Ian Hacking wrote that probability is a Janus-faced concept with one face looking toward the world and the other toward the mind. The face looking toward the world is central to laws and explanations in physics (especially quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics) and the special sciences. The face looking toward the mind is central to epistemology and decision theory. This conference concerns both aspects and especially their relation to each other. What is probability that it possesses both aspects? This three-day conference will focus on answering this and related questions.
There is no registration fee and attendance is open to all; however, RSVP is required. Please RSVP here before Oct 15, if you plan to attend. All are welcome!
General information is available here.
Conference Organizers
Barry Loewer (Rutgers)
Denise Dykstra (Rutgers)
Invited Participants
David Albert (Columbia)
Valia Allori (NIU)
Katie Elliott (UCLA)
Ned Hall (Harvard)
Carl Hoefer (Barcelona)
Jenann Ismael (Columbia)
Christopher Meacham (Amherst)
Wayne Myrvold (Western)
Richard Pettigrew (Bristol)
Jack Spencer (MIT)
Schedule Overview
(A detailed schedule is available here.)
Thursday, October 24
- 3:00 – 6:00: Metaphysics of Objective Probability: Ned Hall (Harvard); Jenann Ismael (Columbia).
Friday, October 25
- 9:00 – 9:50: Breakfast in the philosophy department
- 9:50 – 10:00: Welcome & Introductory Remarks (Barry Loewer)
- 10:00 – 1:00: Chance: Katie Elliott (UCLA); Christopher Meacham (Amherst).
- 1:00 – 2:30: Lunch
- 2:30 – 5:30: Probabilities in the Special Sciences: Carl Hoefer (Barcelona); Wayne Myrvold (Western Ontario).
Saturday, October 26
- 9:00 – 10:00: Breakfast in the philosophy department
- 10:00 – 1:00: Chance-Credence Principles: Richard Pettigrew (Bristol); Jack Spencer (MIT).
- 1:00 – 2:30: Lunch
- 2:30 – 5:30: Typicality and the Statistical Postulate: David Albert (Columbia); Valia Allori (NIU).
Please contact the conference organizers (LawsAndChanceProject@gmail.com) if you have any questions.
Dr.Joel Whitebook, Philosopher and Psychoanalyst will discuss his book Freud: An Intellectual Biography
As Hegel observed, the “Objective Spirit” never stands still — an observation that is especially true today. As a result, members of every generation have to return to the classics and reappropriate them for themselves. This is what Joel Whitebook has done in his recently published intellectual biography of Freud (Cambridge University Press) that we will be discussing in this workshop.
Cutting through the tired clichés of the “Freud Wars,” the author presents us with a radically new portrait of the founder of psychoanalysis. Because Whitebook is a philosopher as well as a psychoanalyst, he has been able to integrate many of the profound transformations that have taken place in psychoanalytic theory and practice, infant research, gender studies, philosophy, and critical theory since Ernest Jones and Peter Gay published their canonical studies in the last century. Whitebook thereby succeeds in creating an account of Freud’s achievement that speaks to our cultural situation.
Furthermore, in addition to presenting the unfolding of Freud’s thinking in the context of the developments in his personal life and in the society at large, Whitebook has also succeeded in bringing this iconic man to life in compelling fashion. Where Freud often tried to protect himself by hiding behind the forbidding mask of an authoritarian patriarch and unbending rationalist, we come to see him as the vulnerable, complex, and all-too-human person that he was.
Presented by The New School for Social Research and Philosophy Department and it is co-sponsored with the Ferenczi Center.
