Sep
6
Fri
Seminar in Logic, Games and Language @ CUNY Grad Center, 4421
Sep 6 @ 4:15 pm – 6:15 pm

Our next meeting will be on September 6 and we will go over Christian List’s survey article on Social Choice from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/social-choice/

Sep
20
Fri
Black Radical Kantianism. Charles Mills (CUNY) @ 302 Philosophy, Columbia U
Sep 20 @ 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm

This essay tries to develop a “black radical Kantianism” – that is, a Kantianism informed by the black experience in modernity. After looking briefly at socialist and feminist appropriations of Kant, I argue that an analogous black radical appropriation should draw on the distinctive social ontology and view of the state associated with the black radical tradition. In ethics, this would mean working with a (color-conscious rather than colorblind) social ontology of white persons and black sub-persons and then asking what respect for oneself and others would require under those circumstances. In political philosophy, it would mean framing the state as a Rassenstaat (a racial state) and then asking what measures of corrective justice would be necessary to bring about the ideal Rechtsstaat.

Response by César Cabezas Gamarra.

Presented by the German Idealism Workshop

Sep
28
Sat
Isaac Levi Conference and Memorial @ Columbia University, Philosophy rm tba
Sep 28 all-day

Conference Schedule

10AM       Teddy Seidenfeld – Conditional Probability, Conditionalization, and Total Evidence

11AM       Eleonora Cresto – Beyond Indeterminate Utilities. The Case of Neurotic Cake-Cutting

11:20AM  Ignacio Ojea Quintana – Unawareness and Levi’s Consensus as Common Ground

11:40AM  Rush Stewart – Uncertainty, Equality, Fraternity

1PM         Nils-Eric Sahlin – Levi’s Decision Theory: Lessons Learned

1:45PM    Wilfried Sieg – Scientific Theories as Set-Theoretic Predicates?

2:45PM    Panel Discussion – Learning from Levi

Abstracts available in attached documents under “Supporting material.”

Memorial

A memorial service will be held at 5PM at St. Paul’s Chapel on the Columbia campus. Reception to follow on the 7th floor of Philosophy Hall.


https://philevents.org/event/show/75850

Oct
11
Fri
The Role of Negative Emotions in the Good Life: Reflections from the Zhuangzi. Richard Kim @ Columbia University Religion Dept. 101
Oct 11 @ 5:30 pm – 7:30 pm

The philosophical and psychological literature on well-being tend to focus on the prudential value of positive emotions such as pleasure, joy, or gratitude. But how do the negative emotions such as grief fit into our understanding of well-being? It is often assumed that negative emotions are intrinsically bad far us and that we should work toward eliminating them, especially from the perspective of our own well-being.

In this presentation I want to question this assumption by drawing on the ideas of Zhuangzi (a prominent early Daoist thinker from the 4th Century BCE) to argue that negative emotions are not intrinsically bad for us, and that their prudential value or disvalue is context dependent. Zhuangzi’s outlook, with his focus on the flexibility of perspectives and living according to our natural, spontaneous inclinations, gives us reason to reconsider the role of negative emotions in our lives and how we might think about them in a more constructive way.

With responses from: CHRISTOPHER GOWANS  (Fordham University)

The Fall dates for the Comparative Philosophy seminar:

September 20 – Justin Tiwald (San Francisco State University)
October 11 – Richard Kim (Loyola University, Chicago
November 8 – Sungmoon Kim (City University of Hong Kong)
December 6 – Paul R. Goldin (University of Pennsylvania)

More details (such as titles, abstracts, and respondents) to follow. Looking forward to seeing you soon.

Hagop Sarkissian
Associate Professor & Chair, Department of Philosophy, The City University of New York, Baruch College
Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, CUNY Graduate Center 
Co-Director, Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy

https://www.cbs.columbia.edu/cscp/

Oct
17
Thu
Positions in Patriarchy: Retooling the Metaphysics of Gender. Robin Dembroff (Yale) @ CUNY Grad Center, rm 5307
Oct 17 @ 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Decades of feminist theory have approached the question ‘what is gender?’ with an eye to gender as a system — in particular, the system that creates and sustains patriarchy. Using this approach, feminists have proposed theories of gender focused on the social positions that persons occupy within a patriarchal system. However, these analyses almost uniformly assume a gender binary (men women), and so look for corresponding, binary social positions. In this talk, I defend the importance of position-based metaphysics of gender, but challenge the assumption that positions in patriarchy can be captured in a binary. Rather than throw out the baby with the bath water, I’ll propose an alternative position-based approach. It begins with modeling the key axes of the patriarchal ‘blueprint’, or the shared beliefs, norms, and attitudes at the core of dominant, western gender ideology. I’ll then build a framework for describing the variety of positions that persons can collectively occupy in relation to this blueprint. A central upshot is that metaphysics intended to illuminate and debunk gender as imagined within the western patriarchal system fails to sufficiently achieve this end when it presupposes the same binary framework. The categories men and women, I’ll argue, are not primarily descriptive, but rather, contested tools with the central function of reinforcing or revising social power.

