In Plato’s Republic, Socrates argues that justice is good not only for its consequences but also in and of itself. Challenged by Glaucon and Adeimantus, who suggest that all human interactions are inherently competitive and that being unjust could help you get the better in these conflicts, Socrates establishes that justice is good because it is harmony in the city and in the soul. If justice is a kind of health of the soul, then surely it is better to be just than unjust. This claim might ameliorate the concerns of Glaucon and Adeimantus, but I will argue that Plato does more than address the vision of justice brought forth by Socrates’ interlocutors. Particularly through the contrasts among the different kinds of lives that are either described or depicted in the Republic, Plato points his readers toward a conception of justice that reveals it as the ground of mutuality, reciprocity, dialogue and friendship. In fact, the Republic reveals justice to be necessary to the philosophical life and, hence, to the best kind of life.
In 1804 Schelling diagnosed our impending “annihilation of nature” due to our conceptual detachment from and consequent economic exploitation of our natural world. His critique of Modernity’s Cartesian Idealisms, effected through his inversion of the Kantian categories, results in a philosophical project whose relevance to our ongoing climate crisis is difficult to overstate.
Bruce Matthews
Bard College/BHSEC, professor of philosophy, research in German Idealism and Romanticism, with a focus on life and thought of F.W.J. Schelling, whose recent work revolves around Schelling’s critique of modernity with its anticipation of, as he wrote in 1804, ‘the annihilation of nature,’ and its relevance to the Anthropocene.
“Schelling in the Anthropocene: A New Mythology of Nature,” (Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy, 2015), “Schelling: A Brief Biographical Sketch of the Odysseus of German Idealism,” in The Palgrave Handbook to German Idealism (2014), and “The New Mythology: Between Romanticism and Humanism,” in The Relevance of Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Books include the forthcoming intellectual biography, Schelling: Heretic of Modernity (2018), Schelling’s Organic Form of Philosophy: Life as the Schema of Freedom (SUNY 2011).
Presented by the Philosophy Department at The New School for Social Research
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.
There is a broad consensus that Aristotle introduced the concept of matter in order to develop a consistent account of substantial change. However, it is disputed which role matter fulfills in substantial change. According to the traditional interpretation, matter persists while taking on or losing a substantial form. According to a rival interpretation, matter does not persist in substantial change; instead, it is an entity from which a new substance can emerge and which ceases to exist in this process. In my view, both interpretations are problematic in the light of Aristotle’s broader ontological project and are at odds with the way Aristotle describes the substantial generation of living beings. On the basis of Aristotle’s biological theory, I will suggest that Aristotelian matter is a continuant in substantial generation, but does not satisfy the common criteria for persistence that apply to individual substances.
Anna Schriefl
Anna Schriefl is Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin (assistant professor) at the University of Bonn, and currently a visiting scholar at the New School. She has published a book about Plato’s criticism of money and wealth, and most recently an introduction into Stoicism (both in German).
Selected speakers:
The Politics department at the New School for Social Research will host its 1st Graduate Conference in Political Theory on March 6-7th, 2020.
We are launching this event to provide graduate students in the history of political thought, political theory and political philosophy an opportunity to present and receive feedback on their work. A total of six (6) papers will be accepted and each of them will receive substantial comments from a New School graduate student, to be followed by a general discussion. We welcome submissions from all traditions, but we are particularly interested in providing a venue for those students working on critical approaches. We would also like to encourage applications from under-represented groups in the field.
We are delighted to announce that Professor Robyn Marasco (Hunter College, City University of New York) will deliver the inaugural keynote address.
Submissions for the conference are due by December 10th, 2019. Papers should not exceed 8,000 words (excluding footnotes and bibliography) and should be sent in PDF format with the help of the electronic form provided below. Papers should be formatted for blind review with no identifying information. Abstracts will not be accepted. A Google account is needed in order to sign-in to the submission form; if you don’t have one, please email us. Papers will be reviewed over the winter break and notifications will be sent out early January 2020.
