Calendar

Conference Schedule

Friday May 10

• 1pm: Rachel Goodman (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)
  Introductory Overview

  1:30pm: Jake Quilty-Dunn (University of Oxford)
  On Elisabeth Camp’s “Putting Thoughts to Work”

  4:30pm: John Kulvicki (Darmouth College)
  On Jacob Beck’s “Perception is Analog”

Saturday May 11

• 1pm: Jacob Beck (York University)
  On Jake Quilty-Dunn’s “Perceptual Pluralism”

  4pm: Elisabeth Camp (Rutgers University)
  On John Kulvicki’s “Modeling the Meanings of Pictures”

The Five Essential Readings for the Conference

The conference is predicated on the assumption that everyone in attendance will have read all five of these essays:

• John Haugeland, Representational Genera
• Elisabeth Camp, Putting Thoughts to Work
• Jacob Beck, Perception Is Analog
• Jake Quilty-Dunn, Perceptual Pluralism
• John Kulvicki, Modeling The Meanings of Pictures (excerpt)

Some Helpful Background Readings

Here are ten additional readings that help to fill in some of the background to the topics that will be discussed at the conference. Those new to these topics might start with the Kulvicki, Camp, and Giardino and Greenberg readings, and then move on to the others.

• John Kulvicki, Images in Mind
• Elisabeth Camp, Thinking With Maps
• Valeria Giardino and Gabriel Greenberg, Introduction: Varieties of Iconicity
• John Haugeland, Analog and Analog
• Fred Dretske, Sensation and Perception
• Jerry Fodor, Preconceptual Representation
• Michael Rescorla, Cognitive Maps and the Language of Thought
• Tyler Burge, Origins of Perception
• Tyler Burge, Steps Towards Origins of Propositional Thought
• Jacob Beck, The Generality Constraint and the Structure of Thought
• Whit Schonbein, Varieties of Analog and Digital Representation

If you have any questions about the conference, please contact Zed Adams at zed@newschool.edu.

Advance Registration Required; RSVP details coming soon

La Maison Française is pleased to host the second symposium of Arts and Pragmatism. Join us for two days of fascinating talks and encounters at the intersection of philosophy and artistic practice under the direction of Sandra Laugier and Yann Toma.
with the support of Panthéon Sorbonne University, Politique scientifique program, Global Works and Society, Liberal Studies, and La Maison Française at New York University.

Full program details to follow.

*We are so excited to welcome the general public back to most events at La Maison Francaise of NYU. Instructions for attending events in-person will be confirmed shortly before each event. Please note that NYU requires all visitors to provide official proof (in English) that they are fully vaccinated and boosted against COVID-19. Additional details to follow.

Our friends from Université de Paris Panthéon-Sorbonne return for a third installment of their symposium Arts & Pragmatism: From Ordinary Aesthetics to Post Creation. 

This day-long symposium will be chaired by Yann Toma and Sandra Laugier. From the organizers:

We have noticed it during the two previous symposia of our program: the pragmatist philosophy and in particular Dewey defends the idea that aesthetics must not only be considered as the search for truths about art and its creations but also as what concerns the experience of the persons with an artwork (a sensitive and active experience). The reception would thus be the dynamic experience of an incarnated observer, acting, feeling in his senses and his affects what is the work and what it makes him feel.

The political stake of the pragmatist aesthetics is to make sure that the strong aesthetic experiences remain open and accessible to the largest public and become even a «matter of ordinary conversation». It is then a matter of thinking about shared experience as a transmission of values, an important phenomenon for the moral, political, “educational” reflection of adults» (Cavell 1979, 1981, Shusterman, Laugier 2019, 2023, Gerrits 2020). Thus, this question of pragmatism addresses societal issues that concern all audiences, not just from a broadcast/transmission perspective. By focusing on experience and agency, this way of approaching pragmatism involves the cultural audience in a broad way to the point where it engages mediums such as television and in general digital cultures.

