Talks hosted by Ryan McElhaney
To get Zoom links, email davidrosenthal1@gmail.com
Some—but not all—sessions are recorded for later access
2/3: Justin Sytsma
Philosophy, Victoria University of Wellington
2/10: Jonathan Birch
Philosophy, London School of Economics
2/17: No talk—one-week break
2/24: Miguel Ángel Sebastián
Philosophy, National Autonomous University of Mexico
3/3: Claudia Passos Ferreira
Philosophy, New York University
** HYBRID: Graduate Center Room 7102 **
3/10: Jonathan Morgan
Philosophy, Montclair State University
** HYBRID: Graduate Center Room 7102 **
3/17: Derek Brown
Philosophy, University of Glasgow
3/24: Robert Kentridge
Psychology and Centre for Vision and Visual Cognition, University of Durham
** HYBRID: Graduate Center Room 7102 **
3/31: Josh Weisberg
Philosophy, University of Houston
** HYBRID: Room TBA **
4/7, 4/14: Spring break—no talks
4/21: Michal Polák
Philosophy, University of West Bohemia
The CUNY Cognitive Science Speaker Series meets weekly at the CUNY Graduate Center,
Fridays, 1-3 pm—all on Zoom, some hybrid. This file is at: http://bit.ly/cs-talks
For additional information e-mail David Rosenthal <davidrosenthal1@gmail.com>
We’re a community of philosophers of language centered in New York City. We have a meeting each week at which a speaker presents a piece of their own work relating to the philosophy of language.
During Spring 2023, we will meet on Mondays, 6-8pm in room 202 of the NYU Philosophy Building, at 5 Washington Place. Anyone with an interest in philosophy of language is welcome.
February 6
Ailís Cournane (NYU)
February 13
Bianca Cepollaro (University Vita-Salute San Raffaele)
February 27
Janek Guerrini (Institut Jean Nicod, ENS)
March 6
Dan Hoek (Virginia Tech)
March 20
Matt Moss (Vassar)
March 27
Will Merrill (NYU)
April 3
Devin Morse (Columbia)
April 10
Florian Schwarz (Penn)
April 17
Andrea Iacona (Turin)
April 24
Tyler Knowlton (Penn)
May 1
Andy Egan (Rutgers)
May 8
Prerna Nadathur (OSU)
RSVP: If you don’t have an NYU ID, and if you haven’t RSVPed for a workshop yet during this academic year, please RSVP no later than 10am on the day of the talk by emailing your name, email address, and phone number to Jack Mikuszewski at jhm378@nyu.edu no later than 10am on the morning of the talk. This is required by NYU in order to access the building. When you arrive, please be prepared to show proof of vaccination and boosters at the request of the security guard.
Artificial intelligence (AI) promises to automate and scale solutions to perennial accessibility challenges (e.g., generating image descriptions for blind users). However, research shows that AI-bias disproportionately impacts people already marginalized based on their race, gender, or disabilities, raising questions about potential impacts in addition to AI’s promise. In this talk, Cynthia Bennett will overview broad concerns at the intersection of AI, disability, and accessibility. She will then share details about one project in this research space that led to guidance on human and AI-generated image descriptions that account for subjective and potentially sensitive descriptors around race, gender, and disability of people in images.
In better times, this talk may have been given as a detailed account of the practices and side stories that had been part of the just published anthology titled Tolstoy as Philosopher (2022), a result of a quarter-century work on Tolstoy’s manuscripts and research at international archives. The finished book can be abstracted as follows.
Beginning with Tolstoy’s first extant records of his written œuvre, the anthology assembles seventy-seven unabridged texts that cover more than seven decades of his life, from 1835 to 1910. It constitutes the most complete single-volume edition to date of the rich variety of Tolstoy’s philosophical output: apothegmatic sayings, visions, intimate sketchbook and day notes, book reviews, open letters, dialogues, pedagogic talks, public lectures, programs and rules for personal behavior, fictions, and reminiscences.
