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.
Socrates’ close association of madness and philosophy from the Phaedrus’ Palinode has puzzled interpreters. How can philosophy be equated to irrationality? In this paper I argue against interpretations that either deny that the association of madness and philosophy ought to be taken seriously or downplay this association by considering madness as akin to the unreflective inspiration characterizing only the first stages of philosophizing but subsequently overcome by the mature philosopher. I show that the association of madness and philosophy is an integral part of Socrates’ polemics against what he calls “human moderation”, characterized by a cold calculation of costs and benefits. And, moreover, that madness is an ongoing feature of philosophy and of the philosopher, who is never fully in possession of all his rational and cognitive processes but has to constantly work on them in an effort of self-clarification.
External visitors must comply with the university’s guest policy as outlined here: https://www.newschool.edu/covid-19/campus-access/?open=visitors.
Audience members must show proof of a full COVID-19 vaccination series (and booster if eligible), ID, and remain masked at all times.
Professor Williamson will give 3 lectures: September 19, 21, and 23. All will take place in AB-2400 [East Wing] from 4:30-6:30pm.
The lectures will discuss problems in the methodology of contemporary philosophy. Although philosophy without use of counterexamples would be a disaster, the way they are currently handled is naïve. In particular, it is too vulnerable to fake counterexamples generated by more or less universal human heuristics.
Lecture One: Heuristics [9/19]
Human cognition, from sense perception to abstract reflection, frequently employs heuristics, quick, easy, efficient, and imperfectly reliable ways of solving problems. To a neglected extent, philosophical problems and paradoxes from reliance on the outputs of fallible heuristics. This will be illustrated with examples involving vagueness, conditionals, belief ascription, truth and falsity, and reasons aggregation. Potential lessons for philosophical method will be discussed.
Lecture Two: Overfitting [9/21]
Overfitting is a well-recognized methodological problem in natural science, where use of models with too many degrees of freedom leads to unstable theorizing and failure to detect errors in the data. Overfitting is also a major but ill-recognized methodological problem in philosophy, exacerbated by its reliance on heuristics. General intellectual tendencies conducive to overfitting in philosophy will be discussed.
Lecture Three: Hyperintensionality [9/23]
The ‘hyperintensional revolution’ proclaims that central metaphysical distinctions cannot be captured in modal terms since they are sensitive to differences between necessary equivalents. Such hyperintensionalism fits the profile of overfitting. It is motivated by case judgments that are explicable as results of a fallible heuristic and it leads to models with too many degrees of freedom.
Professor Williamson will give 3 lectures: September 19, 21, and 23. All will take place in AB-2400 [East Wing] from 4:30-6:30pm.
The lectures will discuss problems in the methodology of contemporary philosophy. Although philosophy without use of counterexamples would be a disaster, the way they are currently handled is naïve. In particular, it is too vulnerable to fake counterexamples generated by more or less universal human heuristics.
Lecture One: Heuristics [9/19]
Human cognition, from sense perception to abstract reflection, frequently employs heuristics, quick, easy, efficient, and imperfectly reliable ways of solving problems. To a neglected extent, philosophical problems and paradoxes from reliance on the outputs of fallible heuristics. This will be illustrated with examples involving vagueness, conditionals, belief ascription, truth and falsity, and reasons aggregation. Potential lessons for philosophical method will be discussed.
Lecture Two: Overfitting [9/21]
Overfitting is a well-recognized methodological problem in natural science, where use of models with too many degrees of freedom leads to unstable theorizing and failure to detect errors in the data. Overfitting is also a major but ill-recognized methodological problem in philosophy, exacerbated by its reliance on heuristics. General intellectual tendencies conducive to overfitting in philosophy will be discussed.
Lecture Three: Hyperintensionality [9/23]
The ‘hyperintensional revolution’ proclaims that central metaphysical distinctions cannot be captured in modal terms since they are sensitive to differences between necessary equivalents. Such hyperintensionalism fits the profile of overfitting. It is motivated by case judgments that are explicable as results of a fallible heuristic and it leads to models with too many degrees of freedom.
Professor Williamson will give 3 lectures: September 19, 21, and 23. All will take place in AB-2400 [East Wing] from 4:30-6:30pm.
The lectures will discuss problems in the methodology of contemporary philosophy. Although philosophy without use of counterexamples would be a disaster, the way they are currently handled is naïve. In particular, it is too vulnerable to fake counterexamples generated by more or less universal human heuristics.
