The North American Society for Early Phenomenology
in conjunction with
The Max Scheler Society of North America
Presents
Feeling, Valuing, and Judging: Phenomenological Investigations in Axiology
May 19th-21st, 2016
St. John’s University – Manhattan Campus
Invited Speakers
- Anthony Steinbock (Southern Illinois University – Carbondale)
- John Drummond (Fordham University)
- James Dodd (New School for Social Research)
Call for Abstracts
Feelings, values, and judgements all played central roles in the philosophical writings of the early phenomenologists – from their discussions of formalism in ethics, to social ontology, the phenomenology of moods and emotions, and even the phenomenology of religion. Though heavily inspired by the work of Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler and the Munich phenomenologists conceived phenomenology as less a method and more an attitude, and developed their phenomenological investigations accordingly. With the phenomenological attitude, the meaning of the object of cognition is revealed. Doxic, volitional, and affective intentional attitudes gives rise to phenomenological descriptions of the world in terms of its meaning and value. Understood in this way, the early phenomenologists saw questions of value as arising alongside questions of ontology.
The theme of this conference will be phenomenological studies in axiology (ethics and aesthetics), and will look at the relationship of intuition, the emotions, and intersubjectivity to acts of feeling, valuing, and judging. Topics include phenomenological theories of valuation, the departure of later phenomenologists from Husserl’s and Brentano’s distinctions of types of mental phenomena, axiological properties of intentional objects, the self as a member of a community, sympathy and empathy, criteria for correct and incorrect value judgments, the difference between axiological and ontic characteristics and fact-value differentiation, axiology in universals and particulars, judgments of value and the role of implicit beliefs, phenomenological descriptions of striving, volition, emotions, moods, the beautiful and the sublime, etc. We encourage papers on the work of Franz Brentano, Edmund Husserl, Theodor Lipps, Max Scheler, Alexander Pfänder, Moritz Geiger, Josef Geyser, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Siegfried Hamburger, Nicolai Hartmann, Waldemar Conrad, Aurel Kolnai, Roman Ingarden, Edith Stein, Emmanuel Levinas, Hans Reiner, and others. We are also interested in papers proposing original phenomenological descriptions of emotions, feelings, volition, and judgments that follow the phenomenological tradition, and build upon these historical antecedents in new and interesting ways.
Abstracts should be 500-700 words, and include a short bibliography of primary and secondary sources. All abstracts must be prepared for blind review and sent via email in .doc or .docx format to Dr. Rodney Parker at: (rodney.k.b.parker@gmail.com).
Both senior researchers and graduate students are encouraged to submit.
Deadline for submissions is: December 15, 2015.
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http://philevents.org/event/show/18534
The Max Scheler Society of North America (MSSNA) invites members of the international community of scholars to participate in their biannual meeting, which will be held at St. John’s University, Manhattan Campus. The 2016 meeting will take place in conjunction with the North American Society for Early Phenomenology (NASEP), with sessions from each society running concurrently.
Broadly conceived, the general theme of the meeting is the phenomenology of value or axiology. The MSSNA is particularly interested in papers examining Max Scheler’s contribution to the study of value and the relevance of his work to recent investigations. Papers examining the significance of value in Scheler’s thought are not restricted to his ethics and may concern any aspect of his work. For this meeting, the intent is to have a program that reflects the tremendous diversity of Scheler’s thought and relevance of value in human existence.
Participants will have approximately 35 minutes to present their work. Though completed papers are preferred, abstracts of at least 500 words in length will also be considered. Deadline for submission is December 15, 2015.
All submissions should be sent electronically to Dr. Zachary Davis (davisz@stjohns.edu). Because all submissions will be reviewed blindly by the selection committee, submissions should have a separate cover sheet with name and contact information. Notification of acceptance will be sent out by January 31.
Science, Value, and Pragmatism Graduate Conference
Organized By: Max Hayward, Robbie Kubala, Ignacio Quintana, and Professor Philip Kitcher
“Pragmatists suppose that our epistemic projects, in scientific and normative domains alike, are motivated by and assessable in terms of the aims of inquiry. Science, Value, and Pragmatism brings together philosophers whose work touches on the connections between these three topics”.
Analytic philosophy is often derided as overly esoteric, focused on matters of little consequence in day-to-day life. This is particularly directed at non-value theoretic areas: Metaphysics, Epistemology, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Mathematics, and Logic. Does any greater good result from our countless hours spent in armchairs?
This conference aims to explore the value of non-value theoretic areas of philosophy. Questions to address include, but are not limited to:
What value does [any area of] non-value theoretic philosophy have, if any? What is it for work to have value? Can we use non-value theoretic philosophy to effect political change, and if so, how? How do we get analytic philosophy out of the conference room and into the real world? Do we need to? Has non-value theoretic philosophy brought significant change to humanity in the past? Does academic work need to be socially relevant to be valuable? What would solving any of the greatest and longest-standing problems in the history of philosophy do for humanity? Is the result significant enough to justify all of the time we devote?
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
· All submissions must be prepared for blind review, with no identifying information (name, affiliated institution, etc.).
· Submitted abstracts must be between 500 – 1000 words in length.
· Submitted abstracts must be received as .doc, .docx, or .pdf files.
· Submission deadline: February 1, 2017.
· Submit to: CUNYGradConf@gmail.com
· Accepted papers will be announced by the end of February 2017.