It was the insolvable, the “scandalous,” problems of philosophy that never gave Tolstoy any rest: freedom of the will, religious tolerance, gender inequality, the tonal shape of music, the value of healthy life habits, the responsibilities of teaching, forms of social protest, cognitive development, science in society, the relation between body and mind, charity and labor, human dignity and public service, sexual psychology, national war doctrines, suicide, individual sacrifice, the purposes of making art. And always: What are the sources of violence? Why should we engage in politics? Why do we need governments? How can one practice non-violence? What is the meaning of our irrepressible desire to seek and find meaning? Why can’t we live without loving? The typeset proofs of his final insights were brought to Tolstoy for approval when he was already on his deathbed. No matter their brevity or the occasion on which they were written, these works exemplify Tolstoy as an artistically inventive and intellectually absorbing thinker.
Most of the newly translated and thoroughly annotated texts have never been available in English. Among the notable archival restorations is the text titled “Tolstoy on Venezuela,” an authentic first publication in English of “Patriotism, or Peace?” (1896) that had been personally checked by Tolstoy and deemed lost. In the inaugural piece, a seven-year-old Tolstoy describes violent but natural animal life in contrast with the lazy life of a peaceful barnyard in the countryside. The last entry in the anthology written by an eighty-year-old Tolstoy for his grandchildren provides a lesson on vegetarianism and non-violence that a hungry wolf teaches a hungry boy during their conversation when both are on their way to lunch.
The anthology was being copyedited when Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022. After having provided the necessary grounding for Tolstoy’s place within the Russian philosophical tradition and explaining his overall reception and standing, the speaker will comment on the implications of this unfolding historic tragedy for the current moment and the future, in order to then open the floor for general discussion.
About the speaker:
Inessa Medzhibovskaya has taught at The New School since 2004. She is an intellectual historian, philologist, specialist in international education, and a literary scholar by training and is currently Professor of Liberal Studies and Literature at The New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College. Her publications include numerous essays and chapters that focus on Russia, Central and Eastern Europe, as well as nine previously published books: Tolstoy’s On Life (from the Archival History of Russian Philosophy), 2019 and Tolstoy and the Religious Culture of His Time (paperback 2009); and an online bibliography of Tolstoy’s publications and Tolstoy criticism in the Oxford University Press Bibliographies series (2021). She is the editor of the critical edition of Tolstoy’s On Life, co-translated with Michael Denner (2018), and editor of two more volumes: Tolstoy and His Problems: Views from the Twenty-First Century (2018), and A Critical Guide to Tolstoy’s On Life: Interpretive Essays (2019). She also served as the academic advisor for volumes 267 and 289AC of Short Story Criticism from Gale/Cengage (2019, 2020). Her Tolstoy as Philosopher was released on October 25, 2022. She is currently completing a long book project solicited by Princeton University Press.
For further information, see this link.
Talks hosted by Ryan McElhaney
To get Zoom links, email davidrosenthal1@gmail.com
Some—but not all—sessions are recorded for later access
2/3: Justin Sytsma
Philosophy, Victoria University of Wellington
2/10: Jonathan Birch
Philosophy, London School of Economics
2/17: No talk—one-week break
2/24: Miguel Ángel Sebastián
Philosophy, National Autonomous University of Mexico
3/3: Claudia Passos Ferreira
Philosophy, New York University
** HYBRID: Graduate Center Room 7102 **
3/10: Jonathan Morgan
Philosophy, Montclair State University
** HYBRID: Graduate Center Room 7102 **
3/17: Derek Brown
Philosophy, University of Glasgow
3/24: Robert Kentridge
Psychology and Centre for Vision and Visual Cognition, University of Durham
** HYBRID: Graduate Center Room 7102 **
3/31: Josh Weisberg
Philosophy, University of Houston
** HYBRID: Room TBA **
4/7, 4/14: Spring break—no talks
4/21: Michal Polák
Philosophy, University of West Bohemia
The CUNY Cognitive Science Speaker Series meets weekly at the CUNY Graduate Center,
Fridays, 1-3 pm—all on Zoom, some hybrid. This file is at: http://bit.ly/cs-talks
For additional information e-mail David Rosenthal <davidrosenthal1@gmail.com>
A Feminist Mythology, Bloomsbury, 2022
A book panel with Christen Clifford (The New School), Jean-Michel Rabate’ (University of Pennsylvania), Rose Rejouis (The New School) and a response by Chiara Bottici.