Lecture One: Heuristics [9/19]
Human cognition, from sense perception to abstract reflection, frequently employs heuristics, quick, easy, efficient, and imperfectly reliable ways of solving problems. To a neglected extent, philosophical problems and paradoxes from reliance on the outputs of fallible heuristics. This will be illustrated with examples involving vagueness, conditionals, belief ascription, truth and falsity, and reasons aggregation. Potential lessons for philosophical method will be discussed.
Lecture Two: Overfitting [9/21]
Overfitting is a well-recognized methodological problem in natural science, where use of models with too many degrees of freedom leads to unstable theorizing and failure to detect errors in the data. Overfitting is also a major but ill-recognized methodological problem in philosophy, exacerbated by its reliance on heuristics. General intellectual tendencies conducive to overfitting in philosophy will be discussed.
Lecture Three: Hyperintensionality [9/23]
The ‘hyperintensional revolution’ proclaims that central metaphysical distinctions cannot be captured in modal terms since they are sensitive to differences between necessary equivalents. Such hyperintensionalism fits the profile of overfitting. It is motivated by case judgments that are explicable as results of a fallible heuristic and it leads to models with too many degrees of freedom.
This event will feature a thought-provoking panel discussion with sexual and reproductive justice experts on the value of the sexual and reproductive justice framework and how it can be applied to diverse stakeholders, settings, and contexts. Panelists will also highlight examples from around the world of momentum towards sexual and reproductive justice.
Event Information
Free and open to the public; registration is required for both in-person and online attendance. For additional information, please visit the event webpage. Please email Malia Maier at mm5352@cumc.columbia.edu with any questions. All in-person attendees must follow Columbia’s COVID-19 policies.
Hosted by the Global Health Justice and Governance Program at Columbia University.
One of the most challenging aspects of the war in Ukraine is the way in which the conflict has been constantly shifting in its form. In the first place, there is a conventional ground war between Russia and Ukraine, in which the identity and will of the two peoples is at stake. Yet Russia has used weapons supplied by Iran, and Ukraine depends on NATO for its own supplies, indicating that this war depends on the maintenance and expansion of alliances. The stability of these alliances in turn depends on a combination of Realpolitik and shared values as the glue that holds them together. This logic of alliances motivates the energy war that Russia is waging with Europe, revealing that, unbeknownst to Europe, Russian energy policy over the last decade was an early form of the war. Similarly, the threat of nuclear war also tests the resolve of NATO, forcing it to consider the values at stake in the conflict. Is the war about Ukraine’s sovereignty or the principle of nation-state sovereignty itself? Is it about human rights for Ukrainians or the entire human rights project? For Russia, is it about self-defense or a pan-Slavic identity? Is it about the protection of Russian minorities in Ukraine or the threat of Western secularization?
The material form of the war—economic, conventional, nuclear—will depend on the way in which the participants on all sides and in all parts of the world come to an understanding about these questions concerning the moral and spiritual stakes in the war. If it is just a matter of giving up Ukraine, then the economic costs for Europe may not be worth the fight, and Russia’s victory in the energy war could lead to a general NATO capitulation. But if the freedom and security of central and western Europe are also at stake, then even a severe economic recession would be a small price to pay for the reestablishment of a NATO-dominated security order. Is freedom worth the risk of annihilation? Is peace worth the indignities and repression of authoritarianism? As the most serious global conflict since World War II, the war in Ukraine risks going beyond the bounds of all other forms of war before it. What are the resources that are necessary for meeting its challenges? How can the shifting forms of the war be contained and channeled toward a future lasting peace?
These types of questions are not specific to the war in Ukraine but arise in any situation of war. Every war forces us to reconsider the character of war and the forms that it can take. In the first place, the insight that leads to a war is one about the nature of a conflict. War only begins once the parties determine that there is an otherwise irresolvable conflict about the basis of order. The course of a war also results in a practical insight into the form of a postwar order. Peace and stability cannot arrive until all come to an agreement about the new understanding of order. This intertwining of practical and theoretical gains means that the time of war is also a time of shifting manifestations of the forms by which war is fought, as well as the forms of order to be established by the outcome of the war. The course of a war will be decided by our understanding of the kind of world we want to live in, the risks we are willing to take to establish such a world, and our belief in its practical possibility. A war will necessarily change in form depending upon where we are in the movement from the conflict of competing ideas to the victory of a particular conception of order. Since the result of the conflict would be an establishment of sovereignty based on some understanding of order, the conflict is not just a material one but also a theoretical and spiritual one about the metaphysical basis of order. In the process of war, insight leads to conflict, and conflict leads to insight.
