The Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Race Reading Group‘s first Fall semester meeting will be:
Tuesday September 4th from 11:15 am to 12:45pm in room 5489 at The Graduate Center, CUNY.
The Graduate Center is located at 365 Fifth Ave, New York, NY 10016.
We will read:
Emmalon Davis’ “On Epistemic Appropriation.”
Graduate Center Professor of Philosophy Linda Alcoff will read from and discuss her new book, Rape and Resistance, with interlocutors Rupal Oza and Alyson Cole.
Co-sponsored with the CUNY Graduate Center PhD Program in Philosophy, Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP), and The Feminist Press.
Abstract: Causal modeling was developed within Artificial Intelligence over the last few decades in order to formally capture causal information, which is notably absent from statistics. Aside from the undeniable impact this has had on Artificial Intelligence, where talk of causal networks has become commonplace, the resulting formalisms were also eagerly picked up by philosophers working on causation. In particular, causal modeling has been used rather successfully in constructing formal definitions of actual causation, aka token causation. Given that actual causation occupies a crucial role in many issues in philosophy, causal modeling is a helpful tool to anyone studying those issues, that much is obvious. However, I argue that even in the absence of any definition of causation, causal modeling can still be put to significant use in order to resolve these issues. Concretely, my talk will consist of three parts. First I introduce my own definition of causation using causal models. Second I illustrate how causal models can be used to clarify and possibly settle the debate about Frankfurt-style cases and the Principle of Alternative Possibilities. Third I use causal models to sketch the position of non-reductive physicalism, and show how this allows it to tackle the famous Exclusion Argument.
The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will be meeting on Mondays from 4:15 to 6:15 in room TBA of the Graduate Center, CUNY (365 5th Avenue). The (provisional) schedule is as follows:
Sep 17. Sander Breckers, Utrecht
Sep 24. Hanoch Ben-Yami, CEU
Oct 1. Otavio Bueno, Miami
Oct 8. GC CLOSED. NO MEETING
Oct 15. Alfredo Freire, Campinas
Oct 22. Yale Weiss, GC
Oct 29. Boris Kment, Princeton
Nov 5. Melissa Fusco, Columbia
Nov 12. Amy Seymour, Fordham
Nov 19. Andrew Tedder, UConn
Nov 26. Justin Bledin, Johns Hopkins
Dec 3. Suki Finn, Southampton
Dec 10. Byong Yi, Toronto
I argue we can make progress in three contemporary debates about transnational feminisms by a) clarifying the normative commitments central to feminism and b) rethinking the role of normative ideals in transnational political practices. These debates concern the purported tension between taking seriously critiques of Western imperialism and retaining feminism’s status as a normative doctrine. Understanding feminism as opposition to sexist oppression unthethers feminism from commitments to controversial forms of individualism and antitraditionalism. Understanding transnational feminist praxis as a practice of nonideal justice-enhancement permits a universalist feminist position that is not monist about the endpoint of gender justice or the strategies that should be taken to achieve it.
I present a logic system I recently developed (RSL 2014), the Quantified Argument Calculus or Quarc. Quarc is closer in syntax and logical properties to Natural Language than is the Predicate Calculus, on any of its versions, and it is no less powerful than the first-order Predicate Calculus. This makes analysing the Barcan formulas and necessary existence by its means particularly interesting. As we shall see, the analogues in Quarc of the Barcan formulas and their converses are straightforwardly invalid. And, since quantification and existence in Quarc come apart, existence isn’t logically necessary. The issues with both the Barcan formulas and necessary existence were an artefact of a specific formal language, the Predicate Calculus, and they are eliminated once it is replaced by a formal language with a claim of providing an improved representation of the logic of Natural Language.
