Calendar

Nina Emery (Holyoke): The Governing Conception of Laws @ NYU, rm 203

Apr 8 @ 4:30 pm – 6:30 pm

In her paper, “The Non-Governing Conception of Laws,” Helen Beebee argues that it is not a conceptual truth that laws of nature govern their instances, and that this fact insulates Humeans about laws of nature from some of the most pressing objections against their view. I agree with the first claim, but not the second. For although it is not a conceptual truth that laws govern, the view that laws govern follows straightforwardly from an important, though under-appreciated, principle that constrains scientific theory choice, and the principles that constrain scientific theory choice ought to constrain theory choice in metaphysics as well. I then show how the specific understanding of governance that plays a role in this argument raises serious concerns for Humeans about laws of nature.

There will be dinner after the talk. If you are interested, please send an email with `Dinner’ in the heading to nyphilsci@gmail.com (please note that all are welcome, but only the speaker’s dinner will be covered). If you have any other questions, please email isaac.wilhelm@rutgers.edu.

Categories: NYU Tags: science

Apr

23

Tue

Elizabeth Miller (Brown) @ NYU, rm 110

Apr 23 @ 4:30 pm – 6:30 pm

Presented by Metro Area Philosophers of Science

Categories: NYU Tags: science

Jun

10

Rutgers-Bristol Workshop on the Metaphysical Unity of Science @ Rutgers U, Newark. Conklin Hall 455

Jun 10 – Jun 11 all-day

Schedule – June 10th

(Talks are aprox. 45 minutes with 30 minutes for Q&A)

9:00 Mazviita Chirimuuta, Emergence in Science & the Unity of Science

10:15 Joyce Havstad, TBA

12:00 Lunch, Marcus P&B. Part of RUN and Newark’s Community Development.

2:00 Ricki Bliss, Fundamentality: From Epistemology to Metaphysics

3:15 Tuomas Tahko, Laws of Metaphysics for Essentialists

Schedule – June 11th

9:00 Kelly Trodgon, Grounding and Explanatory Gaps

10:15 Stuart Glennan, Rethinking Mechanistic Constitution

12:00 Lunch, Mercato Tomato Pie.

2:00 Alex Franklin, How Do Levels Emerge?

3:15 Ken Aizawa, New Directions in Compositional Explanation: Two Cases Studies

Abstracts

Mazviita Chirimuuta – Emergence in Science & the Unity of Science

This paper considers the implications of recent accounts of emergent phenomena for the question of the unity of the sciences. I first offer a historical account of physicalism in its different guises since the mid 19th century. Two threads connecting these otherwise quite different views have been the rejection of emergent phenomena and the commitment to the unity of science. In section two I provide an exposition of emergence as presented in recent philosophy of science, where the key claim is that “parts behave differently in wholes”, based on the empirical finding of what Gillett (2016) calls “differential powers.” Gillett argues that the empirical evidence does not yet support the strong emergentist claim that there is downward causation or any other form of influence from the whole system to its constituent parts, but that such evidence might be obtained. In section 3 I propose instead that the question of whether or not the finding of differential powers is taken to provide overwhelming evidence for strong emergence depends on the further interpretation of differential powers, and ultimately on very broad metaphysical commitments. The interpretation of differential powers that is most resistant to objections from opponents of strong emergence involves a rejection of substance ontology, and hence the rejection of physicalism. Thus, as I conclude in section 4, philosophers should not wait in expectation for empirical results that will settle the question of whether or not there is strong emergence. I offer a preliminary costs/benefits analysis of the different ontologies of differential powers, intended to aid the reader in their decision over the status of strong emergence. On the most radical interpretation, the usual physicalist conception of the unity of science must be rejected, while a different kind of metaphysical wholism stands in its place.

Joyce Havstad, TBC

Ricki Bliss – Fundamentality: from Epistemology to Metaphysics

In this talk, I explore what might follow for the metaphysics of fundamentality if we take seriously certain reasons to believe there is anything fundamental in the first place.

Tuomas Tahko – Laws of Metaphysics for Essentialists

There is a line of thought gathering momentum which suggests that just like causal laws govern causation, there needs to be something in metaphysics that governs metaphysical relations. Such laws of metaphysics would be counterfactual-supporting general principles that are responsible for the explanatory force of metaphysical explanations. There are various suggestions about how such principles could be understood. They could be based on what Kelly Trogdon calls grounding-mechanical explanations, where the role that grounding mechanisms play in certain metaphysical explanations mirrors the role that causal mechanisms play in certain scientific explanations. Another approach, by Jonathan Schaffer, claims to be neutral regarding grounding or essences (although he does commit to the idea that metaphysical explanation is ‘backed’ by grounding relations). In this paper I will assess these suggestions and argue that for those willing to invoke essences, there is a more promising route available: the unificatory role of metaphysical explanation may be accounted for in terms of natural kind essences.