At the 2023 Telos-Paul Piccone Institute conference on forms of war, we will consider different ways of understanding the relationship between conflict and insight in war as well as examples of how the conceptualization of conflict affects the outbreak, progress, and outcome of wars. On the one hand, we will consider the way in which the experience of war, both on the battlefield and on the home front, affects the outcome of the war. On the other hand, we will look at how this importance of the experience of war in turn affects the strategy of war. Such strategizing begins already at the nascent stages of conflict, before any actual fighting begins, but in which the possibility of conflict can already lead to concessions by one side or the other that lead to a transformation of the basis of order. Similarly, fears and hopes for the future also determine the course of a war, helping the participants to end a war by offering them a mutually acceptable vision of the terms of peace.
Questions include:
- What are the different causes of war in any particular case? How do these causes attain such significance that they become a casus belli? Were there alternatives to war that were not taken?
- In what situations does the refusal of war lead to an outcome that is tantamount to surrender in war? How can the threat of war be used as a political tool?
- To what extent is war a continuation of politics? Or is war the breakdown of politics?
- How have different wars been experienced on the battlefield and on the home front? How have the different experiences of war affected the outcomes?
- How does our understanding of world order affect the turn to war?
- What is the relationship between war and peace in terms of international order?
- How do fictional or historical representations of war affect the conduct of war?
- What is the relationship between war and the collective identity of a people?
- How are wars between nation-states linked to their domestic politics? In what situations does an external enemy create unity or division in domestic politics?
- How is war used as a tool in domestic politics, for instance, as a way to divert attention from domestic political problems?
- What are the characteristics of different types of war, such as limited war, absolute war, civil war, cold war, proxy war, phony war, trade war, guerilla war, war on terror, nuclear war? What factors lead to a war being fought in a particular way?
- To what extent can a representation of war replace a real war, for instance, when single combat is supposed to substitute for the combat of armies, or when war is televised?
- What is the relationship between spiritual concerns and the forms of war? Are all wars in some sense religious wars?
Conference Location
The conference will take place at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute in New York City from Thursday, March 30, to Saturday, April 1, 2023.
Abstract Submissions
Please note: Abstracts for this conference will only be accepted from current Telos-Paul Piccone Institute members. In order to become a member, please visit our membership enrollment page. Telos-Paul Piccone Institute memberships are valid until the end of the annual New York City conference.
If you are interested in making a presentation, please submit a 200-word abstract and 50-word bio by December 15, 2022, to telosnyc2023@telosinstitute.net. Please place “The 2023 Telos Conference” in the email’s subject line.
A conference hosted by the Motherhood and Technology Working Group at the Center for the Study of Social Difference on the theme of “Conception and Its Discontents.”
Medical technologies have radically transformed the biological and social experience of motherhood. Advances in genomic and reproductive care, the circulation of novel kinship structures, the entrenchment of existing global networks of power and privilege, and the politics of contested bodily sites mark this emerging constellation.
Technological advancements have in particular impacted not just the understanding of conception, but the very process by which a human embryo is created, implanted, and matured. Egg freezing, embryo storage, IVF, and surrogacy afford women new freedoms in choosing when and how to become mothers, while also raising troubling questions about the pressures of capitalism and the extension of worklife, as well as the global inequalities present in the experience of motherhood. In addition, technologies have arisen allowing for unprecedented control over not just who becomes a mother, but what kind of embryo is allowed to be implanted and to grow. Technologies such as CRISPR and NIPT have re-introduced the question of eugenics, radically shifting the very epistemology of motherhood and what it means to be “expecting.” And contemporary abortion debates draw on technology in order to make arguments both for and against access, with imaging technologies being instrumentalized in the building of a sympathetic case for the unborn, and the very notion of a “heartbeat bill” reliant on the misreading of technologies for measuring fetal activity.
While these problems are urgent today, questions of conception and technology are by no means recent developments. The 18th century saw a flourishing of philosophical and scientific theories regarding the start of human life and its formation within the womb. Such theories relied on modern technologies, such as autopsy, to atomize and visualize the body. In the 19th and 20th centuries, eugenic medical science produced theories of reproductive difference between differing racial and social groups, leading to forced sterilization laws in both the US and in Germany. This long history of racializing the rhetoric of fertility and motherhood continues to influence political debates on immigration and demographic changes in the present.
Full conference details and schedule to come.
Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs