb 22 @ 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm
The New York City Wittgenstein Workshop has the following workshops scheduled for this semester and more planned workshops to be announced soon.
This is a reminder that Zed Adams will be presenting at the workshop this Friday, the 22nd  from 4 to 6 pm on the history of the digital/analogue distinction in philosophy. We will be meeting in room D 1106 in 6 E 16th St, New York, NY 10003. Please join us for a great conversation! As always, snacks and drinks will be served.

We would also like to announce two additions to our schedule this semester. Larry Jackson will be presenting on April 26 and Pierre-Jean Renaudi (Lyon) will be presenting on May 10. Our updated schedule is as follows:

All workshops are on Fridays from 4 to 6 pm in room D1106.

2/22 — Zed Adams (the New School) — History of the digital/analogue distinction in philosophy

4/19 — Nickolas Pappas (CUNY) — “Plato on the Opposite of Philosophy”
4/26 — Larry Jackson
5/10 —  Pierre-Jean Renaudi (Lyon)
Feb
28
Thu
Bryce Huebner: “Meditating and hallucinating: A socially situated and neuro-Yogācarin perspective” @ Wolff Conference Room, D1103
Feb 28 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

A number of philosophers working on Buddhist traditions have recently explored similarities between the cultivated experience of not-self, and the clinical experience of depersonalization. In this talk, I will offer some reflections on this theme. But my primary aim will be to push a similar kind of exploratory project one step further. Drawing on tools from cognitive and computational neuroscience, as well as insights from Yogācāra Buddhist philosophy, I will explore some of the most significant similarities and differences between anomalous experiences evoked by meditation, and anomalous experiences that are commonly labeled as hallucinations. I will then argue that understanding how such experiences are produced offers a powerful framework for thinking about the socially and historically situated nature of everyday experience.

Mar
13
Wed
Why Read Hannah Arendt Now: Book Launch and Movie Screening @ Wolff Conference Room, NSSR, D1103
Mar 13 @ 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm

Vera List Professor of Philosophy, Richard J. Bernstein, will present his new book on Hannah Arendt, Why Read Hannah Arendt Now (2018, Polity Press), followed by a screening of the documentary film Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt.

Free and open to the public.

Mar
14
Thu
Andrea Long Chu “Females: A Concern “ @ Wolff Conference Room, D1103
Mar 14 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

“Everyone is female”—this is the first of several “untenable claims” presented by Andrea Long Chu in her forthcoming book Females: A Concern (Verso, 2019). Drawing inspiration from Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto and her forgotten play Up Your Ass, this lecture in numbered theses whips through a variety of ugly objects (films, manifestos, performance art, psychoanalysis, porn, and the alt-right) to give a portrait of femaleness as a universal category of self-ablation against which all politics—even feminist politics—revolts.

Andrea Long Chu is a writer and critic completing her doctorate at New York University. Her writing has appeared, or will soon, in n+1Boston ReviewThe New York TimesNew YorkArtforumBookforumChronicle of Higher Education4ColumnsdifferencesWomen & PerformanceTSQ, and Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Her book Females: A Concern is forthcoming this year from Verso.

People in Support of Women in Philosophy is a group dedicated to the advancement of women and those who experience marginalization within the field of philosophy. Our group meets weekly to workshop papers, help members prepare for conference presentations and seminars, host guest speakers, and in general celebrate the work of our women and gender-non-conforming colleagues and mentors. Men are welcome and encouraged to take part as allies.

Mar
15
Fri
Roger T. Ames 安樂哲 on “Deweyan and Confucian Ethics: A Challenge to the Ideology of Individualism” @ Wolff Conference Room, NSSR, D1103
Mar 15 @ 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm

John Dewey, in his resistance to foundational individualism, declares that individual autonomy so conceived is a fiction; for Dewey, it is association that is a fact. In his own language: “There is no sense in asking how individuals come to be associated. They exist and operate in association.” In a way that resonates with Confucian role ethics, the revolutionary Dewey particularizes the fact of associated living and valorizes it by developing a vision of the habitude of unique, defused, relationally-constituted human beings. That is, he develops a distinctive, if not idiosyncratic language of habits and “individuality” to describe the various modalities of association that enable human beings to add value to their activities and to transform mere relations into a communicating community.

In Confucian role ethics, Dewey’s contention that association is a fact is restated in a different vocabulary by appealing to specific roles rather than unique habitudes for stipulating the specific forms that association takes within lives lived in family and community—that is, the various roles we live as sons and teachers, grandmothers and neighbors. For Confucianism, not only are these roles descriptive of our associations, they are also prescriptive in the sense that roles in family and community are themselves normative, guiding us in the direction of appropriate conduct. Whereas for both Confucianism and Dewey, mere association is a given, flourishing families and communities are what we are able to make of our facticity as the highest human achievement.

Mar
28
Thu
Is it wrong for feminists to pay other women for housework? Johanna Oksala, Pratt @ Wolff Conference Room, NSSR, D1103
Mar 28 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Many philosophers have suggested that the aim of imaginative philosophical inquiry is not to provide right answers, but right questions. This means demonstrating why certain questions are meaningless, based on false assumptions, or become senseless when posed in a wrong context. The question in my title appears to be a good candidate for this type of philosophical inquiry and I will try to show why. However, I will also argue that posing the question is nevertheless important, perhaps not for moral philosophy, but for feminist politics.

The argument proceeds in three stages. In the first section, I will discuss Gabrielle Meagher’s article, Jstor, Spring 2002, ‘Is it Wrong to Pay for Housework?’. I will contend that rather than posing this question as an abstract philosophical question, it is crucial to place it in the specific historical and socio-economic context in which we encounter it today. A thorough politico-economic analysis of paid housework should then open our eyes to the fact that feminists need to make demands that are not merely ameliorative but embody a radically emancipatory future for all women. In the second section, I will critically assess one such demand, the idea of universal basic income (UBI) – a monthly income paid by the government to each member of society regardless of income from other sources and with no conditions attached. My contention is that a feminist demand for UBI could contribute to the attempts to tackle the deep causes behind the growing socio-economic disparities between women, as well as improving the status of unpaid care work, but only in the context of a feminist revolution of everyday life. In the third section, I will ask what such a revolution might entail and return to the question of individual choice. While I insist that scapegoating women who pay other women for housework misses the real political problem, I will nevertheless conclude by suggesting that there are compelling political reasons for feminists to answer the question in my title with a resolute yes.