Kelly Trogdon – Grounding and Explanatory Gaps

Physicalism is the thesis that all mental facts are ultimately grounded by physical facts. There is an explanatory gap between the mental and physical, and many see this as posing a challenge to physicalism. Jonathan Schaffer (2017) disagrees, arguing that standard grounding connections involve explanatory gaps as a matter of course. I begin by arguing that Schaffer and others mischaracterize the explanatory gap between the mental and physical—it chiefly concerns what I call cognitive significance rather than priori implication or related notions. The upshot is that standard grounding connections normally don’t involve explanatory gaps. Then I consider two grounding-theoretic proposals about how to close explanatory gaps in the relevant sense, one involving structural equations (Schaffer 2017) and the other mechanisms (Trogdon 2018). While each of these proposals seeks to illuminate grounding connections, I argue that neither is helpful in closing the explanatory gap between the mental and physical.

Stuart Glennan – Rethinking Mechanistic Constitution

The relationship between a mechanisms and its working parts is known as mechanistic constitution. In this paper we review the history of the mechanistic constitution debate, starting with Salmon’s original account, and we explain what we take to be the proper lessons to be drawn from the extensive literature surrounding Craver’s mutual manipulability account. Based on our analysis, we argue that much of the difficulty in understanding the mechanistic constitution relation arises from a failure to recognize two different forms of mechanistic constitution — corresponding to two different kinds of relationships between a mechanism and the phenomenon for which it is responsible. First, when mechanisms produce phenomena, the mechanism’s parts are diachronic stages of the process by which entities act to produce the phenomenon. Second, when mechanisms underlie some phenomenon, the phenomenon is a activity of a whole system, and the mechanism’s parts are those of the working entities that synchronically give rise to the phenomenon. Attending to these different kinds of constitutive relations will clarify the circumstances under which mechanistic phenomena can be said to occur at different levels.

Alex Franklin – How Do Levels Emerge?

Levels terminology is employed throughout scientific discourse, and is crucial to the formulation of various debates in the philosophy of science. In this talk, I argue that all levels are, to some degree, autonomous. Building on this, I claim that higher levels may be understood as both emergent from and reducible to lower levels. I cash out this account of levels with a case study. Nerve signals are on a higher level than the individual ionic motions across the neuronal membrane; this is (at least in part) because the nerve signals are autonomous from such motions. In order to understand the instantiation of these levels we ought to identify the mechanisms at the lower level which give rise to such autonomy. In this case we can do so: the gated ion channels and pumps underwrite the autonomy of the higher level.

Ken Aizawa – New Directions in Compositional Explanation: Two Cases Studies

The most familiar approach to scientific compositional explanations is that adopted by the so-called “New Mechanists”. This approach focuses on compositional explanations of processes of wholes in terms of processes of their parts. In addition, the approach focuses on the use of so-called “interlevel interventions” as the means by which compositional relations are investigated. By contrast, on the approach I adopt, we see that there are compositional explanations of individuals in terms of their parts and properties of individuals in terms of the properties of their parts. In addition, I draw attention to the use of abductive methods in investigations of compositional relations. I illustrate my approach by use of Robert Hooke’s microscopic investigations of the cork and the development of the theory of the action potential.

Categories: Rutgers Tags: conference epistemology metaphysics science

Sep

13

Fri

Balzan Conference: Dworkin’s Late Work @ Lester Pollack Colloquium Room, 9th Flr Furman Hall

Sep 13 – Sep 14 all-day

Ronald Dworkin’s work always spanned a wide array of topics, from the most abstract jurisprudence through the details of American constitutional law all the way over to political philosophy and theories of justice and equality. In the last decades of his life, however, Dworkin’s work flowered in ways that went beyond even this prodigious range. Though he continued his central work in the philosophy of law and constitutional theory, he also addressed issues in international law, human dignity, the philosophy of religion, the relation between ethics, morality and legal theory, and the unity of practical thought generally. This conference will explore some of these themes in Dworkin’s late work. Beginning with a panel on his understanding of religion, we will also convene discussions of his work on legal integrity, international law, and the relation between law and morality. There will be a total of nine presentations, with plenty of time for discussion. All are welcome.

