Feb
21
Fri
Philosophy & Education. Fordham University Graduate Philosophy Conference @ Fordham U. Philosophy Dept.
Feb 21 – Feb 22 all-day

We all find ourselves already subject to some educational program and routinely invited into learning and teaching relationships with one another. We are inviting papers that engage philosophy and education from a wide range of perspectives. We welcome both papers that focus on philosophies of education as well as projects which engage the practice of teaching philosophy. Our conference aims to bring together graduate students that work in different areas of philosophy in order to think together about teaching and learning in a warm and convivial environment.

Possible topics may include, but are in no way limited to:

o   How views of education affect how we conceive of what philosophy is

o   The relation between philosophical wonder and learning

o   Normative questions of what role the teacher ought to play in the student’s education

o   How to best approach teaching texts from in and outside the canon

o   Innovative teaching ideas or activities you have used in the classroom

o   Earnest convictions about why we should teach philosophy

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words in a doc file with name and affiliation in the header to Fordhamgradconference@gmail.com no later than Monday, December 2, 2019. Authors of selected papers will be notified by Monday, December 30, 2019.

Apr
6
Mon
Understanding Mathematical Explanation: Uniting Philosophical and Educational Perspectives @ Graduate School of Education, Rutgers
Apr 6 – Apr 7 all-day

The workshop is funded by the National Science Foundation (SES-1921688) and is aimed at bringing together academics who study the notion of mathematical explanation from philosophical and from educational/psychological perspectives. The idea is to bring together philosophers of mathematics, epistemologists, psychologists, and mathematics educators, to discuss how developments in their own fields could meaningfully contribute to the work on mathematical explanation where their fields intersect. In particular, we want to explore the ways in which mathematical explanation engenders understanding, by focusing on (1) the relationship between different types of philosophical accounts of mathematical explanation, (2) educational approaches to the characterization of effective explanations in the mathematics classroom, and (3) work at the intersection of these two perspectives.

All speakers:

Mark Colyvan
University of Sydney

Matthew Inglis
Loughborough University

Marc Lange
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Tania Lombrozo
Princeton University

Alexander Renkl
University of Freiburg

Keith Weber
Rutgers University – New Brunswick

Orit Zaslavsky
New York University

Feb
2
Wed
Art in the Brain of the Beholder @ ZOOM - see site for details
Feb 2 @ 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm

What can science teach us about how we perceive and understand art? How can art help us understand ourselves and each other? In this event, the Zuckerman Institute explores the interactions between our brains and the artistic world, finding connections and parallels between art and science.

Event Speakers

Please visit the event webpage to view the speaker list.

Event Information

Free and open to the public, registration is required by January 28, 2022. This event will also be live-streamed. Please email zuckermaninstitute@columbia.edu with any questions.

This talk is part of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Brain Insight Lecture series hosted by Columbia’s Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute and supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.

Sep
8
Thu
The Madness of Philosophy & the Limitations of Human Moderation in Plato’s Phaedrus”. Cinzia Arruzza (NSSR) @ Wolff Conference Room/D1103
Sep 8 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

 

Feb
23
Thu
Thinking About Death in Plato’s Euthydemus. @ Wolff Conference Room/D1103
Feb 23 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

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.

Mar
24
Fri
Visual Philosophy Conference @ B500
Mar 24 all-day

This conference aims to initiate dialogues between philosophy and the arts. Philosophers and thinkers/ scholars across disciplines of humanities and social sciences will meet with artists and scholars from a wide variety of visual and visual artistic disciplines, including painting, photography, and literature, as well as travel, dance, and fashion. Rather than taking art as a mere object of philosophical study, this conference will explore the manifold confluences and intersections of philosophy and art, exploring how each can become the object of the other and how the boundary between the philosophical and the artistic can be sharpened or blurred. The motive is specifically to explore the “visual” and “movement” element in art of, and in everyday life and theorize it – both philosophically and critically.

Co-sponsored by: Office of Deans: New School for Social Research and School of Art & Design History & Theory; University Student Senate and Graduate Faculty Student Senate

Schedule and Location

The conference will meet on The New School campus in New York City.

On March 24th, we will meet in room B500 at 65 W 11 Street.

On March 25th, we will meet in Starr Foundation Hall UL105 at University Center (63 Fifth Avenue).

Following is the schedule for both days, (please see the website for details on panels and speakers):

11:00 am Panel 1 Speaker presentations.

12:00 pm Panel 1 roundtable and audience Q&A.

1:15 pm Lunch break.

2:15 pm Panel 2 Speaker presentations.

3:15 pm Panel 2 roundtable and audience Q&A.

4:30 pm Evening reception with free food and drinks for attendees!

Mar
25
Sat
Visual Philosophy Conference @ Starr Foundation Hall UL105 at University Center
Mar 25 all-day

This conference aims to initiate dialogues between philosophy and the arts. Philosophers and thinkers/ scholars across disciplines of humanities and social sciences will meet with artists and scholars from a wide variety of visual and visual artistic disciplines, including painting, photography, and literature, as well as travel, dance, and fashion. Rather than taking art as a mere object of philosophical study, this conference will explore the manifold confluences and intersections of philosophy and art, exploring how each can become the object of the other and how the boundary between the philosophical and the artistic can be sharpened or blurred. The motive is specifically to explore the “visual” and “movement” element in art of, and in everyday life and theorize it – both philosophically and critically.

Co-sponsored by: Office of Deans: New School for Social Research and School of Art & Design History & Theory; University Student Senate and Graduate Faculty Student Senate

Schedule and Location

The conference will meet on The New School campus in New York City.

On March 24th, we will meet in room B500 at 65 W 11 Street.

On March 25th, we will meet in Starr Foundation Hall UL105 at University Center (63 Fifth Avenue).

Following is the schedule for both days, (please see the website for details on panels and speakers):

11:00 am Panel 1 Speaker presentations.

12:00 pm Panel 1 roundtable and audience Q&A.

1:15 pm Lunch break.

2:15 pm Panel 2 Speaker presentations.

3:15 pm Panel 2 roundtable and audience Q&A.

4:30 pm Evening reception with free food and drinks for attendees!

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

Nov
2
Thu
Hell Dialogues: Adaptation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s “No Exit” with elements of Plato’s Dialogues @ Sheen Center for Thought & Culture
Nov 2 @ 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm

We are embarking on an innovative adaptation of J.P. Sartre’s timeless masterpiece, “No Exit.” Infused with elements inspired by Plato’s Dialogues, our play aims to explore the depths of existentialism, dark absurdity, and musical comedy while delving into the realms of speech and movement improvisation.

Through this innovative production, we aim to challenge and provoke audiences, encouraging deep introspection and dialogue about our existence and the choices we make. We believe that the combination of Sartre’s piercing insights and Plato’s philosophical foundations will create a unique theatrical experience that will resonate with both enthusiasts of classic literature and fans of contemporary performance art.

Nov
3
Fri
Hell Dialogues: Adaptation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s “No Exit” with elements of Plato’s Dialogues @ Sheen Center for Thought & Culture
Nov 3 @ 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm

We are embarking on an innovative adaptation of J.P. Sartre’s timeless masterpiece, “No Exit.” Infused with elements inspired by Plato’s Dialogues, our play aims to explore the depths of existentialism, dark absurdity, and musical comedy while delving into the realms of speech and movement improvisation.

Through this innovative production, we aim to challenge and provoke audiences, encouraging deep introspection and dialogue about our existence and the choices we make. We believe that the combination of Sartre’s piercing insights and Plato’s philosophical foundations will create a unique theatrical experience that will resonate with both enthusiasts of classic literature and fans of contemporary performance art.