For any questions, please contact NSSRconferencepoliticaltheory@gmail.com
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfqJWRPS5DBI-zlmS4-3m-FpZA3suckmInHSIlvayKoibzQYg/viewform
https://philevents.org/event/show/77746
Advance Registration Required; RSVP details coming soon
La Maison Française is pleased to host the second symposium of Arts and Pragmatism. Join us for two days of fascinating talks and encounters at the intersection of philosophy and artistic practice under the direction of Sandra Laugier and Yann Toma.
with the support of Panthéon Sorbonne University, Politique scientifique program, Global Works and Society, Liberal Studies, and La Maison Française at New York University.
Full program details to follow.
*We are so excited to welcome the general public back to most events at La Maison Francaise of NYU. Instructions for attending events in-person will be confirmed shortly before each event. Please note that NYU requires all visitors to provide official proof (in English) that they are fully vaccinated and boosted against COVID-19. Additional details to follow.
A two-day conference on the philosophy of deep learning, organized by Ned Block (New York University), David Chalmers (New York University) and Raphaël Millière (Columbia University), and jointly sponsored by the Presidential Scholars in Society and Neuroscience program at Columbia University and the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at New York University.
About
The conference will explore current issues in AI research from a philosophical perspective, with particular attention to recent work on deep artificial neural networks. The goal is to bring together philosophers and scientists who are thinking about these systems in order to gain a better understanding of their capacities, their limitations, and their relationship to human cognition.
The conference will focus especially on topics in the philosophy of cognitive science (rather than on topics in AI ethics and safety). It will explore questions such as:
- What cognitive capacities, if any, do current deep learning systems possess?
- What cognitive capacities might future deep learning systems possess?
- What kind of representations can we ascribe to artificial neural networks?
- Could a large language model genuinely understand language?
- What do deep learning systems tell us about human cognition, and vice versa?
- How can we develop a theoretical understanding of deep learning systems?
- How do deep learning systems bear on philosophical debates such as rationalism vs empiricism and classical vs. nonclassical views of cognition.
- What are the key obstacles on the path from current deep learning systems to human-level cognition?
A pre-conference debate on Friday, March 24th will tackle the question “Do large language models need sensory grounding for meaning and understanding ?”. Speakers include Jacob Browning (New York University), David Chalmers (New York University), Yann LeCun (New York University), and Ellie Pavlick (Brown University / Google AI).
Conference speakers
- Cameron Buckner (University of Houston)
- Rosa Cao (Stanford University)
- Ishita Dasgupta (DeepMind)
- Nikolaus Kriegeskorte (Columbia University)
- Brenden Lake (New York University / Meta AI)
- Grace Lindsay (New York University)
- Tal Linzen (New York University / Google AI)
- Raphaël Millière (Columbia University)
- Nicholas Shea (Institute of Philosophy, University of London)
Call for abstracts
We invite abstract submissions for a few short talks and poster presentations related to the topic of the conference. Submissions from graduate students and early career researchers are particularly encouraged. Please send a title and abstract (500-750 words) to phildeeplearning@gmail.com by January 22nd, 2023 (11.59pm EST).
https://philevents.org/event/show/106406
Our friends from Université de Paris Panthéon-Sorbonne return for a third installment of their symposium Arts & Pragmatism: From Ordinary Aesthetics to Post Creation.
This day-long symposium will be chaired by Yann Toma and Sandra Laugier. From the organizers:
We have noticed it during the two previous symposia of our program: the pragmatist philosophy and in particular Dewey defends the idea that aesthetics must not only be considered as the search for truths about art and its creations but also as what concerns the experience of the persons with an artwork (a sensitive and active experience). The reception would thus be the dynamic experience of an incarnated observer, acting, feeling in his senses and his affects what is the work and what it makes him feel.
