Reading and discussing Orientalism by Edward Said
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
What is critique? According to the Kantian tradition, it is an investigation of the transcendental conditions for the possibility of thinking and experience. While later critics shifted the focus to material conditions, core metaphysical commitments and procedures of critique remained unchanged. Critique of Critique (Stanford UP, 2023), the subject of this talk, probes critique as an orientation of thought through its historical manifestations from Plato to the Frankfurt school and present-day critical theory. In the process, it asks us to consider what critical thinking is and whether it can assume orientations other than critique.
Bio: Roy Ben-Shai, a New School graduate, is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College. His recently published book, Critique of Critique (Stanford University Press, 2023), is the first volume in a trilogy on the concept of “orientation” in critical thought. He is currently working on the second volume, Emancipatory Thinking, or the Art of Thinking Otherwise.