“Being dragged into the orbit of Webster’s mind is like entering the Magic Mountain: you go in as a visitor, and stay as a patient”
– Tom Mcarthy, author of Remainder and Satin Island
“Jamieson Webster’s new work reflects upon that aspect of hysteria—or conversion disorder—that has eluded the attention of most commentators: the indifference of the subject at the very moment that the symptom is most clearly enacted. This point of departure allows Webster to think about what the body contains but also what traverses the body at a level that is prior to speech, that is perhaps the condition of speech itself. This incisive and unsettling meditation gives us a form of psychoanalytic writing that tracks the transference as bodily transformation and impasse. It is written in and for our times, when the courage and difficulty of the slow labor of psychoanalysis provides a perspective that eludes the certitudes of dogma and the exhilarations of false promises. Webster’s book asks us to stay within the domain of difficult exchange where what registers and shifts at the level of the body lets us know more about what we can expect of life and what our own living carries of the lives of others. Beautifully written, theoretically brave, and disturbing in all the best ways”.
– Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature and Critical Theory, University of California, Berkeley
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/conversion-disorder/9780231184083
From the book:
Conversion disorder—a psychiatric term that names the enigmatic transformation of psychic energy into bodily manifestations—offers a way to rethink the present. With so many people suffering from unexplained bodily symptoms; with so many seeking recourse to pharmacological treatments or bodily modification; with young men and women seemingly willing to direct violence toward anybody, including themselves—a radical disordering in culture insists on the level of the body.
Part memoir, part clinical case, part theoretical investigation, this book searches for the body. Is it a psychopathological entity; a crossroads for the cultural, political, and biological in the form of care; or the foundation of psychoanalytic work on the question of sexuality? Jamieson Webster traces conversion’s shifting meanings—in religious, economic, and even chemical processes—revisiting the work of thinkers as diverse as Benjamin, Foucault, Agamben, and Lacan. She provides an intimate account of her own conversion from patient to psychoanalyst, as well as her continuing struggle to apprehend the complexities of the patient’s body. When listening to dreams, symptoms, worries, or sexual impasses, the body becomes a defining trope that belies a vulnerable and urgent wish for transformation. Conversion Disorder names what is singular about the entanglement of the fractured body and the social world in order to imagine what kind of cure is possible.
Presented by The New School for Social Research and Philosophy Department and it is co-sponsored with the Ferenczi Center.
Contact Barry Loewer-loewer@philosophy.rutgers.edu or Denise Dykstra- denise.dykstra@rutgers.edu
The Eastern Study Group invites submissions for its 17th annual meeting to take place at Fordham University on Saturday and Sunday, May 2-3, 2020. Our host this year is Reed Winegar.
Keynote Speakers: Patricia Kitcher (Columbia)
Please send all abstracts electronically to Kate Moran, kmoran@brandeis.edu
Please submit a detailed abstract (1,000–1,200 words) with a select bibliography. Submissions should be prepared for blind review and include a word count. Please supply contact information in a separate file. If you are a graduate student, please indicate this in your contact information.
The selection committee welcomes contributions on all topics of Kantian scholarship (contemporary or historically oriented), including discussions of Kant’s immediate predecessors and successors. Presentation time is limited to 30 minutes, followed by 30 minutes of discussion.
The best graduate student paper will receive a $200 stipend and be eligible for the Markus Herz Prize. Women, minorities, and graduate students are encouraged to submit. Papers submitted for the Herz prize should not exceed 6,000 words.
Papers already read or accepted at other NAKS study groups or meetings may not be submitted. Presenters must be members of NAKS in good standing.
ENAKS receives support from NAKS and host universities.
For questions about ENAKS or the upcoming meeting, please contact Kate Moran (kmoran@brandeis.edu) or consult the ENAKS website at www.enaks.net.
