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
Thursday, September 29th, 2022
Christina Van Dyke (Barnard College)
Title “I feel it in my fingers, I feel it in my toes: Imaginative Meditation and Experience of Love in Medieval Contemplative Philosophy”
4:10-6:00 PM
716 Philosophy Hall
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.
Distinguished Guest:
Peter van Inwagen (University of Notre Dame)
Speakers:
Aaron Segal (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Alex Rosenberg (Duke University)
Anna Marmodoro (Durham University & Oxford University)
Barry Loewer (Rutgers University)
Brian Leftow (Rutgers University)
David Builes (Princeton University)
Dean Zimmerman (Rutgers University)
Ernest Sosa (Rutgers University)
John Hawthorne (University of Southern California & Australian Catholic University)
Laurie Paul (Yale University)
Ted Sider (Rutgers University)
Trenton Merricks (University of Virginia)
The tentative schedule can be found here.
This event is sponsored by the Rutgers Center for the Philosophy of Religion and the Department of Philosophy
Registration
To register, please inform Esther Goh (esther.goh@rutgers.edu) that you plan to attend.
Note: Space is limited, and non-Rutgers attendees must provide proof of vaccination (you can email this to Esther or show us on the day itself) or a negative PCR test.
Travelling to Rutgers (Plane & Train)
The closest airport is EWR (Newark Liberty International Airport). When you are at Newark Airport, just follow the signs to the monorail “airtrain”. The airtrain will take you to the NJ transit train stop, and then you can take the NJ Transit train (Northeast Corridor Line) to New Brunswick station (It costs $14; takes approx. 45mins).
Another two nearby airports are JFK (John F. Kennedy International Airport) and LGA (LaGuardia Airport). Both are in New York. It takes 1hr+ by taxi or 2hr+ by public transport to come to Rutgers.
Hotels
The closest hotels are “Hyatt Regency New Brunswick” (6mins walk from train station) and “The Heldrich Hotel and Conference Center” (8mins walk from train station). You can also check out “Rutgers University Inn and Conference Center” which is further away.
The best rates for the Hyatt can often be found on hotels.com.
Questions
For any inquiries, please contact Esther Goh at esther.goh@rutgers.edu.
(If you are a guest speaker, please contact Frederick Choo at frederick.choo@rutgers.edu for inquiries instead.)
Generative art made with algorithms has existed since the early days of computing in the 1960s. In recent years, a new strand of generative art has emerged: AI-generated art, which leverages the recent progress of artificial intelligence to create artworks. Unlike old-fashioned generative art, AI-generated art is not produced with an explicit set of programming instructions provided by human artists; instead, it involves training an algorithm on a dataset so that it can later produce artworks (images, music, or video clips) using its own internal parameters that have not been explicitly defined by a human. This process raises fascinating questions at the intersection of computer science, art history, and the philosophy of art. At a superficial level of analysis, AI-generated art seems to offload much of the creative impetus of art production to the machine, requiring minimal intervention from the artist. On closer inspection, however, it involves a novel process of curation at two key stages: upstream in the selection of the dataset on which the algorithm is trained, and downstream in the selection of the outputs that should qualify as artworks. Instead of replacing human artists with computers, AI-generated art can be understood as a new kind of collaboration between mind and machine, both of which contribute to the aesthetic value of the final artwork.
This seminar will bring together AI artists and philosophers to explore the significance of this new mode of art production. It will discuss the implications of AI-generated art for the definition of art, the nature of the relationship between artists and tools, the process of digital curation, and whether AI systems can be as creative as humans.
Event Speakers
- Sougwen Chung, artist and researcher
- Helena Sarin, visual artist
- Anne Spalter, digital mixed-media artist
- Katherine Thomson-Jones, Professor of Philosophy at Oberlin College
- Moderated by Raphaël Millière, Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience at Columbia University
Event Information
Free and open to the public. Registration is required via Eventbrite. Registered attendees will receive an event link shortly before the seminar begins.
This event is hosted by the Presidential Scholars in Society and Neuroscience as part of the Seminars in Society and Neuroscience series.
The Center for Science and Society makes every reasonable effort to accommodate individuals with disabilities. If you require disability accommodations to attend a Center for Science and Society event, please contact us at scienceandsociety@columbia.edu or (212) 853-1612 at least 10 days in advance of the event. For more information, please visit the campus accessibility webpage.
A prominent logician Melvin Fitting has turned 80. This hybrid conference is a special event in his honor.
Melvin Fitting was in the departments of Computer Science, Philosophy, and Mathematics at the CUNY Graduate Center and in the department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Lehman College. He is now Professor Emeritus. He has authored 11 books and over a hundred research papers with staggering citation figures. In 2012, Melvin Fitting was given the Herbrand Award by the Conference on Automated Deduction (CADE) for distinguished contributions to the field. In 2019, Professor Fitting received a Doctor Honoris Causa (an Honorary Doctorate) from the University of Bucharest.
Greetings, congratulations, photos for posting, and ZOOM link requests could be sent to Sergei Artemov by sartemov@gmail.com or sartemov@gc.cuny.edu.
Conference website https://sartemov.ws.gc.cuny.edu/fitting-at-80/
Program (the times are given in the Eastern Day Time zone EST). In-person location: CUNY Graduate Center, rm. 3310-B.
January 28, Saturday
8:00-8:45 am Arnon Avron (Tel Aviv), “Breaking the Tie: Benacerraf’s Identification Argument Revisited”
8:45-9:30 am Junhua Yu (Beijing), “Exploring Operators on Neighborhood Models”
9:30-9:45 am Break
9:45-10:30 am Sara Negri (Genoa), “Faithful Modal Embedding: From Gödel to Labelled Calculi”
10:30-11:15 am Heinrich Wansing (Bochum), “Remarks on Semantic Information and Logic. From Semantic Tetralateralism to the Pentalattice 65536_5”
11:15-11:30 am Break
11:30 am -12:15 pm Roman Kuznets (Vienna), “On Interpolation”
12:15-1:00 pm Walter Carnielli (Campinas), “Combining KX4 and S4: A logic that encompasses factive and non-factive evidence“
1:00-1:15 pm Break
1:15-2:00 pm Eduardo Barrio and Federico Pailos (Buenos Aires), “Meta-classical Non-classical Logics”
2:00-2:45 pm Graham Priest (New York), “Jaśkowski and the Jains: a Fitting Tribute”
2:45-4:00 pm Session of memories and congratulations featuring Sergei Artemov, Anil Nerode, Hiroakira Ono, Melvin Fitting, and others.