May
10
Fri
Hannah Arendt and Reiner Schurmann Annual Symposium in Political Philosophy “Varieties of Intentionality” @ Theresa Lang Center, I202, New School
May 10 – May 11 all-day

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:

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.

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

Sep
12
Thu
International Merleau-Ponty Circle: Affect / Emotion / Feeling @ 12th Floor Lounge
Sep 12 – Sep 14 all-day

Thursday, September 12 Schedule

8:30 – 9 a.m. Registration and coffee
9 – 9:15 a.m. Opening remarks: Shiloh Whitney, Conference Director
Session 1 – Organic Affectivity and Animality
Moderator: Emilia Angelova, Concordia University
9:15 – 10 a.m. Hermanni Yli-Tepsa, University of Jyväskylä: “How to feel like our eyes: tracing the theme of instinctive affectivity in Phenomenology of Perception”
10 – 10:45 a.m. Sarah DiMaggio, Vanderbilt University: “Flesh and Blood: Reimagining Kinship”
10:45 – 11 a.m. Break
Session 2 – Passivity
Moderator: Philip Walsh, Fordham University
11 – 11:45 a.m. David Morris, Concordia University: “The Transcendentality of Passivity: Affective Being and the Contingency of Phenomenology as Institution”
11:45 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. Rajiv Kaushik, Brock University “Merleau-Ponty on Passivity and the Limit of Philosophical Critique”
12:30 – 2 p.m. Lunch Break
Session 3 – Theorizing Emotion 1: Outside-in, Inside-Outside
Moderator: Duane H. Davis, University of North Carolina at Asheville
2 – 2:45 p.m. Ed Casey, Stonybrook University: “Bringing Edge to Bear: Vindicating Merleau-Ponty’s Nascent Ideas on Emotion”
2:45 – 3:30 p.m. Ondřej Švec, Charles University Prague: “Acting out one’s emotion”
3:30 – 3:45 p.m. Break
Session 4 – Theorizing Emotion 2: Intersubjective Dimensions
Moderator: April Flakne, New College of Florida
3:45 – 4:30 p.m. Jan Halák, Palacky University Olomouc: “On the diacritical value of expression with regard to emotion”
4:30 – 5:15 p.m. Corinne Lajoie, Penn State University: “The equilibrium of sense: Levels of embodiment and the (dis)orientations of love”
Winner of the M. C. Dillon Award for best graduate essay
5:15 – 5:45 p.m. Snack Break (light refreshments provided)
Thursday Keynote
Introduction: Shiloh Whitney, Fordham University
5:45 – 7:15 p.m. Alia Al-Saji, McGill University
“The Affective Flesh of Colonial Duration”

Friday, September 13 Schedule

8:30 – 9 a.m. Registration and coffee
Session 5 – Affective Pathologies and Empathy
Moderator: Lisa Käll, Stockholm University
9 – 9:45 a.m. Ståle Finke, Norwegian University of Science and Technology Trondheim: “Structuring Affective Pathology: Merleau-Ponty and Psychoanalysis”
9:45 – 10:30 a.m. Catherine Fullarton, Emory University: “Empathy, Perspective, Parallax”
10:30 – 10:45 a.m. Break
Session 6 – Eating and Breathing
Moderator: Ann Murphy, University of New Mexico
10:45 – 11:30 a.m. Whitney Ronshagen, Emory University: “Visceral Relations: On Eating, Affect, and Sharing the World”
11:30 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. Amie Leigh Zimmer, University of Oregon: “Rethinking Chronic Breathlessness Beyond Symptom and Syndrome”
12:15 – 2 p.m. Lunch Break (and graduate student Mentoring Session in Lowenstein 810)
Session 7 – Critical Phenomenologies 1: Work and Freedom
Moderator: Whitney Howell, La Salle University
2 – 2:45 p.m. Talia Welsh, University of Tennessee Chattanooga: “Toward a Critical Phenomenology of Work and Its Discontents”
2:45 – 3:30 p.m. Laura McMahon, Eastern Michigan University: “The ‘Great Phantom’: Merleau-Ponty on Habitus, Freedom, and Political Transformation”
3:30 – 3:45 p.m. Break
Session 8 – Critical Phenomenologies 2: The “I Can”
Moderator: Cheryl Emerson, SUNY Buffalo
3:45 – 4:30 p.m. Kym Maclaren, Ryerson University: “Criminalization and the Self-Constituting Dynamics of Distrust”
4:30 – 5:15 p.m. Joel Reynolds, University of Massachusetts Lowell and Lauren Guilmette, Elon University: “Rethinking the Ableism of Affect Theory with Merleau-Ponty”
5:15 – 5:45 p.m. Snack Break (light refreshments provided)
Friday Keynote
Introduction: Shiloh Whitney, Fordham University
5:45 – 7:15 p.m. Matthew Ratcliffe, York University
“Towards a Phenomenology of Grief: Insights from Merleau-Ponty”

