Contact Professor Wolfgang Mann for more info.
Abstract. The Noble Lie proposed by Plato for the Just City in Republic III has been much misunderstood. Its agenda is twofold: to get the citizens of the City to see their society as a natural entity, with themselves as all ‘family’ and akin; and to get the Guardians in particular to make class mobility, on which the justice of the City depends, a top priority. Since the second is taken to depend on the first, the Lie passage amounts to an argument (1) that the survival of a just community depends on the existence of social solidarity between elite and mass, which allows for full class mobility and genuine meritocracy; (2) that this solidarity in turn depends on an ideology of natural unity; and (3) that such ideologies are always false. So the Lie really is a lie, but a necessary one; as such it poses an awkward ethical problem for Plato and, if he is right, for our own societies as well.
Presented by SWIP-NYC
How can we know what it’s like to be someone else? Classical Indian philosophers found the answer in theater, arguing that it’s not just a form of entertainment, but a source of knowledge of other minds. In this talk, I’ll explore how this theme is developed in Śrī Śaṅkuka (c. 850 CE) and examine the reasons his views were rejected in the later tradition. I’ll argue that those reasons are unsound, and that we can see why by turning to contemporary studies of the relationship between knowledge and luck.
Jonardon Ganeri is the Bimal. K. Matilal Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is a philosopher whose work draws on a variety of philosophical traditions to construct new positions in the philosophy of mind, metaphysics and epistemology. His books include Attention, Not Self (2017), a study of early Buddhist theories of attention; The Concealed Art of the Soul (2012), an analysis of the idea of a search for one’s true self; Virtual Subjects, Fugitive Selves (2020), an analysis of Fernando Pessoa’s philosophy of self; and Inwardness: An Outsiders’ Guide (2021), a review of the concept of inwardness in literature, film, poetry, and philosophy across cultures. He joined the Fellowship of the British Academy in 2015, and won the Infosys Prize in the Humanities the same year, the only philosopher to do so.
This series is curated and co-presented by Brooklyn Public Philosophers, aka Ian Olasov.
THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY
Presents: Li Zehou on the ‘Deep Structures of Confucianism’
Lead Presenter: Andrew Lambert (College of Staten Island, CUNY)
Discussants: Robert A. Carleo III (East China Normal University), Emma Buchtel (Hong Kong Education University)
ABSTRACT: Contemporary Chinese intellectual Li Zehou’s cross-cultural methodology blends traditional Confucian thought with thinkers such as Kant and Marx. This seminar addresses the question of culture and its role in Li’s thought. Li has made several claims about how a settled cultural tradition influences the subjects within it. One such claim concerns the existence of ‘deep structures’ of Confucianism, as outlined in this preparatory reading. The idea is that culture, history, and social practice (collectively, a tradition) shape human psychology (including the formation of concepts, emotions, and values) in ways not always apparent to the subject. Within the Chinese tradition, Confucianism constitutes such a deep structure, and its effects cannot be captured by textual studies alone, nor studies of material culture. Rather, the deep structure is articulated in terms of an emergent shared subjectivity. Such traditions can evolve and ultimately dissolve; nevertheless, their effects are deep-rooted. This seminar meeting will aim to identify the parameters of Li’s ambitious theoretical framework and its plausibility, and to explore connections with current work in related fields, such as cultural and empirical psychology.
DATE: March 25, 2022
TIME: 6:30 – 8:00 pm EST
This seminar will take place via Zoom (please scroll down for the full invitation). Below you will find the link to join the meeting. Here is an instruction manual to help you familiarize yourself with the program. In addition to familiarizing yourself with the program’s basic functions, there are two things we ask you to do before the meeting can start. First, you will need to sign in by typing your name in the chat. Subsequently, we will have to agree on the privacy policy for the meeting. The privacy policy provided by the Columbia University Seminars Office will be read aloud. To indicate your agreement, you will raise your virtual Zoom hand in the Participants panel. In the manual, you will find step-by-step instructions of how to sign in and to raise your hand.
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With responses from Timothy Connolly (East Stroudsburg University)
ABSTRACT: Recent philosophical discussions on compassion focus on the value and the nature of compassion as an emotion. Ancient Asian philosophical traditions such as Confucianism and Buddhism, however, emphasize compassion as a character trait that should be nurtured. This paper examines the insights drawn from these traditions to help inform the nurturing of compassion. For example, is empathy a necessary tool? What is the role of love and care? Does self-reflection contribute to the process?
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.
What makes right acts right? A Stoic answer to Ross’s question.
When W.D. Ross poses the question, “what makes right acts right?” (The Right and the Good ch. 2), he is asking a question that is prior to the deliberative question, “how do I determine the right thing to do?” The Stoics recognize this: in De Officiis 1.7, Cicero says that every inquiry about duty has two parts: (1) a theoretical part concerned with the end of goods and evils, which addresses such matters as whether all duties are perfect, whether some are more important than others, and what are the kinds of duties, and (2) a practical part which sets out rules (praecepta) by which our conduct can be made to conform with the end. This paper focuses on (1) and in particular asks Ross’s question about Stoic right actions (kathêkonta).
