Mar
28
Thu
Nietzsche and the Disadvantage of History: the Rise of Western Oikophobia. Benedict Beckeld @ Meyer Hall, Room 102, NYU
Mar 28 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

New York University’s Liberal Studies, in Collaboration with Nietzsche Circle, Presents:

Nietzsche and the Disadvantage of History: The rise of Western Oikophobia

More Info & RSVP:
If you like to attend, Please RSVP by sending email to Luke Trusso at luke.trusso@gmail.com

Mar
29
Fri
Bjorndahl: The Epistemology of Nondeterminism. Logic, Probability, and Games Seminar @ Faculty House, Columbia U
Mar 29 @ 4:00 pm

Propositional dynamic logic (PDL) is a framework for reasoning about nondeterministic program executions (or, more generally, nondeterministic actions). In this setting, nondeterminism is taken as a primitive: a program is nondeterministic iff it has multiple possible outcomes. But what is the sense of “possibility” at play here? This talk explores an epistemic interpretation: working in an enriched logical setting, we represent nondeterminism as a relationship between a program and an agent deriving from the agent’s (in)ability to adequately measure the dynamics of the program execution. More precisely, using topology to capture the observational powers of an agent, we define the nondeterministic outcomes of a given program execution to be those outcomes that the agent is unable to rule out in advance. In this framework, determinism coincides exactly with continuity: that is, determinism is continuity in the observation topology. This allows us to embed PDL into (dynamic) topological (subset space) logic, laying the groundwork for a deeper investigation into the epistemology (and topology) of nondeterminism.

The seminar is concerned with applying formal methods to fundamental issues, with an emphasis on probabilistic reasoning, decision theory and games. In this context “logic” is broadly interpreted as covering applications that involve formal representations. The topics of interest have been researched within a very broad spectrum of different disciplines, including philosophy (logic and epistemology), statistics, economics, and computer science. The seminar is intended to bring together scholars from different fields of research so as to illuminate problems of common interest from different perspectives. Throughout each academic year, meetings are regularly presented by the members of the seminar and distinguished guest speakers.

details tba

02/08/2019 Faculty House, Columbia University
4:00 PM

03/29/2019 Faculty House, Columbia University
4:00 PM

04/19/2018 Faculty House, Columbia University
4:00 PM

Apr
26
Fri
Huttegger: Rethinking Convergence to the Truth. Simon Huttegger (UC Irvine) @ Faculty House, Columbia U
Apr 26 @ 4:10 pm

Convergence to the truth is viewed with some ambivalence in philosophy of science. On the one hand, methods of inquiry that lead to the truth in the limit are prized as marks of scientific rationality. But an agent who, by using some method, expects to always converge to the truth seems to fail a minimum standard of epistemic modesty. This point was recently brought home by Gordon Belot in his critique of Bayesian epistemology. In this paper I will study convergence to the truth theorems within the framework of Edward Nelson’s radically elementary probability theory. This theory provides an enriched conceptual framework for investigating convergence and gives rise to an appropriately modest from of Bayesianism.

The seminar is concerned with applying formal methods to fundamental issues, with an emphasis on probabilistic reasoning, decision theory and games. In this context “logic” is broadly interpreted as covering applications that involve formal representations. The topics of interest have been researched within a very broad spectrum of different disciplines, including philosophy (logic and epistemology), statistics, economics, and computer science. The seminar is intended to bring together scholars from different fields of research so as to illuminate problems of common interest from different perspectives. Throughout each academic year, meetings are regularly presented by the members of the seminar and distinguished guest speakers.

details tba

02/08/2019 Faculty House, Columbia University
4:00 PM

03/22/2019 Faculty House, Columbia University
4:00 PM

04/19/2018 Faculty House, Columbia University
4:00 PM

May
17
Fri
Nietzsche Circle Fundraiser @ Beyhan Karahan & Associates Architects
May 17 @ 7:00 pm

Annual Nietzsche Circle Fundraiser with talk, music, drinks, and refreshments.

$25 General Admission

$10 Student Admission

Levels of Sponsorship:

Eagle: Above $600 (5 free tickets and 4 books)

Hawk: $600 (4 free tickets and 3 books)

Falcon: $400 (3 free tickets and 2 books)

Owl: $200 (2 free tickets and 1 book)

Donations can be made direct, at our website at www.nietzschecirclecom/support_us.html, or simply bring a check with you. Payable to: Nietzsche Circle. Funds may be held in an escrow account subject to determination of 501(c) compliance. We thank you.

Please RSVP with Luke Trusso at luke.trusso@gmail.com by May 10, 2019 and include any guests.

Sep
27
Fri
NYC Nietzsche Group: Michael Begun (Fordham) @ Plaza View Room (12th Floor)
Sep 27 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Presented by Fordham Philosophy

Oct
10
Thu
Reconstructing Nietzsche, Contextually. Matthew Meyer @ Wolff Conference Room, D1106
Oct 10 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

I defend a contextual reconstruction of Nietzsche’s philosophical project. My contextualist reconstruction contrasts with the rationalist reconstruction predominant in contemporary Anglo-American scholarship. After discussing the differences between the two approaches, I show how the rationalist reconstruction has distorted our understanding of Nietzsche in at least two respects. First, in trying to extract theories from Nietzsche’s corpus that will be attractive to contemporary philosophers, it has caused scholars largely to neglect the nature, structure, and argument of Nietzsche’s published works. Here, I make my case by focusing on common misunderstandings of Nietzsche’s free spirit works. Second, it has caused scholars to tame Nietzsche’s project by dismissing Thus Spoke Zarathustra as mere poetry and distancing Nietzsche from controversial ideas such as the will to power and the eternal recurrence. In contrast, I argue that by reading Nietzsche as a naturalist through the lens of a historical influence like Schopenhauer, rather than anachronistically through Quine, we can begin to make sense of these essential features of his project. I close with some remarks about why a contextual reconstruction may not only be truer to Nietzsche, but also more philosophically satisfying than the rationally reconstructed Nietzsche currently on offer.

Oct
18
Fri
NYC Nietzsche Group: Dylan Bailey (Fordham) @ Plaza View Room (12th Floor)
Oct 18 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Contact Sara Pope for more information.

Nov
22
Fri
NYC Nietzsche Group: Yunus Tuncel (New School) @ Plaza View Room (12th Floor)
Nov 22 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Contact Sara Pope for more information.

Oct
24
Mon
Arts and Pragmatism @ La Maison Française NYU & Zoom
Oct 24 – Oct 25 all-day

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.

Apr
3
Mon
Arts & Pragmatism: From Ordinary Aesthetics to Post-Creation @ La Maison Française
Apr 3 all-day

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.

Read the statement in French

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