The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will be meeting on Mondays from 4:15 to 6:15 in room 6494 of the Graduate Center, CUNY (365 5th Avenue). The (provisional) schedule is as follows:
Sep 17. Sander Breckers, Utrecht
Sep 24. Hanoch Ben-Yami, CEU
Oct 1. Otavio Bueno, Miami
Oct 8. GC CLOSED. NO MEETING
Oct 15. Alfredo Freire, Campinas
Oct 22. Yale Weiss, GC
Oct 29. Boris Kment, Princeton
Nov 5. Melissa Fusco, Columbia
Nov 12. Amy Seymour, Fordham
Nov 19. Andrew Tedder, UConn
Nov 26. Justin Bledin, Johns Hopkins
Dec 3. Suki Finn, Southampton
Dec 10. Byong Yi, Toronto
The Sorites paradox offers an unsettling situation in which, in light of its premises and the apparent validity of the argument, one may be inclined to take the argument to be sound. But this entails that vague concepts, ubiquitous and indispensable to express salient features of the world, are ultimately inconsistent, or at least the application conditions of these concepts seem to lead one directly into contradiction. In what follows, I argue that this inconsistent understanding of vagueness is difficult to resist, but it is also hard to accept. First, I point out that a number of approaches to vagueness that try to resist this conclusion ultimately fail. But it is also difficult to accept the inconsistency approach. After all, vague concepts do not seem to be inconsistent. Second, even if the inconsistency view turned out to be true, the phenomenology of vague concepts (and such concepts, after all, do not seem to be inconsistent at all) can be accommodated. Contextual factors force one to apply inconsistent concepts consistently by arbitrarily resisting to apply the concepts once a locally determined threshold is met. This yields the impression that vague concepts are consistent. As a result, in light of the apparent non-inconsistent nature of vagueness, on the one hand, and the Sorites argument that supports the opposite view, on the other, it is unclear how to establish whether vague concepts ultimately are inconsistent or not. This explains why the Sorites paradox, despite centuries of reflection, does not go away, and why it is unclear how to settle, in one way or another, a significant aspect of the nature of vagueness.
The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will be meeting on Mondays from 4:15 to 6:15 in room 6494 of the Graduate Center, CUNY (365 5th Avenue). The (provisional) schedule is as follows:
Sep 17. Sander Breckers, Utrecht
Sep 24. Hanoch Ben-Yami, CEU
Oct 1. Otavio Bueno, Miami
Oct 8. GC CLOSED. NO MEETING
Oct 15. Alfredo Freire, Campinas
Oct 22. Yale Weiss, GC
Oct 29. Boris Kment, Princeton
Nov 5. Melissa Fusco, Columbia
Nov 12. Amy Seymour, Fordham
Nov 19. Andrew Tedder, UConn
Nov 26. Justin Bledin, Johns Hopkins
Dec 3. Suki Finn, Southampton
Dec 10. Byong Yi, Toronto
The CUNY Graduate Center Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC), the Center for the Humanities, and the Philosophy Program present an interdisciplinary conference on:
“#MeToo and Epistemic Injustice”
Over the past year, the #MeToo movement has forced into national consciousness what has long been an underground truth known by women: the horrifying pervasiveness of sexual harassment and assault as routine everyday occurrences, largely unpunished. How can one explain the resistance there has traditionally been, as recently brought out in one high-profile case after another, to taking women’s testimony seriously? Using Miranda Fricker’s innovative concept of “epistemic injustice” as a focus—the refusal to give members of subordinated groups a fair hearing—this 2-day interdisciplinary conference will examine the problem in its multiple dimensions. Eighteen theorists from a wide variety of subjects—philosophy, political theory, media studies, history, gender and women’s studies, LGBTQ theory, Africana and Native American studies, law, and disability theory—will look from their distinctive perspectives at women’s vulnerability to sexual harassment and assault, and the ways in which it is complicated by class, race, nationality, sexuality, and disability.
October 5-6, 2018
Venues:
- Oct 5th – Roosevelt House, 47-49 East 65th St.
9:30 a.m. – 6:00 p.m. - Oct 6th – Skylight Room (9100), CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Ave.
10:00 a.m. – 7:00 p.m.
Speakers:
- Linda Martín Alcoff, Philosophy, Hunter College & CUNY Grad Center
- Susan Brison, Philosophy, Dartmouth College
- Ann Cahill, Philosophy, Elon University
- Nirmala Erevelles, Disability Studies & Education, University of Alabama
- Karyn Freedman, Philosophy, University of Guelph
- Miranda Fricker, Philosophy, CUNY Grad Center
- Mishuana Goeman, Gender Studies & American Indian Studies, UCLA
- Suzanne Goldberg, Columbia Law School
- Raja Halwani, Liberal Arts, Art Institute of Chicago
- Alison Jaggar, Philosophy, University of Colorado Boulder
- Kate Manne, Philosophy, Cornell University
- Danielle McGuire, Independent Historian
- Sarah Clark Miller, Philosophy, Penn State University
- Rupal Oza, Women & Gender Studies, Hunter College & CUNY Grad Center
- Andrea Press, Media Studies & Sociology, University of Virginia
- Tricia Rose, Africana Studies, Brown University
- Dina Siddiqi, Women & Gender Studies, Hunter College
- Shatema Threadcraft, Government, Dartmouth College
Conference organizers: Linda Martín Alcoff and Charles W. Mills
The CUNY Graduate Center Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC), the Center for the Humanities, and the Philosophy Program present an interdisciplinary conference on:
“#MeToo and Epistemic Injustice”
Over the past year, the #MeToo movement has forced into national consciousness what has long been an underground truth known by women: the horrifying pervasiveness of sexual harassment and assault as routine everyday occurrences, largely unpunished. How can one explain the resistance there has traditionally been, as recently brought out in one high-profile case after another, to taking women’s testimony seriously? Using Miranda Fricker’s innovative concept of “epistemic injustice” as a focus—the refusal to give members of subordinated groups a fair hearing—this 2-day interdisciplinary conference will examine the problem in its multiple dimensions. Eighteen theorists from a wide variety of subjects—philosophy, political theory, media studies, history, gender and women’s studies, LGBTQ theory, Africana and Native American studies, law, and disability theory—will look from their distinctive perspectives at women’s vulnerability to sexual harassment and assault, and the ways in which it is complicated by class, race, nationality, sexuality, and disability.