Saturday, September 14 Schedule

8:30 – 9 a.m. Registration and coffee
Session 9 – Feeling Beyond Humanism
Moderator: Wayne Froman, George Mason University
9 – 9:45 a.m. Marie-Eve, Morin, University of Alberta. “Merleau-Ponty’s ‘cautious anthropomorphism’”
9:45 – 10:30 a.m. Jay Worthy, University of Alberta: “Feelings of Adversity: Towards a Critical Humanism”
10:30 – 10:45 a.m. Break
Session 10 – Art and Affect
Moderator: Stephen Watson, Notre Dame
10:45 – 11:30 a.m. Veronique Foti, Pennsylvania State University. “Body, Animality, and Cosmos in the Art of Kiki Smith”
11:30 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. Rebecca Longtin, State University of New York New Paltz: “From Stone to Flesh: Affect and the Poetic Ambiguity of the Body”
12:15 – 2:15 p.m. Lunch Break (and Business Lunch at Rosa Mexicano, 61 Columbus Ave)
Session 11 – Voice and Silence
Moderator: Gail Weiss, George Washington University
2:15 – 3 p.m. Susan, Bredlau, Emory University. “Losing One’s Voice: Merleau-Ponty and the Lived Space of Conversation”
3 – 3:45 p.m. Martina, Ferrari, University of Oregon. “The Laboring of Deep Silence: ‘Conceptless Opening(s),’ the Suspension of the Familiar, and the Dismemberment of the Ego”
3:45 – 4 p.m. Break
Session 12 – Affectivity and Language
Moderator: Galen Johnson, University of Rhode Island
4 – 4:45 p.m. Silvana de Souza Ramos, University of São Paulo. “Merleau-Ponty and the Prose of Dora’s World”
4:45 – 5:30 p.m. Katie Emery Brown, University of California Berkeley. “Queer Silence in Merleau-Ponty’s Gesture”
Banquet
7 – 10 p.m. At Salam, 104 W 13th St.
Oct
24
Thu
IS ACTIVITY IN PREFRONTAL CORTEX IMPORTANT FOR CONSCIOUS PERCEPTION? @ Deutsches Haus at NYU
Oct 24 @ 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm

Speakers:

Biyu Jade He (NYU Medical Centre)
Hakwan Lau (UCLA)
Victor Lamme (University of Amsterdam)
Johannes Fahrenfort (University of Amsterdam)

Where in the brain are the neural correlates of perceptual consciousness?  Some leading theories of consciousness, including global workspace and higher-order thought theories, hold that these correlates centrally involve prefrontal cortex.  Other leading theories, including first-order and integrated information theories, hold that these correlates centrally involve sensory cortices, with prefrontal cortex playing at most a secondary role.  In recent years much experimental evidence has been brought to bear on both sides of the question.

In this debate, Hakwan Lau (UCLA) and Biyu Jade He (NYU) will defend the view that neural activity in prefrontal cortex is important for conscious perception, while Victor Lamme (Amsterdam) and Johannes Fahrenfort (Amsterdam) will argue that prefrontal activity is not important for conscious perception.

