Vera List Professor of Philosophy, Richard J. Bernstein, will present his new book on Hannah Arendt, Why Read Hannah Arendt Now (2018, Polity Press), followed by a screening of the documentary film Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt.
Free and open to the public.
The Department’s colloquium series typically meets on Thursdays in the Seminar Room at Gateway Transit Building, 106 Somerset Street, 5th Floor at 3:00 p.m. Please see the Department Calendar for scheduled speakers and more details.
- 01/31 Department Colloquium-Prof. Brian Epstein (Tufts)
- 02/07 Inclusive Pedagogy by Prof. Zoë Johnson-King (NYU)
- 02/28 Climate Lecture-Prof. Teresa Blankmeyer Burke (Gallaudet University)
- 03/14 Mesthene Lecture-Prof. Lara Buchak (UC Berkeley)
- 03/28 Break It Down Lecture-Prof. Paul Pietroski, “Human Languages: What are They?”
- 04/11 Class of 1970s Lecture: Prof. Gideon Rosen (Princeton) Alexander Teleconf. Lecture Hall, 4:30-7:30 pm
- 04/18 Break It Down Lecture-Prof. Larry Temkin, “Population Ethics: Forty Years On”
- 04/25 – 04/27 Semantics Workshop (Lepore)
- 04/27 Rutgers Day 10:00 am – 4:00 pm
- 05/03 Epistemology Conference
- 05/04 Epistemology Conference
- 07/21 – 07/26 Summer Institute for Diversity in Philosophy
“Everyone is female”—this is the first of several “untenable claims” presented by Andrea Long Chu in her forthcoming book Females: A Concern (Verso, 2019). Drawing inspiration from Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto and her forgotten play Up Your Ass, this lecture in numbered theses whips through a variety of ugly objects (films, manifestos, performance art, psychoanalysis, porn, and the alt-right) to give a portrait of femaleness as a universal category of self-ablation against which all politics—even feminist politics—revolts.
Andrea Long Chu is a writer and critic completing her doctorate at New York University. Her writing has appeared, or will soon, in n+1, Boston Review, The New York Times, New York, Artforum, Bookforum, Chronicle of Higher Education, 4Columns, differences, Women & Performance, TSQ, and Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Her book Females: A Concern is forthcoming this year from Verso.
People in Support of Women in Philosophy is a group dedicated to the advancement of women and those who experience marginalization within the field of philosophy. Our group meets weekly to workshop papers, help members prepare for conference presentations and seminars, host guest speakers, and in general celebrate the work of our women and gender-non-conforming colleagues and mentors. Men are welcome and encouraged to take part as allies.
John Dewey, in his resistance to foundational individualism, declares that individual autonomy so conceived is a fiction; for Dewey, it is association that is a fact. In his own language: “There is no sense in asking how individuals come to be associated. They exist and operate in association.” In a way that resonates with Confucian role ethics, the revolutionary Dewey particularizes the fact of associated living and valorizes it by developing a vision of the habitude of unique, defused, relationally-constituted human beings. That is, he develops a distinctive, if not idiosyncratic language of habits and “individuality” to describe the various modalities of association that enable human beings to add value to their activities and to transform mere relations into a communicating community.
In Confucian role ethics, Dewey’s contention that association is a fact is restated in a different vocabulary by appealing to specific roles rather than unique habitudes for stipulating the specific forms that association takes within lives lived in family and community—that is, the various roles we live as sons and teachers, grandmothers and neighbors. For Confucianism, not only are these roles descriptive of our associations, they are also prescriptive in the sense that roles in family and community are themselves normative, guiding us in the direction of appropriate conduct. Whereas for both Confucianism and Dewey, mere association is a given, flourishing families and communities are what we are able to make of our facticity as the highest human achievement.
The Department’s colloquium series typically meets on Thursdays in the Seminar Room at Gateway Transit Building, 106 Somerset Street, 5th Floor at 3:00 p.m. Please see the Department Calendar for scheduled speakers and more details.
- 01/31 Department Colloquium-Prof. Brian Epstein (Tufts)
- 02/07 Inclusive Pedagogy by Prof. Zoë Johnson-King (NYU)
- 02/28 Climate Lecture-Prof. Teresa Blankmeyer Burke (Gallaudet University)
- 03/14 Mesthene Lecture-Prof. Lara Buchak (UC Berkeley)
- 03/28 Break It Down Lecture-Prof. Paul Pietroski, “Human Languages: What are They?”
- 04/11 Class of 1970s Lecture: Prof. Gideon Rosen (Princeton) Alexander Teleconf. Lecture Hall, 4:30-7:30 pm
- 04/18 Break It Down Lecture-Prof. Larry Temkin, “Population Ethics: Forty Years On”
- 04/25 – 04/27 Semantics Workshop (Lepore)
- 04/27 Rutgers Day 10:00 am – 4:00 pm
- 05/03 Epistemology Conference
- 05/04 Epistemology Conference
- 07/21 – 07/26 Summer Institute for Diversity in Philosophy
Many philosophers have suggested that the aim of imaginative philosophical inquiry is not to provide right answers, but right questions. This means demonstrating why certain questions are meaningless, based on false assumptions, or become senseless when posed in a wrong context. The question in my title appears to be a good candidate for this type of philosophical inquiry and I will try to show why. However, I will also argue that posing the question is nevertheless important, perhaps not for moral philosophy, but for feminist politics.