The political stake of the pragmatist aesthetics is to make sure that the strong aesthetic experiences remain open and accessible to the largest public and become even a «matter of ordinary conversation». It is then a matter of thinking about shared experience as a transmission of values, an important phenomenon for the moral, political, “educational” reflection of adults» (Cavell 1979, 1981, Shusterman, Laugier 2019, 2023, Gerrits 2020). Thus, this question of pragmatism addresses societal issues that concern all audiences, not just from a broadcast/transmission perspective. By focusing on experience and agency, this way of approaching pragmatism involves the cultural audience in a broad way to the point where it engages mediums such as television and in general digital cultures.
The concept of Post-Creation, insofar as it plays a form of exteriority to an original Creation, has all its place in a world where the strong aesthetic experiences remain open and accessible to a wider public. It is a question of placing the creation beyond what is biased, in the heart of a form of Third State of the artistic act in charge of a heuristic and critical potential, towards a form extracted from the zone of influence of the world of the art as such. The idea of Post-Creation tends towards the universal that would be the fact of conceiving the creation beyond any not institutionalized academism. We will see how a possible emulation between the ordinary aesthetic and the shared experience of the Post-Creation is articulated and played, where the experience of the creation produces knowledge and transforms what is out of the specific field of perception of the art in so many new acting and reflexive spaces. In that, the influence of the artistic creation on whole sections of the society, domains of perception until now inaccessible, becomes a stake of opening which results from the transformation of a form of ordinary aesthetics in a Post-Creation freed from the aesthetic channels of the contemporary art.
Program:
10:30AM : Opening Yann Toma, Sandra Laugier and François Noudelmann
11:00AM – 1:00PM : Panel I Pragmatism and the Project of an Ordinary Aesthetics
Chair : Yann Toma
Andrew Brandel (Penn State University) From the Aesthetics of the Everyday Life to Ordinary Aesthetics.
Barbara Formis (Panthéon-Sorbonne University) Doings and redoings of the Identical.
Sandra Laugier (Panthéon-Sorbonne) Ordinary Creation and Shared Culture.
Emmanuel Kattan (Columbia University) What happens when nothing happens: Chantal Akerman, Francis Ponge, Marisa Merz and the emergence of time.
1:00PM – 3:00PM : Lunch Break
3:00PM – 6:00PM : Panel II Pragmatism, Post-Creation
Chair : Sandra Laugier
Yann Toma (Artist/Panthéon-Sorbonne University) Post-Creation, a new way of making creation
The example of L’Or bleu.
Jung Hee Choi (artist and author of «Manifest Unmanifest») Dream House.
Dan Thomas (United Nations Global Compact), The importance of Art and Perception in the Diplomatic Way.
Warren Neidich (Artist and Founding Director Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art) The Brain Without Organs and the Ecocene.
This event is organized with the support of Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Politique scientifique program, and La Maison Française at New York University
The International Conference on Brain Informatics (BI) series has established itself as the world’s premier research conference on Brain Informatics, which is an emerging interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research field that combines the efforts of Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, Machine Learning, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to explore the main problems that lie in the interplay between human brain studies and informatics research.
The 16th International Conference on Brain Informatics (BI’23) provides a premier international forum to bring together researchers and practitioners from diverse fields for presentation of original research results, as well as exchange and dissemination of innovative and practical development experiences on brain Informatics research, brain-inspired technologies and brain/mental health applications.
The key theme of the conference is “Brain Science meets Artificial Intelligence“.
The BI’23 solicits high-quality original research and application papers (both full paper and abstract submissions). Relevant topics include but are not limited to:
- Track 1: Cognitive and Computational Foundations of Brain Science
- Track 2: Human Information Processing Systems
- Track 3: Brain Big Data Analytics, Curation and Management
- Track 4: Informatics Paradigms for Brain and Mental Health Research
- Track 5: Brain-Machine Intelligence and Brain-Inspired Computing
Keynote Speakers
Professor Emery N. Brown
MIT, Massachusetts General Hospital, USA
Profile: Emery Neal Brown is the Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School and at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and a practicing anesthesiologist at MGH. At MIT he is the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and professor of computational neuroscience, the Associate Director of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, and the Director of the Harvard–MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology. Brown is one of only 19 individuals who has been elected to all three branches of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, as well as the first African American and the first anesthesiologist to be elected to all three National Academies.