The concept of Post-Creation, insofar as it plays a form of exteriority to an original Creation, has all its place in a world where the strong aesthetic experiences remain open and accessible to a wider public. It is a question of placing the creation beyond what is biased, in the heart of a form of Third State of the artistic act in charge of a heuristic and critical potential, towards a form extracted from the zone of influence of the world of the art as such. The idea of Post-Creation tends towards the universal that would be the fact of conceiving the creation beyond any not institutionalized academism. We will see how a possible emulation between the ordinary aesthetic and the shared experience of the Post-Creation is articulated and played, where the experience of the creation produces knowledge and transforms what is out of the specific field of perception of the art in so many new acting and reflexive spaces. In that, the influence of the artistic creation on whole sections of the society, domains of perception until now inaccessible, becomes a stake of opening which results from the transformation of a form of ordinary aesthetics in a Post-Creation freed from the aesthetic channels of the contemporary art.

Read the statement in French

Program:

10:30AM : Opening Yann Toma, Sandra Laugier and François Noudelmann

11:00AM – 1:00PM : Panel I Pragmatism and the Project of an Ordinary Aesthetics

Chair : Yann Toma

Andrew Brandel (Penn State University) From the Aesthetics of the Everyday Life to Ordinary Aesthetics.

Barbara Formis (Panthéon-Sorbonne University) Doings and redoings of the Identical.

Sandra Laugier (Panthéon-Sorbonne) Ordinary Creation and Shared Culture.

Emmanuel Kattan (Columbia University) What happens when nothing happens: Chantal Akerman, Francis Ponge, Marisa Merz and the emergence of time.

1:00PM – 3:00PM : Lunch Break

3:00PM – 6:00PM : Panel II Pragmatism, Post-Creation

Chair : Sandra Laugier

Yann Toma (Artist/Panthéon-Sorbonne University) Post-Creation, a new way of making creation

The example of L’Or bleu.

Jung Hee Choi (artist and author of «Manifest Unmanifest»)    Dream House.

Dan Thomas (United Nations Global Compact), The importance of Art and Perception in the Diplomatic Way.

Warren Neidich (Artist and Founding Director Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art) The Brain Without Organs and the Ecocene.

This event is organized with the support of Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Politique scientifique program, and La Maison Française at New York University

Richard J. Bernstein first encountered John Dewey’s pragmatist naturalism as a graduate student at Yale University, where  “Dewey’s naturalistic vision of the relation of experience and nature—how human beings as natural creatures are related to the rest of nature—spoke deeply to me.” This early enthusiasm for Dewey’s naturalistic vision never left him. During the final years of his long life, Bernstein finished two books that return to issues of pragmatist naturalism.

·       His Pragmatic Naturalism: John Dewey’s Living Legacy (2020), traces differing versions of Deweyan naturalism in the works of contemporary philosophers, including Robert Brandom, John McDowell, Richard Rorty, Wilfrid Sellars, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Philip Kitcher, Bjorn Ramberg, David Macarthur, Steven Levine, Mark Johnson, Robert Sinclair, Huw Price, and Joseph Rouse.

·       In his final book, The Vicissitudes of Nature (2022), Bernstein clarifies his own pragmatist naturalism in relation to the thinking of earlier modern philosophers: Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.

This conference will critically assess and expand the legacy of Bernstein’s final pragmatic naturalism as expressed in these two books. Accepted papers will be collected for publication.

The New York Pragmatist Forum

Paper topics may include: 

●      Bernstein’s discussion of Dewey’s thinking in relation to contemporary philosophers’ formulations of naturalism in Pragmatic Naturalism: John Dewey’s Living Legacy.

●      Bernstein’s interpretation of an earlier thinker’s understanding of naturalism or nature in The Vicissitudes of Nature (Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, or Freud).

●      A larger theme or problem that brings one of these Bernstein’s texts into conversation with philosophical naturalism, either particular expressions or conceptual issues.

●      The consequences of one or both of these texts for questions of naturalism in relation to wider social and political questions, e.g., democracy, praxis, critique.

Abstracts: Please submit an abstract of no more than 500 words to tara@newschool.edu.

Submission Deadline: May 22, 2023 

NYPF Conference Committee:

Sergio Gallegos, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

Judith Green, Fordham University
Brendan Hogan, New York University

Tara Mastrelli, New School for Social Research

David Woods, New York University