The last Philosophy in the Library talk of 2019 is coming up on December 4th at 7:00 PM! Sebastian Purcell is talking about “Good Habits Aren’t Enough: The Aztec Conception of Shared Agency!” If you’re into indigenous philosophy, the history of philosophy, virtue ethics, or collective action, you should enjoy it.
Brooklyn Public Philosophers is a forum for philosophers in the greater Brooklyn area to discuss their work with a general audience, hosted by the Brooklyn Public Library. Its goal is to raise awareness of the best work on philosophical questions of interest to Brooklynites, and to provide a civil space where Brooklynites can reason together about the philosophical questions that matter to them.
10/23 – Philosophy in the Library: Jennifer Morton on Education @ the Brooklyn Public Library’s Information Commons Lab // 7:30-9:00 PM
11/6 – Philosophy in the Library: Asia Ferrin on Mindfulness @ the Brooklyn Public Library’s Information Commons Lab // 7:30-9:00 PM
12/4 – Philosophy in the Library: Sebastian Purcell on Aztec Philosophy @ the Brooklyn Public Library’s Information Commons Lab // 7:00-9:00 PM
David Bates, in conversation with Stefanos Geroulano and Joanna Stalnaker
We imagine that we are both in control of and controlled by our bodies—autonomous and yet automatic. This entanglement, according to David W. Bates, emerged in the seventeenth century when humans first built and compared themselves with machines. Reading varied thinkers from Descartes to Kant to Turing, Bates reveals how time and time again technological developments offered new ways to imagine how the body’s automaticity worked alongside the mind’s autonomy. Tracing these evolving lines of thought, David Bates discusses his new book, An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence, which offers a new theorization of the human as a being that is dependent on technology and produces itself as an artificial automaton without a natural, outside origin.
David Bates is Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California Berkeley. His research focuses on the history of legal and political ideas, and the relationship between technology, science, and the history of human cognition.
Stefanos Geroulanos is the Director of the Remarque Institute and Professor of European Intellectual History at NYU. He usually writes about concepts that weave together modern understandings of time, the human, and the body. His new book is a history of the concepts, images, and sciences of human origins since 1770, forthcoming from Liveright Press as The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins in 2024.
Joanna Stalnaker is Professor of French at Columbia. She works on Enlightenment philosophy and literature, with a recent interest in how women shaped the Enlightenment. Her new book, The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death, will be published by Yale University Press in the Walpole series.