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
The 9th annual Radical Democracy conference, sponsored by the Department of Politics at The New School for Social Research, will convene theorists and practitioners around the theme of Radical Ecologies. In the year that “climate strike” was named word of the year by Collins Dictionary, we seek to explore what opportunities for democratic resistance can be found in a multiplicity of ecologies. The conference will provide a platform for dialogue on the urgent question of our future in a post-climate change world.
Against the backdrop of increasingly visible and devastating climate disasters, resurgent environmental movements are embracing divergent visions and methods of struggle to realize change. As such, it is timely to ask, What makes an ecology radical? A multitude of intersecting traditions have sought to answer this question. An eco-feminist might approach this through the lens of social reproduction. An eco-socialist might frame radical ecology in terms of a mode of production beyond capitalism that can sustain and replenish nature. Indigenous perspectives can draw on centuries of resistance to extractive colonial capitalism. The conference will consider how a radical ecological praxis can be pursued within this plurality of histories, cosmologies and schools of thought, and, crucially, examine what we can learn from the work of activists on the frontline. We therefore call on both scholars and activists to engage in a fruitful dialogue on the still unsettled relationship between politics and the environment.
We seek abstracts and panel proposals that grapple with this issue across a broad range of perspectives and disciplines, including, but by no means limited to:
- environmental social movements past, present and future;
- indigenous, subaltern, decolonial and posthuman perspectives and strategies of resistance;
- the urgency of converging ecological crises, and strategic possibilities and limitations of confronting it within existing political systems;
- the theoretical and ontological underpinnings of environmentalism in the global North, and critiques thereof;
- networks of alliance across geographical space, disciplinary boundaries, and patterns and institutions of oppression;
- materialist analyses of winners and losers in the clean energy transition and ecological sustainability movement;
- questions of future(s) and intergenerational ethics;
- meditations on the relations between aesthetics, activism, and the nonhuman.
The conference will take place over two days, the structure of which will include graduate-student panels, an indigenous activist-scholar roundtable, and a keynote address.
For individual paper proposals, please submit a one-page abstract (max. 300 words) that includes institutional affiliation, academic level and contact information. Complete panel proposals with up to four papers are strongly encouraged.
Please submit your paper or panel abstracts by February 1st, 2020, to radicaldemocracy@newschool.edu. Selected participants will be notified March 1st, 2020. Full conference papers are due by April 5, 2020.
https://philevents.org/event/show/78134
Please note: All events are virtual until otherwise stated.
“What is Sin?“
Brian Leftow
Willian Palstion Chair for the Philosophy of Religion
Rutgers University
Please join Cornel West, 2021-2022 Presidential Visiting Scholar at The New School, for a public in-person lecture, “Philosophy in Our Time of Imperial Decay.”
Welcome by Dwight A. McBride, New School President
Moderated by Simon Critchley, Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy
PLEASE NOTE: Proof of vaccination and a booster are required for campus access; no exceptions will be granted. You must remain masked during the event. You will receive additional information about this closer to the event date.
Dr. Cornel West is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary. Dr. West teaches on the works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as well as courses in Philosophy of Religion, African American Critical Thought, and a wide range of subjects — including but by no means limited to, the classics, philosophy, politics, cultural theory, literature, and music.
Dr. West is the former Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard University and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. He graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard in three years and obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy at Princeton. He has written 20 books and has edited 13. He is best known for his classics, Race Matters and Democracy Matters, and for his memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. His most recent book, Black Prophetic Fire, offers an unflinching look at nineteenth and twentieth-century African American leaders and their visionary legacies.
Dr. West is a frequent guest on the Bill Maher Show, CNN, C-Span and Democracy Now. He has a passion to communicate to a vast variety of publics in order to keep alive the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. – a legacy of telling the truth and bearing witness to love and justice.
Location TBA
Contact Toby Bollig
TBA
Location TBD
Jacob Soll, in conversation with Pierre Force, John Shovlin, Carl Wennerlind, and Emmanuelle Saada
After two government bailouts of the U.S. economy in less than twenty years, free market ideology is due for serious reappraisal. In Free Market: the History of an Idea, Jacob Soll details how we got to this current crisis, and how we can find our way out by looking to earlier iterations of free market thought. Contrary to popular narratives, early market theorists believed that states had an important role in building and maintaining free markets. But in the eighteenth century, thinkers insisted on free markets without state intervention, leading to a tradition of ideological brittleness. That tradition only calcified in the centuries that followed. Tracing the intellectual evolution of the free market from Cicero to Milton Friedman, Soll argues that we need to go back to the origins of free market ideology in order to truly understand it—and to develop new economic concepts to face today’s challenges.
Jacob Soll is professor of history and accounting at the University of Southern California. He has been awarded numerous prestigious prizes including two NEH Fellowships, the Jacques Barzun Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and, in 2011, the MacArthur Fellowship. He also advises political and financial leaders across the globe to promote accounting standards and financial transparency.
Joining Jacob Soll to discuss his book will be: Pierre Force, Professor of French and History at Columbia; John Shovlin, Professor of History at NYU; and Carl Wennerlind, Professor of History at Barnard College. Emmanuelle Saada, Professor of History and French at Columbia, will moderate the discussion.
This event is co-sponsored by the Maison Française and the Department of History.
Susan Neiman develops in Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (2002, Princeton: Princeton University Press) a watershed perspective on the longstanding problem of evil, the perniciously difficult to satisfy “need to find order within those appearances so unbearable that they threaten reason’s ability to go on.” The book thereby also presents a radically new perspective on traditional debates within metaphysics. On the occasion of its twentieth anniversary, we gather to celebrate her accomplishment and to advance the research program it reflects. Participants will include, in addition to Neiman herself: Annalise Acorn, Frederick Beiser, Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, Omri Boehm, Dan Brudney, Caroline Bynum, Lorraine Daston, Michael Della Rocca, Wendy Doniger, Wolfram Ellenberger, John Faithful Hamer, Carey Harrison, Patricia Kitcher, Philip Kitcher, Christia Mercer, Cornel West, Allen Wood, and James Wood.
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.