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.
The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will be meeting on Mondays from 4:15 to 6:15 (NY time). Talks may be either virtual (via Zoom) or in-person (at the Graduate Center, Room 7314). The provisional schedule is as follows:
Sept 5. NO MEETING
Sep 12. Yasuo Deguchi (Kyoto)
Sep 19. Bokai Yao (Notre Dame)
Sep 26. Gabriella Pigozzi (Paris Dauphine), Louise Dupuis (Paris Dauphine), and Matteo Michelini (Eindhoven)
Oct 3. Yale Weiss (CUNY)
Oct 10. NO MEETING
Oct 17. Guillermo Badia (Queensland)
Oct 24. Friederika Moltmann (CNRS, Côte d’Azur)
Oct 31. Rohit Parikh (CUNY)
Nov 7. Victoria Gitman (CUNY)
Nov 14. Tommy Kivatinos (Auburn)
Nov 21. Marko Malink (NYU)
Nov 28. William McCarthy (Columbia)
Dec 5. Martin Pleitz (Muenster)
Dec 12. Harry Deutsch (Illinois State)
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.
Book Panel with:
Chiara Bottici (NSSR and Lang College), Judith Butler (UC Berkeley and NSSR) and Romy Opperman (NSSR and Lang College).
Abstract:
How can we be sure the oppressed do not become oppressors in their turn? How can we envisage a feminism that doesn’t turn into yet another tool for oppression? By arguing that there is no single arche explaining the oppression of women and LGBTQI+ people, Chiara Bottici proposes a radical anarchafeminist philosophy inspired by two major claims: that there is something specific to the oppression of ‘the second sexes’, and that, in order to fight that, we need to untangle all other forms of oppression and the anthropocentrism they inhabit. On the basis of a Spinozist philosophy of transindividuality, Anarchafeminism calls for a decolonial and deimperial attitude and for a renewed awareness of the somatic communism connecting all different life forms on the planet. In this revolutionary vision, feminism does not mean the liberation of the lucky few, but liberation of the planet from both capitalist exploitation and an anthropocentric politics of domination. Either the entire planet, or none of us will be free.
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.
Sponsored by the NSSR Philosophy Department & The Gender and Sexualities Studies Institute (GSSI)
The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will be meeting on Mondays from 4:15 to 6:15 (NY time). Talks may be either virtual (via Zoom) or in-person (at the Graduate Center, Room 7314). The provisional schedule is as follows:
Sept 5. NO MEETING
Sep 12. Yasuo Deguchi (Kyoto)
Sep 19. Bokai Yao (Notre Dame)
Sep 26. Gabriella Pigozzi (Paris Dauphine), Louise Dupuis (Paris Dauphine), and Matteo Michelini (Eindhoven)
Oct 3. Yale Weiss (CUNY)
Oct 10. NO MEETING
Oct 17. Guillermo Badia (Queensland)
Oct 24. Friederika Moltmann (CNRS, Côte d’Azur)
Oct 31. Rohit Parikh (CUNY)
Nov 7. Victoria Gitman (CUNY)
Nov 14. Tommy Kivatinos (Auburn)
Nov 21. Marko Malink (NYU)
Nov 28. William McCarthy (Columbia)
Dec 5. Martin Pleitz (Muenster)
Dec 12. Harry Deutsch (Illinois State)
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.
During Fall 2022, we will meet on Mondays from 5:30 until 7:30 in room 302 of NYU’s Philosophy Building, at 5 Washington Place. Our schedule of speakers is below.
RSVP Requirement: If you do not have an NYU ID, you will have to RSVP at least a week before the first workshop that you attend. You will then receive email instructions for uploading your proof of vaccination. We have made a single RSVP form where you can RSVP for all of the semester’s workshops at once, or for as many as you think you might attend. (Hopefully you will also only have to upload your proof of vaccination once, but we’re not sure.) So, if you don’t have an NYU ID, you can RSVP now!
Fall 2022 Speakers
September 19
Tal Linzen (NYU)
October 3
Natasha Korotkova (Utrecht)
October 10
Craige Roberts (OSU)
October 17
Justin Khoo (MIT)
October 24
Josh Knobe (Yale)
November 7
Sadhwi Srinivas (William & Mary)
November 14
Elmar Unnsteinsson (UC Dublin and Iceland)
November 21
Robert Stalnaker (MIT)
November 28
Jonathan Phillips (Dartmouth)
December 5
Andrés Soria Ruiz (Lisbon Nova)
December 12
Gretchen Ellefson (Southern Utah)
We are excited to announce a public talk featuring Elie During as part of French philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s 60th death anniversary. On the face of it, The Dialectic of Duration, Gaston Bachelard’s 1936 essay, is a pungent—if often unfair—criticism of the Bergsonian doctrine of time and creative evolution. The constructive side of this Anti-Bergson has received less attention: it implies a genuine poetics of time based on the intuition of the sporadic and oscillatory nature of becoming. Bachelard’s rhythmic theme is consistent with the idea of “surrationalism” introduced that same year as a formal counterpart to the surrealist experiments carried out on the fringes of conscious experience. Inspired by the explosive potential of scientific revolutions already celebrated in Le Nouvel Esprit Scientifique, the surrationalist project can be interpreted as that of a poetics of reason. André Breton believed it would “act simultaneously as a stimulant and restraining influence” (“Crisis of the Object”). Insights from the scientific investigation of time as well as poetic and musical experience will help us see how this double action is in keeping with the eruptive dynamics of imagination and reason, as much as with Bachelard’s ideal of “self-surveillance”.
Elie During is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris Ouest. His research focuses on the philosophical implications of relativity theory. His publications include an introduction to Poincaré’s philosophy of science (La Science et l’Hypothèse, 2001), an essay on the nature of time (The Future does not Exist, 2014), two critical editions of Bergson, a coedited volume on contemporary metaphysics of realism (Choses en soi, 2018, English translation forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press), and most recently a critical edition of Bachelard’s Dialectique de la durée (2021).
Organized by
Julie Beauté, Aix-Marseille Université, ADES (France)
Alexander Campolo, Durham University (UK)
Jeanne Etelain, New York University (USA)
Sam Kellogg, New York University (USA)
Alexander Miller, Ghent University (Belgium)
Pierre Schwarzer, New York University (USA)
Meg Wiessner, New York University (USA)
2022-23
- September 20 – Miguel Vatter (Deakin), “Home, Habitat, Habitability: Reflections on Planetary Politics”
- October 11 – María Pía Lara (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana), TBD
- Additional Meetings TBA