October 5-6, 2018
Venues:
- Oct 5th – Roosevelt House, 47-49 East 65th St.
9:30 a.m. – 6:00 p.m. - Oct 6th – Skylight Room (9100), CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Ave.
10:00 a.m. – 7:00 p.m.
Speakers:
- Linda Martín Alcoff, Philosophy, Hunter College & CUNY Grad Center
- Susan Brison, Philosophy, Dartmouth College
- Ann Cahill, Philosophy, Elon University
- Nirmala Erevelles, Disability Studies & Education, University of Alabama
- Karyn Freedman, Philosophy, University of Guelph
- Miranda Fricker, Philosophy, CUNY Grad Center
- Mishuana Goeman, Gender Studies & American Indian Studies, UCLA
- Suzanne Goldberg, Columbia Law School
- Raja Halwani, Liberal Arts, Art Institute of Chicago
- Alison Jaggar, Philosophy, University of Colorado Boulder
- Kate Manne, Philosophy, Cornell University
- Danielle McGuire, Independent Historian
- Sarah Clark Miller, Philosophy, Penn State University
- Rupal Oza, Women & Gender Studies, Hunter College & CUNY Grad Center
- Andrea Press, Media Studies & Sociology, University of Virginia
- Tricia Rose, Africana Studies, Brown University
- Dina Siddiqi, Women & Gender Studies, Hunter College
- Shatema Threadcraft, Government, Dartmouth College
Conference organizers: Linda Martín Alcoff and Charles W. Mills
The Saul Kripke Center is delighted to announce that Brian Cross Porter (PhD student, CUNY) will give the second talk in our Young Scholars Series, on October 11th, 2pm – 4pm, in room 3207.
The title is “Kripke’s Fixed Point Construction and the V-Curry Paradox.”
The series is an opportunity for graduate students and early career faculty from throughout the CUNY system to present material on philosophy, computer science and linguistics that is connected to Saul’s work.
n his seminal work Counterfactuals, David Lewis presents a family of systems of conditional logic—his V-family—which includes both his preferred logic of counterfactuals (VC/C1) and Stalnaker’s conditional logic (VCS/C2). Graham Priest posed the problem of finding systems of (labeled) tableaux for logics from Lewis’s V-family in his Introduction to Non-Classical Logic (2008, p. 93). In this talk, I present a solution to this problem: sound and complete (labeled) tableaux for Lewis’s V-logics. Errors and shortcomings in recent work on this problem are identified and corrected (especially close attention is given to a recent paper by Negri and Sbardolini, whose approach anticipates my own). While most of the systems I present are analytic, the tableaux I give for Stalnaker’s VCS and its extensions make use of a version of the Cut rule and, consequently, are non-analytic. I conjecture that Cut is eliminable from these tableaux and discuss problems encountered in trying to prove this.
The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will be meeting on Mondays from 4:15 to 6:15 in room 6494 of the Graduate Center, CUNY (365 5th Avenue). The (provisional) schedule is as follows:
Sep 17. Sander Breckers, Utrecht
Sep 24. Hanoch Ben-Yami, CEU
Oct 1. Otavio Bueno, Miami
Oct 8. GC CLOSED. NO MEETING
Oct 15. Alfredo Freire, Campinas
Oct 22. Yale Weiss, GC
Oct 29. Boris Kment, Princeton
Nov 5. Melissa Fusco, Columbia
Nov 12. Amy Seymour, Fordham
Nov 19. Andrew Tedder, UConn
Nov 26. Justin Bledin, Johns Hopkins
Dec 3. Suki Finn, Southampton
Dec 10. Byong Yi, Toronto