Professor Bin He
Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Profile: Bin He is the Trustee Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Professor of the Neuroscience Institute, and Professor by courtesy of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. He has made significant research and education contributions to the field of neuroengineering and biomedical imaging, including functional biomedical imaging, noninvasive brain-computer interface (BCI), and noninvasive neuromodulation. His pioneering research has helped transforming electroencephalography from a 1-dimensional detection technique to 3-dimensional neuroimaging modality. His lab demonstrated for the first time for humans to fly a drone and control a robotic arm just by thinking about it using a noninvasive BCI. He is an elected Fellow of International Academy of Medical and Biological Engineering (IAMBE), American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES), and IEEE. Dr. He served as a Past President of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering from 2013-2018, the Chair of the International Academy of Medical and Biological Engineering from 2018-2021. Dr. He has been a Member of NIH BRAIN Initiative Multi-Council Working Group from 2014-2019.
Professor John Ngai
NIH BRAIN Initiative, USA
Profile: John J. Ngai, Ph.D., is the Director of the NIH’s Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative. Dr. Ngai earned his bachelor’s degree in chemistry and biology from Pomona College, Claremont, California, and Ph.D. in biology from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. He was a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech and at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons before starting his faculty position at the University of California at Berkeley. During more than 25 years as a Berkeley faculty member, Dr. Ngai has trained 20 undergraduate students, 24 graduate students and 15 postdoctoral fellows in addition to teaching well over 1,000 students in the classroom. His work has led to the publication of more than 70 scientific articles in some of the field’s most prestigious journals and 10 U.S. and international patents. Dr. Ngai has received many awards including from the Sloan Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, and McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience. As a faculty member, Dr. Ngai has served as the director of Berkeley’s Neuroscience Graduate Program and Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute. He has also provided extensive service on NIH study sections, councils and steering groups, including as previous co-chair of the NIH BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Consortium Steering Group. Dr. Ngai oversees the long-term strategy and day-to-day operations of the NIH BRAIN Initiative as it strives to revolutionize our understanding of the brain in both health and disease.
Professor Helen Mayberg
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, USA
Profile: Helen Mayberg is a neurologist recognized for her neuroimaging studies of brain circuits in depression and their translation to the development of deep brain stimulation as a novel therapeutic for treatment resistant patients. Born and raised in Southern California, she received a BA in Psychobiology from UCLA and a MD from the University of Southern California, then trained in Neurology at Columbia’s Neurological Institute in New York and did a research fellowship in nuclear medicine at Johns Hopkins. She had early academic appointments at Johns Hopkins and the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in San Antonio, held the inaugural Sandra Rotman Chair in Neuropsychiatry at the University of Toronto, the first Dorothy C. Fuqua Chair in Psychiatric Imaging and Therapeutics at Emory University and is now the Mount Sinai Professor of Neurotherapeutics at the Icahn School of Medicine where she is founding Director of the Nash Family Center for Advanced Circuit Therapeutics. She is a member of the both the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine as well as the National Academy of Inventors and American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Professor Vinod Goel
York University, Canada
Profile: Vinod Goel is a professor of cognitive neuroscience at York University, Toronto, Canada. He completed his PhD in cognitive science at UC-Berkeley, and received postdoctoral training in neuroscience at the NIH (NINDS) and the Wellcome Department of Cognitive Neurology, Institute of Neurology, UCL, UK. He has made significant empirical contributions to our understanding of the roles of prefrontal cortex in real-world problem solving and reasoning, hemispheric asymmetry in prefrontal cortex, and models of rationality, using the methodologies of fMRI and lesion studies. He has most recently completed a book reconstructing the role of rationality in human behavior entitled “Reason and Less: Pursuing Food, Sex, and Politics” (The MIT Press, 2022). His current project is to explore the implications of this work on our understanding of reason and legal responsibility.