Presented by SWIP-Analytic

Oct
21
Mon
The Buddha versus Popper: When to Live? Rohit Parikh @ CUNY Grad Center, 7314
Oct 21 @ 4:15 pm – 6:15 pm

We discuss two approaches to life: presentism and futurism. The first one, which we are identifying with the Buddha, is to live in the present and not to allow the future to hinder us from living in the ever present now. The second one, which we will identify with Karl Popper, is to think before we act, and act now for a better future. We will discuss various aspects of presentism and futurism, such as Ruth Millikan’s Popperian animal, the psychologist Howard Rachlin’s social and temporal discounting, and even the popular but controversial idea, YOLO (you live only once). The purpose of this talk is to contrast one with the other. The central question of ethics is: How should one live? Our variation on that question is: When should one live? We conjecture that the notion of flow, developed by Csikszentmihalyi, may be a better optimal choice between these two positions.

This work, which is joint with Jongjin Kim, is to appear in the Journal of Buddhist Ethics.


Logic and Metaphysics Workshop:

September 2 GC Closed NO MEETING

September 9 Yael Sharvit, UCLA

September 16  Ole Hjortland and Ben Martin, Bergen

September 23 Alessandro Rossi, StAndrews

September 30 GC Closed NO MEETING

October 7 Dongwoo Kim, GC

October 14 GC Closed NO MEETING

October 21 Rohit Parikh, GC

October 28 Barbara Montero, GC

November 4 Sergei Aretmov, GC

November 11 Martin Pleitz, Muenster

November 18

November 25
December 2 Jessica Wilson, Toronto

December 9 Mark Colyvan, Sydney

December 16  MAYBE A MEETING; MAYBE NOT

Nov
8
Fri
Buddhism and Politics in Korea @ International Affairs Building, Room 918
Nov 8 @ 1:00 pm – 5:30 pm

Abstracts:

“Giving as Spending and Spending as Giving: Buddhism and the Politics of Spending during the Chosŏn Dynasty”
Juhn Ahn, University of Michigan

The impact of the Koryŏ-Chosŏn transition on the Buddhist establishment in Korea is generally understood in current scholarship to have been a negative one. It is all too often assumed that Buddhist monasteries, who enjoyed great economic prosperity under Koryŏ’s culture of giving, were forced to undergo a radical reduction in size and number and their wealth confiscated to replenish the empty royal fisc. There is also a tendency to assume that this systematic restructuring of the Buddhist establishment, often dubbed its “decline,” was orchestrated and executed by a small group of reform-minded Neo-Confucian scholar-officials who saw Buddhism as an economic parasite and cause of unnecessary spending. It is true that the Buddhist establishment never again enjoyed the kind of wealth that it once did during the Koryŏ, but this paper argues that we should not take this as a sign of decline or the necessary outcome of state suppression. Instead, this paper will turn its attention to the politics of spending that continued to shape and reshape the Chosŏn court and show that the politics of spending provided the Buddhist establishment with an opportunity—an opportunity that it did in fact use—to redefine the conditions of its existence.

“Court Lady Ch’ŏn Ilch’ŏng (1848 – 1934) in the Making of Modern Korean Buddhism”
Hwansoo Kim, Yale University

In this talk, I will introduce the work of a forgotten Korean Buddhist laywoman who served as one of the highest-ranking ladies in the court of the late Chosŏn dynasty. I will demonstrate that Court Lady Ch’ŏn (1848 – 1934) was as integral to modernizing Korean Buddhism during the pre-colonial and colonial era as the Korean Buddhist monastics with whom she worked. By examining Ch’ŏn’s seminal role in the incipient stage of modern Korean Buddhism, the history of female Buddhist leadership can be extended.

Ch’ŏn primarily worked with the Korean monk and leader Yi Hoegwang (1862-1933), drawing on a wide network of relationships both inside and outside the court to help him establish the first modern institution of Korean Buddhism, build the first modern temple in central Seoul, and open a Buddhist clinic. However, because Yi was later condemned by historiography as the worst of Buddhists who had collaborated with Korea’s colonizer, Ch’ŏn’s leadership and legacy were likewise stigmatized and sidelined. This talk seeks to restore Ch’ŏn’s centrality as a Buddhist modernizer, thereby giving balance to a largely male-centered and ethno-centric history and lengthening the lineage of lay female leadership in the transformation of Korean Buddhism in the early twentieth century.