Abstract: The Great Divide in metaphysical debates about laws of nature is between Humeans who think that laws merely describe the distribution of matter and non-Humeans who think that laws govern it. The metaphysics can place demands on the proper formulations of physical theories. It is sometimes assumed that the governing view requires a fundamental / intrinsic direction of time: to govern, laws must be dynamical, producing later states of the world from earlier ones, in accord with the fundamental direction of time in the universe. In this paper, we propose a minimal primitivism about laws of nature (MinP) according to which there is no such requirement. On our view, laws govern by constraining the physical possibilities. Our view captures the essence of the governing view without taking on extraneous commitments about the direction of time or dynamic production. Moreover, as a version of primitivism, our view requires no reduction / analysis of laws in terms of universals, powers, or dispositions. Our view accommodates several potential candidates for fundamental laws, including the principle of least action, the Past Hypothesis, the Einstein equation of general relativity, and even controversial examples found in the Wheeler-Feynman theory of electrodynamics and retro-causal theories of quantum mechanics. By understanding governing as constraining, non-Humeans who accept MinP have the same freedom to contemplate a wide variety of candidate fundamental laws as Humeans do.
The talk will take place over Zoom. I will send out the Zoom link closer to the meeting.
Contact TBA
TBA
Location Rutgers University Inn & Conference Center
Professor Williamson will give 3 lectures: September 19, 21, and 23. All will take place in AB-2400 [East Wing] from 4:30-6:30pm.
The lectures will discuss problems in the methodology of contemporary philosophy. Although philosophy without use of counterexamples would be a disaster, the way they are currently handled is naïve. In particular, it is too vulnerable to fake counterexamples generated by more or less universal human heuristics.
Lecture One: Heuristics [9/19]
Human cognition, from sense perception to abstract reflection, frequently employs heuristics, quick, easy, efficient, and imperfectly reliable ways of solving problems. To a neglected extent, philosophical problems and paradoxes from reliance on the outputs of fallible heuristics. This will be illustrated with examples involving vagueness, conditionals, belief ascription, truth and falsity, and reasons aggregation. Potential lessons for philosophical method will be discussed.
Lecture Two: Overfitting [9/21]
Overfitting is a well-recognized methodological problem in natural science, where use of models with too many degrees of freedom leads to unstable theorizing and failure to detect errors in the data. Overfitting is also a major but ill-recognized methodological problem in philosophy, exacerbated by its reliance on heuristics. General intellectual tendencies conducive to overfitting in philosophy will be discussed.
Lecture Three: Hyperintensionality [9/23]
The ‘hyperintensional revolution’ proclaims that central metaphysical distinctions cannot be captured in modal terms since they are sensitive to differences between necessary equivalents. Such hyperintensionalism fits the profile of overfitting. It is motivated by case judgments that are explicable as results of a fallible heuristic and it leads to models with too many degrees of freedom.
Professor Williamson will give 3 lectures: September 19, 21, and 23. All will take place in AB-2400 [East Wing] from 4:30-6:30pm.
The lectures will discuss problems in the methodology of contemporary philosophy. Although philosophy without use of counterexamples would be a disaster, the way they are currently handled is naïve. In particular, it is too vulnerable to fake counterexamples generated by more or less universal human heuristics.
Lecture One: Heuristics [9/19]
Human cognition, from sense perception to abstract reflection, frequently employs heuristics, quick, easy, efficient, and imperfectly reliable ways of solving problems. To a neglected extent, philosophical problems and paradoxes from reliance on the outputs of fallible heuristics. This will be illustrated with examples involving vagueness, conditionals, belief ascription, truth and falsity, and reasons aggregation. Potential lessons for philosophical method will be discussed.
Lecture Two: Overfitting [9/21]
Overfitting is a well-recognized methodological problem in natural science, where use of models with too many degrees of freedom leads to unstable theorizing and failure to detect errors in the data. Overfitting is also a major but ill-recognized methodological problem in philosophy, exacerbated by its reliance on heuristics. General intellectual tendencies conducive to overfitting in philosophy will be discussed.
Lecture Three: Hyperintensionality [9/23]
The ‘hyperintensional revolution’ proclaims that central metaphysical distinctions cannot be captured in modal terms since they are sensitive to differences between necessary equivalents. Such hyperintensionalism fits the profile of overfitting. It is motivated by case judgments that are explicable as results of a fallible heuristic and it leads to models with too many degrees of freedom.