Professor Amy Kuceyeski
Cornell University, USA
Profile: Amy Kuceyeski is an Associate Professor of Mathematics and Neuroscience in Radiology at Weill Cornell Medicine and the Computational Biology Department at Cornell University. She is the director of the Computational Connectomics (CoCo) Laboratory and the Machine Learning in Medicine group at Cornell. Over the past 14 years, she has been working to understand the human brain using quantitative modeling approaches, including machine learning, to map anatomical and physiological characteristics to behavior. Specifically, she is interested in understanding how brains recover from injury so we can devise strategies, possibly via non-invasive neuromodulation, to support natural recovery processes. She also performs research at the intersection of biological and artificial neural networks that aims to understand how human brains process incoming visual information.
Professor Patrick Purdon
Harvard Medical School, USA
Profile: Patrick L. Purdon, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Anaesthesia at Harvard Medical School and the Nathaniel M. Sims Endowed Chair in Anesthesia Innovation and Bioengineering at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Purdon received his A.B. in Engineering Sciences from Harvard College in 1996, his M.S. in Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1998, and his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from MIT in 2005. Dr. Purdon’s research in neuroengineering encompasses the mechanisms of anesthesia, Alzheimer’s disease and brain health, anesthesia and the developing brain, neural signal processing, and the development of novel technologies for brain monitoring. He has published over 90 peer-reviewed publications, is an inventor on 16 pending patents, and is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. Dr. Purdon has won numerous awards, including the prestigious National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award.
Important Dates
- 15 April 2023: Full paper submission deadline
- 20 April 2023: Workshop proposal deadline
- 10 May 2023: Abstract presentation submission deadline
- 30 May 2023: Final paper and abstract acceptance notification
- 20 Jun 2023: Accepted paper and abstract registration deadline
- 1-3 Aug 2023: The Brain Informatics Conference
Paper Submission and Publications
Full Paper (Regular):
1. 9-12 pages are strongly encouraged for the regular papers including figures and references in Springer LNCS Proceedings format(https://www.springer.com/us/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines). Over length papers will be charged for 100$ per page.
2. All papers will be peer-reviewed and accepted based on originality, significance of contribution, technical merit, and presentation quality.
3. All papers accepted (and all workshop & special sessions’ full-length papers) will be published by Springer as a volume of the Springer-Nature LNAI Brain Informatics Book Series(https://link.springer.com/conference/brain).
Abstract (Only for Workshops/Special Sessions):
Research abstracts are encouraged and will be accepted for presentations in an oral presentation format and/or poster presentation format. Each abstract submission should include the title of the paper and an abstract body within 500 words. The abstract will not be included in the conference proceedings to be published by Springer.
Journal Opportunities:
High-quality BI conference papers will be nominated for a fast-track review and publication at the Brain Informatics Journal, (https://braininformatics.springeropen.com/) an international, peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary Open Access journal published by Springer Nature. Discount or no open access article-processing fee will be charged for BI conference paper authors.
Special Issues & Books Opportunities:
Workshop/special session organizers and BI conference session chairs may consider and can be invited to prepare a book proposal of special topics for possible book publication in the Springer-Nature Brain Informatics & Health Book Series (https://www.springer.com/series/15148), or a special issue at the Brain Informatics Journal.
Poster-Conference Publication
1. Accepted full papers will be selected to publish in the Brain Informatics Journal upon revision.
2. Discount or no article-processing fee will be charged for authors of Brain Informatics conference (https://braininformatics.springeropen.com/).
3. The organizers of Workshops and Special-Sessions are invited to prepare a book proposal based on the topics of the workshop/special session for possible book publication in the Springer-Nature Brain Informatics and Health book series (http://www.springer.com/series/15148).