“Buddhism and State Violence in Modern Korea”
Jin Y. Park, American University

Historically, Korean Buddhism has been known as “State Protection Buddhism” (護國佛敎). The seemingly positive character of this description also points to the limitations of Korean Buddhism’s role in the broader context of society. A state should exist to protect its members, but history has witnessed that the state can and did exercise its power against its members. Which members did the Korean government support, and which were sacrificed in the process? What role did Korean Buddhism play in the unfolding of that history?

This presentation deals with Buddhism’s response to state violence in modern Korea. Through an analysis of a specific instance of state violence and Korean Buddhism’s response, the presentation tries to gauge Korean Buddhism’s capacity to engage with the socio-political milieu of human existence.

Co-sponsored by
The Academy of Korean Studies, Seoul Korea; Weatherhead East Asian Institute; the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures; The Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life; The Department of Religion;  The Center for Buddhism and East Asian Religion

Dec
6
Fri
The Immortal Spirit in Classical Chinese Aesthetics. Paul Goldin (UPenn) @ Columbia University Religion Dept. 101
Dec 6 @ 5:30 pm – 7:30 pm

This will be the third (and, time permitting, some material from the fourth) of a series of lectures that I aim to write up formally as a book.  We will begin with a brief review of the most familiar theory of Chinese aesthetics: works of art are the products of sensitive human beings who cannot suppress their sincere responses to emotional stimuli.  If art is understood as a sincere statement of this kind by a great genius, it stands to reason that, by correctly interpreting the work, one can communicate with that genius’s mind (xin 心) even after his or her death–and, likewise, that an artist today can communicate with audiences yet unborn.  Art is thus timeless and offers the possibility of incorporeal immortality.  If there is extra time, I will also survey two interrelated phenomena that I call meta-criticism and meta-writing (since there are no technical terms for them in Chinese).  Meta-criticism, i.e. criticism of criticism, is a major feature of Chinese theories about art.  Meta-criticism must be related to meta-writing, or the practice of writing about writing while exemplifying the very styles and techniques that one recommends: for example, artfully rhyming a couplet about rhyming.

With responses from: SANDRA SHAPSHAY (Hunter College, CUNY)


The Fall dates for the Comparative Philosophy seminar:

September 20 – Justin Tiwald (San Francisco State University)
October 11 – Richard Kim (Loyola University, Chicago
November 8 – Sungmoon Kim (City University of Hong Kong)
December 6 – Paul R. Goldin (University of Pennsylvania)

More details (such as titles, abstracts, and respondents) to follow. Looking forward to seeing you soon.

Hagop Sarkissian
Associate Professor & Chair, Department of Philosophy, The City University of New York, Baruch College
Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, CUNY Graduate Center 
Co-Director, Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy

https://www.cbs.columbia.edu/cscp/

Dec
7
Sat
Philosophy of Emotion Workshop @ CUNY Grad Center, rm 5307
Dec 7 all-day

Please R.S.V.P.

The City University of New York, Graduate Center, is hosting its second Emotion Workshop. This semester, we are profiling the work of local scholars and visitors to New York.  Topics relate to mind, social philosophy, epistemology, aesthetics, experimental philosophy, and psychology.     The workshop will be 1 day long.  Participants should not feel obligated to attend every session, but we do ask you to RSVP (this is to make sure everyone is allowed Saturday building access).   If you think there is a chance you will join us for any part of the day, please send your name to Sarah Arnaud, postdoc in the Philosophy Program and co-organizer: sarnaud@gc.cuny.edu

PROGRAM

10:00-10:15 Introduction

10:15-11:00 Jesse Prinz (CUNY, Philosophy), “Are emotions socially constructed?”

11:00-11:15 Break

11:15-12:00 Rodrigo Díaz (Bern, Philosophy), “Folk emotion concepts”

12:00-12:45 Juliette Vazard (NYU / Institut Jean Nicod, Paris / University of Geneva), “Epistemic anxiety”

12:45-2:15 Break (lunch)

2:15-3:00 S. Arnaud & K. Pendoley (CUNY, Philosophy), “Intentionalism and the understanding of emotion experience”

3:00-3:15 Break

3:15-4:00 Jonathan Gilmore (CUNY, Philosophy), “Emotion, absorption, and experiential imagining”

4:00-4:45 Jordan Wylie (CUNY, Psychology), “Investigating the influences of emotion on object recognition”

4:45-6:00 Reception

Mar
13
Fri
The Social and Individual Conference @ Columbia U Philosophy Dept.
Mar 13 – Mar 14 all-day

Contact  Professor Gooding-Williams for more info.