A Feminist Mythology takes us on a poetic journey through the canonical myths of femininity, testing them from the point of view of our modern condition. A myth is not an object, but rather a process, one that Chiara Bottici practises by exploring different variants of the myth of “womanhood” through first- and third-person prose and poetry. We follow a series of myths that morph into each other, disclosing ways of being woman that question inherited patriarchal orders. In this metamorphic world, story-telling is not just a mix of narrative, philosophical dialogues and metaphysical theorizing: it is a current that traverses all of them by overflowing the boundaries it encounters. In doing so, A Feminist Mythology proposes an alternative writing style that recovers ancient philosophical and literary traditions from the pre-Socratic philosophers and Ovid’s Metamorphoses to the philosophical novellas and feminist experimental writings of the last century.
Our speaker on Monday, February 13th will be Bianca Cepollaro, who is a Research Fellow at the Faculty of Philosophy in University Vita-Salute San Raffaele. Bianca will give a talk called ‘(Not Necessarily Credible) Deniability’:
Dinges and Zakkou’s 2022 analyze deniability as an epistemic notion. For them, a speaker has deniability with respect to the proposition that they meant something just in case their audience does not know what they meant, possibly thanks to their denial. In this paper, we illustrate two kinds of cases that challenge their account, in order to argue that deniability cannot be so understood. The first kind of scenario shows how their epistemic understanding of deniability does not provide sufficient conditions for deniability; the second one suggests that their conditions are not necessary either. Our goal here is entirely negative: we aim to do a ground-clearing job, providing reasons why deniability cannot be understood in certain ways, and leave the articulation of an alternative proposal for future work.
We’re a community of philosophers of language centered in New York City. We have a meeting each week at which a speaker presents a piece of their own work relating to the philosophy of language.
During Spring 2023, we will meet on Mondays, 6-8pm in room 202 of the NYU Philosophy Building, at 5 Washington Place. Anyone with an interest in philosophy of language is welcome.
February 6
Ailís Cournane (NYU)
February 13
Bianca Cepollaro (University Vita-Salute San Raffaele)
February 27
Janek Guerrini (Institut Jean Nicod, ENS)
March 6
Dan Hoek (Virginia Tech)
March 20
Matt Moss (Vassar)
March 27
Will Merrill (NYU)
April 3
Devin Morse (Columbia)
April 10
Florian Schwarz (Penn)
April 17
Andrea Iacona (Turin)
April 24
Tyler Knowlton (Penn)
May 1
Andy Egan (Rutgers)
May 8
Prerna Nadathur (OSU)
RSVP: If you don’t have an NYU ID, and if you haven’t RSVPed for a workshop yet during this academic year, please RSVP no later than 10am on the day of the talk by emailing your name, email address, and phone number to Jack Mikuszewski at jhm378@nyu.edu no later than 10am on the morning of the talk. This is required by NYU in order to access the building. When you arrive, please be prepared to show proof of vaccination and boosters at the request of the security guard.
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.
Poets and singers in a number of medieval vernacular languages reached non-native audiences and inspired speakers of other languages to compose in theirs; and many imagined their compositions enjoying a universality similar to that of cosmopolitan languages like Latin and Arabic. An interesting rationalization of these aspirations can be discerned in a short verse narrative of a well-known episode in the youth of Alexander the Great, conqueror of India, together with his tutor, the philosopher Aristotle. Not only does it involve Greeks and Indians singing French songs and cosplaying French lovers, but the philosopher is induced to pretend to be a horse and then justifies his behavior as “natural,” with far-reaching implications which this talk will explore.
Sarah Kay is Professor Emerita in the Department of French Literature, Thought and Culture at New York University and Life Fellow at Girton College, University of Cambridge. In Spring 2023, she is Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the Columbia Society of Senior Scholars.
This talk is presented by the Columbia Maison Française, Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, The Society of Senior Scholars, the Department of Music, and Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
Thinking Across the Humanities on Valentines’s Day
Tuesday, Feb. 14 of course! 4pm, McShane Center 311
A fun student-faculty roundtable discussion on topics related to love in all of its fabulous variety: erotic love, unrequited love, love and justice, love of friends, love of the Divine, sanctioned and unsanctioned love, personal and political love, and so much more! What insights can we, along with some of our favorite artists and thinkers, offer on love? Come for a roundtable where a small group of faculty and students will jump off with brief prepared remarks, followed by a discussion, food, and fun!
RSVP here