Calendar

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

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

With responses from Mark Siderits (Illinois State University)

ABSTRACT: Buddhist philosophers often draw a distinction between two different kinds of truth: conventional truth (saṃvṭi-satya) and ultimate truth (paramārtha-satya). Abhidharma Buddhists philosophers typically understand this distinction in terms of an ontological distinction between two different kinds of entities: ultimately real entities (paramārtha-sat) and conventionally real entities (saṃvṛti-sat). Similar to contemporary philosophical discussions about ordinary objects, Buddhist philosophers debate the ontological status of conventional entities and the semantics of discourse concerning them. Mark Siderits (2015, 2021, 2022) has influentially argued for an eliminitivist position he calls “Buddhist reductionism” that interprets the Abhidharma position as one that denies conventional entities exist but that retains discourse involving apparent reference to them. However, in a recent article Kris McDaniel (2019), a prominent defender of ontological pluralism, challenges that view by proposing that the Abhidharma Buddhist distinction between conventional truth and ultimate truth be “defined up” from a more basic distinction between two different ways an entity can exist: conventionally or ultimately. In this paper I argue that Saṃghabhadra’s account of conventional reality and truth does lends itself well to McDaniel’s proposal but I will also argue that the account of conventional and ultimate truth that results differs in important ways from the models he offers. I will end by offering a modification of McDaniel’s account of conventional truth that is derived from Saṃghabhadra’s pluralist ontology. That view will, unlike the views suggested by both Siderits and McDaniel, allow for there to be ultimate truths about what is conventionally true.

Dinner will be kindly offered by the Columbia University Seminars. 

RSVP is required for dinner. Please email Lucilla with eating requirements at lm3335@columbia.edu. 

Please join us for a talk by Eric-John Russell (Universität Potsdam), who will present chapters from his recently published book, Why Everything is as it Seems: Hegel and Debord. Jacob McNulty (University College London) will provide a response followed by a Q&A with our audience.

Guy Debord has been called many things: pseudo-philosopher, nihilist, filmmaker, megalomaniac, strategist, third-rate Mephistopheles. His book The Society of the Spectacle (1967) has fallen into a similarly motley reception, frequently enveloped within the discourses of postmodernism, media and cultural studies, and avant-garde art history. My research however, dispenses with such narratives and instead offers a sustained examination of the concept of the society of the spectacle through the two pillars upon which Debord understood his own work as a critical theory of society: Marx’s critique of political economy and Hegel’s speculative philosophy. It is the latter that will be the focus of my paper, first by offering some introductory remarks on Debord’s theory of the spectacle but then arguing  that it precisely the speculative dimension of Hegel’s dialectic that remains central for Debord’s diagnosis of twentieth century capitalism, with emphasis placed on the importance of Hegel’s Wesenslogik. I will conclude with the historical significance of Debord’s “heretical Hegelianism,” specifically as an intervention within the atmosphere of the French Hegelianism of the interwar and postwar period.

15 Feb, 4pm:

James Kreines (Claremont McKenna)

From Shapeless Abyss Towards Self-Developing Thought: Taking Hegel on Spinoza Seriously

@ The New School, Room L502, at 2 W 13th Street

Guests and visitors policies at the New School can be accessed via this website. You will have to download CLEAR and upload proof of vaccination or the results of a rapid test. Please try to arrive 15 minutes earlier so we can help you in case of complications.

Feb 24:

Georg Spoo (Freiburg)

Grounds and Limits of Immanent Critique: Kant, Hegel, Marx

@ Columbia

Mar 3:

Heikki Ikaheimo

Hegel, Humanity, and Social Critique

@ Zoom

Mar 24:

Stephen Howard (KU Leuven)

Kant’s Late Philosophy of Nature: The Opus Postumum

@ Columbia

Apr 11:

Karin de Boer

Does Kant’s Antinomy of Pure Reason Amount to an A Priori History of Rational Cosmology?

@ Columbia

Apr 15, 4pm:

Eva von Redecker

Co-sponsored by the New School Graduate Student Conference

@ The New School

Apr 21:

Giulia Battistoni

NAture, Life, Organizm: The Legacy of Romanticism and Classical German Philosophy in Jonas’ Philosophical Biology

@ The New School

In Sanskrit epistemology, philosophers are preoccupied with the notion of pramā. A pramā, roughly, is a mental event of learning or knowledge-acquisition. Call any such mental event a knowledge-event. In A Confection of Refutation (Khaṇḍanakhaṇḍakhādya), the 12th century philosopher and poet Śrīharṣa argued that knowledge-events are indefinable. Any satisfactory (and therefore non-circular) definition of knowledge-events will have to include an anti-luck condition that doesn’t appeal back to the notion of learning or knowledge-acquisition itself. But there is no such anti-luck condition. What is novel about Śrīharṣa’s argument is that it is motivated by his commitment to a certain “knowledge first” approach to epistemology: the view that knowledge-events are epistemically prior to other non-factive mental states and events. On this view, when we are trying to determine whether an agent has undergone a knowledge-event, we don’t initially ascribe to them some other non-factive mental event, and then check if that event meets some further conditions (like truth or reliability) necessary for it to count as a knowledge-event; rather, we treat certain mental events by default as knowledge-events until a defeater comes along.  Surprisingly, Śrīharṣa argues that this kind of “knowledge first” epistemology should give us reason to doubt whether our ordinary attributions of knowledge-events are reliably tracking any sui generis psychological kind. In this talk, I reconstruct Śrīharṣa’s position.

With responses from Rosanna Picascia (Swarthmore College)

RSVP is required for dinner. Dinner will take place at a nearby restaurant. Please contact Lucilla at lm3335@columbia.edu for further information.