Panel 1 (Friday 1:30 p.m.): Dworkin’s Religion without God.
Eric Gregory (Princeton),
Moshe Halbertal (NYU and Hebrew U.) Ronald Dworkin Religion Without God: Morality and the Transcendent
Larry Sager (Texas) Solving Religious Liberty

Panel 2 (Friday 4:30 p.m.): Dworkin on international law.
Samantha Besson (Fribourg)
The Political Legitimacy of International Law: Sovereign States and their International Institutional Order

John Tasioulas (King’s College, London)

Panel 3 (Saturday 10 a.m.): The idea of integrity in Law’s Empire.
Andrei Marmor (Cornell) Integrity in Law’s Empire
Jeremy Waldron (NYU) The Rise and Decline of Integrity

Panel 4 (Saturday 2:15 p.m.): Law and morality in Justice for Hedgehogs.
Mark Greenberg (UCLA)
What Makes a Moral Duty Legal? Dworkin’s Judicial Enforcement Theory Versus the Moral Impact Theory

Ben Zipursky (Fordham)

Categories: NYU Tags: conference legal political religion

7

Slavoj Žižek: Disorder Under Heaven @ NYU Skirball Center

Oct 7 @ 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm

Our situation is dangerous, there are uncertainties and elements of chaos in our environment, in international relations, in biotechnology, in sexual relations… But it is here that we should remember Mao’s old motto: “There is great disorder under heaven, so the situation is excellent!” Let’s not lose nerves, let’s exploit the confusion as a chance to propose a new radical vision. In January 2019, an international team of scientists proposed “a diet it says can improve health while ensuring sustainable food production to reduce further damage to the planet.” We are talking about a radical reorganization of our entire food production and distribution—so how to do it? Is it not clear that a strong global agency is needed with the power to coordinate such measures? And is not such an agency pointing in the direction of what we once called “Communism”? And does the same not hold for other threats to our survival as humans? Is a similar global agency not needed also to deal with the problem of increasing numbers of refugees and immigrants, with the problem of digital control over our lives? Let’s not be afraid to tackle the problem of the new order that the ongoing disorder is calling for.

Slavoj Žižek will be introduced by Xudong Zhang, Professor of Comparative Literature & East Asian Studies, and Director of China House at NYU.

About the speakers:

Slavoj Žižek, Ph.D., is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and visiting professor at a number of U.S. Universities (Columbia, Princeton, New School for Social Research, New York University, University of Michigan). He obtained his Ph.D. in Philosophy in Ljubljana studying Psychoanalysis and also studied at the University of Paris. Slavoj Zizek is a Hegelian philosopher, Lacanian psychoanalyst, and Marxist social analyst. He is the author of The Indivisible Remainder; The Sublime Object of Ideology; The Metastases of Enjoyment; Looking Awry: Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture; The Plague of Fantasies; The Ticklish Subject; Disparities; and Antigone. His latest publication, Like a Thief in Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism (Seven Stories Press), will be on sale at the event by the NYU Bookstore.

Xudong Zhang is Professor of Comparative Literature and East Asian Studies at NYU, and founding director of the International Center for Critical Theory (a consortium of Peking University, New York University, University of Tokyo and Eastern China Normal University). He is also Director of China House NYU. He has published widely on critical theory and transcultural comparisons of Chinese and European modernities.

As part of NYU Skirball Talks, the NYU Department of German and Deutsches Haus at NYU present Disorder under Heaven with Slavoj Žižek.

Attendance information:

This event is free and open to the general public. Please RSVP here.

“SKIRBALL TALKS: SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: DISORDER UNDER HEAVEN” is a DAAD-supported event.

Categories: NYU Tags: social

17

Thu

Colloquium in Legal, Political, and Social Philosophy: Pop-up Session with Joseph Raz @ NYU Law School - Vanderbilt Hall, 3rd Flr, Faculty Library

Oct 17 @ 4:00 pm – 7:00 pm

Although the Colloquium on Legal, Political, and Social Philosophy is on hiatus this year, it will convene a special “pop-up” session on Thursday, October 17 from 4-7 p.m. in the Faculty Library on the third floor of Vanderbilt Hall. Professor Joseph Raz, who has long been an important member of the Colloquium community, will present a pre-circulated paper on this occasion, which marks the end of many years during which he has taught regularly at Columbia Law School each fall. Professor Raz’s paper will be posted on the Colloquium website in due course.