The argument proceeds in three stages. In the first section, I will discuss Gabrielle Meagher’s article, Jstor, Spring 2002, ‘Is it Wrong to Pay for Housework?’. I will contend that rather than posing this question as an abstract philosophical question, it is crucial to place it in the specific historical and socio-economic context in which we encounter it today. A thorough politico-economic analysis of paid housework should then open our eyes to the fact that feminists need to make demands that are not merely ameliorative but embody a radically emancipatory future for all women. In the second section, I will critically assess one such demand, the idea of universal basic income (UBI) – a monthly income paid by the government to each member of society regardless of income from other sources and with no conditions attached. My contention is that a feminist demand for UBI could contribute to the attempts to tackle the deep causes behind the growing socio-economic disparities between women, as well as improving the status of unpaid care work, but only in the context of a feminist revolution of everyday life. In the third section, I will ask what such a revolution might entail and return to the question of individual choice. While I insist that scapegoating women who pay other women for housework misses the real political problem, I will nevertheless conclude by suggesting that there are compelling political reasons for feminists to answer the question in my title with a resolute yes.
The Philosophy Department of The New School for Social Research invites you to a conference in honor of the life and work of Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy Yirmiyahu Yovel.
The conference will be on March 29th and 30th in the Wolff Conference Room, D1103, 6 E 16th Street.
Celebrating Yirmiyahu Yovel
Friday, March 29th
Chair: Richard J. Bernstein
9 AM – 11 AM: Agnes Heller “The Other Within”
11 AM – 1 PM: Jay Bernstein “Yovel and Hegel’s Phenomenology
Lunch
2 PM – 4 PM: James Dodd “The Historical Antinomy”
4PM – 6PM: Jonathan Yovel “Normativity as a Poetic Quality”
Saturday, March 30th
Chari: Dmitri Nikulin
9 AM – 11 AM: Joel Whitebook “Immanence, Finitude, and Emancipation: A Psychoanalytic Perspective”
11 AM – 1 PM: Omri Boehm “Immanence, Knowledge, and Immortality: Spinoza’s Ethics as an Inversion of the Biblical Fall”
Lunch
2 PM – 4 PM: Chiara Bottici “Marrano of Reason”
4 PM – 6 PM: Eli Friedlander “On the Different Ways to the Highest Good”
The Department’s colloquium series typically meets on Thursdays in the Seminar Room at Gateway Transit Building, 106 Somerset Street, 5th Floor at 3:00 p.m. Please see the Department Calendar for scheduled speakers and more details.
- 01/31 Department Colloquium-Prof. Brian Epstein (Tufts)
- 02/07 Inclusive Pedagogy by Prof. Zoë Johnson-King (NYU)
- 02/28 Climate Lecture-Prof. Teresa Blankmeyer Burke (Gallaudet University)
- 03/14 Mesthene Lecture-Prof. Lara Buchak (UC Berkeley)
- 03/28 Break It Down Lecture-Prof. Paul Pietroski, “Human Languages: What are They?”
- 04/11 Class of 1970s Lecture: Prof. Gideon Rosen (Princeton) Alexander Teleconf. Lecture Hall, 4:30-7:30 pm
- 04/18 Break It Down Lecture-Prof. Larry Temkin, “Population Ethics: Forty Years On”
- 04/25 – 04/27 Semantics Workshop (Lepore)
- 04/27 Rutgers Day 10:00 am – 4:00 pm
- 05/03 Epistemology Conference
- 05/04 Epistemology Conference
- 07/21 – 07/26 Summer Institute for Diversity in Philosophy
The Department’s colloquium series typically meets on Thursdays in the Seminar Room at Gateway Transit Building, 106 Somerset Street, 5th Floor at 3:00 p.m. Please see the Department Calendar for scheduled speakers and more details.
- 01/31 Department Colloquium-Prof. Brian Epstein (Tufts)
- 02/07 Inclusive Pedagogy by Prof. Zoë Johnson-King (NYU)
- 02/28 Climate Lecture-Prof. Teresa Blankmeyer Burke (Gallaudet University)
- 03/14 Mesthene Lecture-Prof. Lara Buchak (UC Berkeley)
- 03/28 Break It Down Lecture-Prof. Paul Pietroski, “Human Languages: What are They?”
- 04/11 Class of 1970s Lecture: Prof. Gideon Rosen (Princeton) Alexander Teleconf. Lecture Hall, 4:30-7:30 pm
- 04/18 Break It Down Lecture-Prof. Larry Temkin, “Population Ethics: Forty Years On”
- 04/25 – 04/27 Semantics Workshop (Lepore)
- 04/27 Rutgers Day 10:00 am – 4:00 pm
- 05/03 Epistemology Conference
- 05/04 Epistemology Conference
- 07/21 – 07/26 Summer Institute for Diversity in Philosophy