Philosophers have employed two different varieties of felt necessity to explain central aspects of agency in addiction and love, respectively. In the case of addiction, the relevant felt need is often described in terms of an appetite, whereas love is characterized by necessities arising from a particular kind of caring. On Dr. Wonderly’s view, the extant literature offers an instructive, but incomplete picture of the roles of felt necessity in addiction and love. Dr. Wonderly argues that a third form of felt necessity – attachment necessity – often better captures central aspects of agency in love and addiction. Recognizing the role of attachment necessity will not only illuminate how felt necessity can impact the value of certain relationships, but it will also allow us to discern important features of addiction and love that remain obscured on extant approaches.
Monique Wonderly is the Harold T. Shapiro Postdoctoral Research Associate in Bioethics. She is primarily interested in puzzles at the intersection of ethics and the nature of emotions. She has published in the areas of applied ethics, philosophy of emotion, and history of philosophy. Her current research focuses on emotional attachment – and in particular, on questions concerning moral agency and ethical treatment that arise when considering certain attachment-related pathologies, including psychopathy and (some forms of) addiction. For more, visit here.
Reception to follow.
Keynote speakers:
The Speculative Ethics Forum is a one day workshop-style event in which we’ll consider the most challenging matters of ethics. Ethical approaches of all sorts are welcomed–analytic, continental, ancient, medieval, Asian, and so on. Most papers are invited. However, there are two slots open for submissions. Any paper in ethical theory will be considered for acceptance. Bold and speculative inquiries are preferred to papers that primarily defend ground already gained or papers that are primarily scholarly. Our aim, in short, is to have a single day concentrated on expanding the horizons of ethics.
Our Invited Speakers Are:
Katja Vogt (Columbia University)
James Dodd (New School for Social Research)
Leo Zaibert (Union College)
Justin Clarke-Doane (Columbia University)
Organisers:
Register
November 17, 2017, 11:45pm EST
speculative.ethics.forum [at the host] gmail.com
The paper draws on the first sentence of Nicomachean Ethics I, but goes beyond interpretation in putting forward a new version of the Guise of the Good (GG). This proposal is Aristotelian in spirit, but defended on philosophical grounds. GG theorists tend to see their views as broadly speaking Aristotelian. And yet they address particular actions in isolation: agents, the thought goes, are motivated to perform a given action by seeing the action or its outcome as good. The paper argues that the GG is most compelling if we distinguish between three levels: the motivation of small-scale actions, the motivation of mid-scale actions or pursuits, and the desire to have one’s life go well. The paper analyzes the relation between small-, mid-, and large-scale motivation in terms of Guidance, Substance, and Motivational Dependence. In its Aristotelian version, the argument continues, the GG belongs to the theory of the human good.
Katja Maria Vogt, Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. She specializes in ancient philosophy, ethics, and normative epistemology. In her books and papers, she focuses on questions that figure both in ancient and in contemporary discussions: What are values? What kind of values are knowledge and truth? What does it mean to want one’s life to go well?
Presented by The New School for Social Research (NSSR) Philosophy Department.
The paper argues that Spinoza is influenced by epicureanism. This is evident particularly in the conflict between authority—understood as the kind of figure that is impervious to argumentation—and the calculation of utility (phronesis) that is the precondition of action. This conflict is complex because in certain circumstances we may calculate that it is to our utility to allow a person in authority to calculate on our behalf.
The paper indicates, in addition, that the way Spinoza constructs the relation between authority and utility can inform our political predicament today. Spinoza may offer an alternative to populism as to why we have political figures who lack authority. And his thinking on utility could help us reconsider instrumentality in the neoliberal age.
Dimitris Vardoulakis is the debuty chair of Philosophy at Western Sydney University. He is the author of The Doppelgänger: Literature’s Philosophy (2010), Sovereignty and its Other: Toward the Dejustification of Violence (2013), Freedom from the Free Will: On Kafka’s Laughter (2016), and Stasis Before the State: Nine Theses on Agonistic Democracy (2018). He has also edited or co-edited numerous books, including Spinoza Now (2011) and Spinoza’s Authority (2018). He is the director of “Thinking Out Loud: The Sydney Lectures in Philosophy and Society,” and the co-editor of the book series “Incitements” (Edinburgh University Press).
The theme of our conference, “Thinking and Living the Good Life,” asks participants to think upon what it means to live well in contemporary society, how we can know the right or best way to live, and the role of thought in the enterprise of human life. Evocative of ancient theories of virtue, the theme of the good life also bears on prominent areas of discussion in contemporary political philosophy, epistemology, and metaphysics. Papers topics may include, but are not limited to: the relationship between political structures and the shared goal of realizing a common good; the complexities that arise in trying to achieve knowledge of the good; and the nature of the good in and of itself. Our conference aims to bring together graduate students that work in different areas in order to think through this singular theme of the good life and to search for commonalities and intersections amongst a broad array of approaches.
Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be submitted to fordhamredstarline@gmail.com by December 20, 2018. Authors of selected papers will be notified by January 10, 2019.
Keynote speakers:
Organisers:
Well-being, also known as prudential value, refers to whatever makes a life non-instrumentally good for the person living it. Well-being is the object of immense practical, philosophical, and scientific concern. Assessments of well-being help to guide our decisions in everyday life, from relationships, to health decisions, to education and career choices. Well-being is increasingly the object of governmental and institutional policy, and even policies that are not aimed directly at promoting it can be evaluated in terms of their impacts on well-being. Colleges and universities routinely offer programs designed to help students maintain their well-being in the face of academic and personal stress. However, debates over the nature of well-being have raged since the beginning of philosophical inquiry, leaving us in a bad position when it comes to making headway on addressing those practical and scientific concerns. The goal of this talk is to show how the application of naturalistic methodology can help us to resolve the philosophical stalemate and thus to make progress in our practical and scientific projects relating to well-being.
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Talk link — Email cruzdavis <at> umass.edu or jrc2266 <at> columbia.edu for the passcode