Categories: NYU Tags: legal political social

21

Objectivity and the Humanities – Prospects for a New Realism. Markus Gabriel @ Deutsches Haus at NYU

Oct 21 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Over the last decades, the humanities have come under pressure from the scientific worldview. To many, it seems as if the humanities provide us at best with less-than-objective knowledge claims. Arguably, there are at least two overall reasons for this. On the one hand, the scientific worldview tends to associate objectivity with the kind of knowledge-acquisition, explanation, and justification characteristic of the natural sciences. On the other hand, the humanities themselves have contributed to the impression that they might be less relevant than the natural sciences to epistemic progress due to internal problems having to do with the very concept(s) of knowledge, reality and objectivity.

New Realism is a term for a whole series of current trends in philosophy that has important consequences for our understanding of knowledge in general. In particular, it reshapes our account of the human being qua source and object of knowledge claims. In this context, New Realism draws on a crucial indispensability thesis: we simply cannot eliminate the standpoint from which humans gather information about human and non-human reality alike from our account of reality itself. In light of this thesis, it turns out that the humanities are fully-fledged contributions to objective knowledge about reality – a fact we cannot ignore without succumbing to illusion. Against this background, the talk concludes that the so-called “scientific worldview” is untenable: it is built upon a denial of knowledge we actually possess, and so, by not being scientific enough, it fails to respect its own premises.

About the speaker:

Markus Gabriel holds the chair in epistemology, modern and contemporary philosophy at the University of Bonn. He is the director of the International Center for Philosophy and the multidisciplinary Center for Science and Thought. With Jocelyn Benoist he also directs Bonn-Paris Center for Research on New Realisms. His work focuses on contemporary philosophy, in particular epistemology and ontology, in an attempt to spell out the consequences of various trends in philosophy in a conversation with the humanities. Currently, he is working on a book called Fictions which deals with topics at the intersection of philosophy, literary studies and sociology.

The NYU Department of German and Deutsches Haus at NYU present “Objectivity and the Humanities – Prospects for a New Realism,” a talk by Professor Markus Gabriel.

Attendance information:

Events at Deutsches Haus are free of charge. If you would like to attend this event, please send us an email to deutscheshaus.rsvp@nyu.edu. Space at Deutsches Haus is limited; please arrive ten minutes prior to the event. Thank you!

“Objectivity and the Humanities – Prospects for a New Realism” is a DAAD-supported event.

Categories: NYU Tags: epistemology science

31

Thu

Empirical and Normative Truth in Democracy – Julian Nida-Rümelin (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) @ NYU Philosophy Dept. 6th flr. lounge

Oct 31 @ 12:00 pm – 2:00 pm

In public discourse, but also in political theory, the opinion prevails, that democracy is incompatible with aspirations of truth. Some assume, in the Hobbesian tradition, that civic peace requires that truth assertions be restricted to science and religion (normative positivism), whereas the political sphere is constituted by interests, bargaining and collective decisions based on interests, bargaining and rules of aggregation, be they implicit or explicit. In this perspective Collective Choice as preference aggregation is paradigmatic for the understanding of democracy. Postmodernist and neo-pragmatist thought dismisses truth, because it threatens solidarity and belonging. Libertarian political thought relies on market mechanisms reducing citizens to consumers and producers of material and immaterial goods like security and welfare. Accounts of deliberative democracy focus on reasoning in the public sphere but dismiss a realistic understanding of truth, because it is thought to threaten collective and individual self-determination.

In my talk I will argue that a realistic understanding of empirical and normative truth is compatible, even necessary, for an adequate understanding of democracy, that truth assertions do not threaten civic peace, that postmodernist relativity undermines democratic practice, that libertarian market-orientation is incompatible with the status of citizens in democracy and that even deliberative, but anti-realist, accounts of democracy do not allow for an adequate understanding of democracy. My argument is based on a Davidsonian, or pragmatist, understanding of truth, therefore one might say: it critizises normative positivism, postmodernism, libertarianism, and critical theory using pragmatist insights.

Julian Nida-Rümelin presently holds a chair for philosophy and political theory at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, is a member of the European Academy of Sciences, was president of the German Philosophical Association (DGphil) and state-minister for culture and media in the first government of Gerhard Schröder. The topics of his books include Democracy as Cooperation (1999); Democracy and Truth (2006), translated in Chinese and Italian, Philosophy and the form of Life (2009), Realism (2018) and A Theory of Practical Reason (2020, forthcoming, de Gruyter and PUP).

Generous support provided by the New York Institute of Philosophy.

Categories: NYU Tags: political truth

Feb

4

Tue

Entropy in long-lived genuinely closed quantum systems. Anthony Aguirre (UCSC) @ NYU Philosophy Dept. rm 302