Oct
26
Wed
How AI Is Changing Artistic Creation @ Online
Oct 26 @ 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm

Generative art made with algorithms has existed since the early days of computing in the 1960s. In recent years, a new strand of generative art has emerged: AI-generated art, which leverages the recent progress of artificial intelligence to create artworks. Unlike old-fashioned generative art, AI-generated art is not produced with an explicit set of programming instructions provided by human artists; instead, it involves training an algorithm on a dataset so that it can later produce artworks (images, music, or video clips) using its own internal parameters that have not been explicitly defined by a human. This process raises fascinating questions at the intersection of computer science, art history, and the philosophy of art. At a superficial level of analysis, AI-generated art seems to offload much of the creative impetus of art production to the machine, requiring minimal intervention from the artist. On closer inspection, however, it involves a novel process of curation at two key stages: upstream in the selection of the dataset on which the algorithm is trained, and downstream in the selection of the outputs that should qualify as artworks. Instead of replacing human artists with computers, AI-generated art can be understood as a new kind of collaboration between mind and machine, both of which contribute to the aesthetic value of the final artwork.

This seminar will bring together AI artists and philosophers to explore the significance of this new mode of art production. It will discuss the implications of AI-generated art for the definition of art, the nature of the relationship between artists and tools, the process of digital curation, and whether AI systems can be as creative as humans.

Event Speakers

Event Information

Free and open to the public. Registration is required via Eventbrite. Registered attendees will receive an event link shortly before the seminar begins.

This event is hosted by the Presidential Scholars in Society and Neuroscience as part of the Seminars in Society and Neuroscience series.

The Center for Science and Society makes every reasonable effort to accommodate individuals with disabilities. If you require disability accommodations to attend a Center for Science and Society event, please contact us at scienceandsociety@columbia.edu or (212) 853-1612 at least 10 days in advance of the event. For more information, please visit the campus accessibility webpage.

Jan
28
Sat
Fitting at 80 conference @ CUNY Grad Center rm 3310-B
Jan 28 all-day

A prominent logician Melvin Fitting has turned 80. This hybrid conference is a special event in his honor.

Melvin Fitting was in the departments of Computer Science, Philosophy, and Mathematics at the CUNY Graduate Center and in the department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Lehman College. He is now Professor Emeritus. He has authored 11 books and over a hundred research papers with staggering citation figures. In 2012, Melvin Fitting was given the Herbrand Award by the Conference on Automated Deduction (CADE) for distinguished contributions to the field. In 2019, Professor Fitting received a Doctor Honoris Causa (an Honorary Doctorate) from the University of Bucharest.

Greetings, congratulations, photos for posting, and ZOOM link requests could be sent to Sergei Artemov by sartemov@gmail.com or sartemov@gc.cuny.edu.

Conference website https://sartemov.ws.gc.cuny.edu/fitting-at-80/

Program (the times are given in the Eastern Day Time zone EST). In-person location: CUNY Graduate Center, rm. 3310-B.

January 28, Saturday

8:00-8:45 am Arnon Avron (Tel Aviv), “Breaking the Tie: Benacerraf’s Identification Argument Revisited”
8:45-9:30 am Junhua Yu (Beijing), “Exploring Operators on Neighborhood Models”

9:30-9:45 am Break

9:45-10:30 am Sara Negri (Genoa), “Faithful Modal Embedding: From Gödel to Labelled Calculi”
10:30-11:15 am Heinrich Wansing (Bochum), “Remarks on Semantic Information and Logic. From Semantic Tetralateralism to the Pentalattice 65536_5”

11:15-11:30 am Break

11:30 am -12:15 pm Roman Kuznets (Vienna), “On Interpolation”
12:15-1:00 pm Walter Carnielli (Campinas), “Combining KX4 and S4: A logic that encompasses factive and non-factive evidence

1:00-1:15 pm Break

1:15-2:00 pm Eduardo Barrio and Federico Pailos (Buenos Aires), “Meta-classical Non-classical Logics”
2:00-2:45 pm Graham Priest (New York), “Jaśkowski and the Jains: a Fitting Tribute”

2:45-4:00 pm Session of memories and congratulations featuring Sergei Artemov, Anil Nerode, Hiroakira Ono, Melvin Fitting, and others.