The endpoint of Stoic deliberation is determining what token action is the right action. The paper begins with the Stoic distinction between a thing’s choiceworthiness, its intrinsic disposition to elicit a choice response in a suitable subject, and its possession being to-be-chosen. The determination of what is to-be-done is made by weighing against each other all the values of the relevant action types specified by their content (the so-called ‘intermediate actions’) that are in accordance with nature, as Stoic value theory says that according with nature is an objective reason to do an action. What constitutes the rightness of the token right action, and is given in its reasonable defense, is the same as what constitutes the rightness of a perfect (katorthôma) action. The Stoic distinction between right and perfect action depends on the action’s moral goodness—not rightness—which is due to its causal origin.
Presented by Professor Rachana Kamtekar (Cornell University)
Book discussion on Gwenda-lin Grewal’s, Thinking About Death in Plato’s Euthydemus. A Close Reading and New Translation (OUP 2022)
Speakers:
Gwenda-lin Grewal (NSSR)
Cinzia Arruzza (NSSR)
Nicholas Pappas (CUNY)
Thinking of Death places Plato’s Euthydemus among the dialogues that surround the trial and death of Socrates. A premonition of philosophy’s fate arrives in the form of Socrates’ encounter with the two-headed sophist pair, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, who appear as if they are the ghost of the Socrates of Aristophanes’ Thinkery. The pair vacillate between choral ode and rhapsody, as Plato vacillates between referring to them in the dual and plural number in Greek. Gwenda-lin Grewal’s close reading explores how the structure of the dialogue and the pair’s back-and-forth arguments bear a striking resemblance to thinking itself: in its immersive remove from reality, thinking simulates death even as it cannot conceive of its possibility. Euthydemus and Dionysodorus take this to an extreme, and so emerge as the philosophical dream and sophistic nightmare of being disembodied from substance. The Euthydemus is haunted by philosophy’s tenuous relationship to political life. This is played out in the narration through Crito’s implied criticism of Socrates-the phantom image of the Athenian laws-and in the drama itself, which appears to take place in Hades. Thinking of death thus brings with it a lurid parody of the death of thinking: the farce of perfect philosophy that bears the gravity of the city’s sophistry. Grewal also provides a new translation of the Euthydemus that pays careful attention to grammatical ambiguities, nuances, and wit in ways that substantially expand the reader’s access to the dialogue’s mysteries.
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.
What is an appropriate response to humiliating treatments such as insults? This question is not only relevant to today’s discourse but has also piqued the curiosity of thinkers in classical Chinese philosophy. The Warring States period debate regarding whether one’s inner sense of shame can shield one from insulting situations and from experiencing shame is frequently presented as a one-sided narrative that focuses on the Confucian texts. Meanwhile, the views of their rival thinkers, such as the Daoist, legalist, or much-neglected Songzi (3rd century BCE), are rarely the focus of attention. This paper brings Songzi, a key player in the debate of emotions as responses to external triggers, into the picture and restores the historical intellectual discourse over the topic of what constitutes an appropriate response to humiliating situations such as insults. More importantly, I point out the philosophical significance of this debate, namely how Songzi prompts Xunzi to respond to an ambiguity within the Confucian doctrine: The early Confucians appear to think that an individual’s internal virtues can isolate and shield one from hostile external stimuli while also maintaining that the external environment impacts one’s moral cultivation and moral life in significant ways. Xunzi’s strategic move, I argue, is to give credit to both an inner sense of shame and the function of external stimuli in inducing negative emotions, thus making an important philosophical concession compared to Confucius and Mencius.
With responses from Nalei Chen (New York University)
- September 15 – Jing Hu (Concordia)
- October 13 – Bill Waldron (Middlebury)
- October 27 – David Wong (Duke)
- December 1 – Stephen Angle (Wesleyan)
When W.D. Ross poses the question “what makes right acts right?” (The Right and the Good, ch. 2), he is asking a question that is prior to, and has a bearing on, the practical question “how do I determine the right thing to do?” The Stoics recognize this. Cicero (De Officio, where he is referring to Panaetius’ work Peri Kathêkontos) tells us that every inquiry about duty has two parts: (1) a theoretical part concerned with the end of good and evil deeds, which addresses such matters as whether all duties are perfect (omniane official perfecta sint), whether some are more important than others, and what the kinds of duties are, and (2) a practical part which sets out rules (praecepta) by which our conduct can be made to conform with the end (De Officiis, 1.7). While Cicero himself focuses on the second, this paper seeks the answer to the first part.
Rachana Kamtekar is a Professor of Philosophy and Classics at Cornell University and has written on many topics in ancient philosophy and contemporary moral psychology. Her monograph, Plato’s Moral Psychology: Intellectualism, the Divided Soul and the Desire for Good, was published in 2017. She is currently working on the relationship between action and character in ancient Greek ethics.