Calendar

Gordon Belot (Michigan) – Typical!, 10am
Abstract. This talk falls into three short stories. The over-arching themes are: (i) that the notion of typicality is protean; (ii) that Bayesian technology is both more and less rigid than is sometimes thought.

Simon Huttegger (Irvine LPS) – Schnorr Randomness and Lévi’s Martingale Convergence Theorem, 11:45am
Abstract. Much recent work in algorithmic randomness concerns characterizations of randomness in terms of the almost everywhere
behavior of suitably effectivized versions of functions from analysis or probability. In this talk, we take a look at Lévi’s Martingale Convergence Theorem from this perspective. Levi’s theorem is of fundamental importance to Bayesian epistemology. We note that much of Pathak, Rojas, and Simpson’s work on Schnorr randomness and the Lebesgue Differentiation Theorem in the Euclidean context carries over to Lévi’s Martingale Convergence Theorem in the Cantor space context. We discuss the methodological choices one faces in choosing the appropriate mode of effectivization and the potential bearing of these results on Schnorr’s critique of Martin-Löf. We also discuss the consequences of our result for the Bayesian model of learning.

Deborah Mayo (VA Tech) – Probing With Severity: Beyond Bayesian Probabilism and Frequentist Performance, 2:45pm
Abstract. Getting beyond today’s most pressing controversies revolving around statistical methods and irreproducible findings requires scrutinizing underlying statistical philosophies. Two main philosophies about the roles of probability in statistical inference are probabilism and performance (in the long-run). The first assumes that we need a method of assigning probabilities to hypotheses; the second assumes that the main function of statistical method is to control long-run performance. I offer a third goal: controlling and evaluating the probativeness of methods. A statistical inference, in this conception, takes the form of inferring hypotheses to the extent that they have been well or severely tested. A report of poorly tested claims must also be part of an adequate inference. I show how the “severe testing” philosophy clarifies and avoids familiar criticisms and abuses of significance tests and cognate methods (e.g., confidence intervals). Severity may be threatened in three main ways: fallacies of rejection and non-rejection, unwarranted links between statistical and substantive claims, and violations of model assumptions. I illustrate with some controversies surrounding the use of significance tests in the discovery of the Higgs particle in high energy physics.

Teddy Seidenfeld (CMU) – Radically Elementary Imprecise Probability Based on Extensive Measurement, 4:30pm
Abstract. This presentation begins with motivation for “precise” non-standard probability. Using two old challenges — involving (i) symmetry of probabilistic relevance and (ii) respect for weak dominance — I contrast the following three approaches to conditional probability given a (non-empty) “null” event and their three associated decision theories.
Approach #1 – Full Conditional Probability Distributions (Dubins, 1975) conjoined with Expected Utility.
Approach #2 – Lexicographic Probability conjoined with Lexicographic Expected Value (e.g., Blume et al., 1991)
Approach #3 – Non-standard Probability and Expected Utility based on Non-Archimedean Extensive Measurement (Narens, 1974).
The second part of the presentation discusses progress we’ve made using Approach #3 within a context of Imprecise Probability.

Games, Networks and Social Epistemology

There will be a one day meeting on Friday April 21 at the City University of New York Graduate Center at 365 Fifth Avenue, New York.

The room will be C198. Time, 10 AM to 6 PM

The theme of the meeting is to examine how social networks and influence from friends and neighbors affect the formation of opinions.

Speakers:

Zoe Christoff (Bayreuth, Germany)
Adam Elga (Princeton)
Shweta Jain (John Jay and CUNY Graduate Center))
Fenrong Liu (Tsinghua University and Stanford)
Bud Mishra (NYU)
Pavel Naumov (Vassar College)
Yunqi Xue (CUNY Grad Center)

Organizer:
Rohit Parikh (Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center)

The last two decades have seen a significant outpouring of criminal law reform efforts throughout the English-speaking world and beyond – including in the U.S., England  and Wales, Scotland, Australia, the Balkans, Georgia, Germany, Norway, Poland, and Rwanda. Despite, or possibly because of, all this activity, there has been relatively little consideration of the underlying theoretical issues that such reform raises. And there has been even less dialogue among criminal law reformers across jurisdictions. This project will seek to fill these voids by bringing together some of the leading figures in contemporary criminal law reform, as well as younger scholars and law reformers, to participate in an international workshop on the subject.

The idea of “criminal law reform,” as we conceive of it, entails not just any change to the criminal law, but rather an intentional process of revising, reordering, and reformulating a substantial area of the criminal law in some systematic way. Our interest here is not in the particular reforms one might think worthy in, say, the law of homicide in Argentina or the insanity defense in Greece. Rather, we are interested in the possibility of identifying and analyzing the kinds of general principles that underlie, or should underlie, the process of criminal law (or criminal procedure) reform across jurisdictions and subject matters.

Among the issues that we hope to see addressed are the following:

• How should a given jurisdiction determine that reform is needed? What kinds of concerns – whether arising from perceived social problems, international obligations, regime change or political revolution, structural inconsistencies and formal defects in the law, or short-term political ends – constitute appropriate justifications for reform?

• What makes for successful (or unsuccessful) criminal law or procedure reform? What are the formal attributes of good criminal law reform? Is reform best achieved in a comprehensive code, or in a more piecemeal manner? What is the proper scope of a criminal code? How does the process of criminal law reform differ depending on the part of the criminal law being considered, whether general principles or particular offenses? How accessible should criminal codes be to the general public? How should criminal law reformers deal with gaps and redundancies? How important is comprehensiveness?

• Who should be engaged in the process of law reform? What kinds of pre-legislative bodies should be created to assess needs for reform and to propose reforms, and with what kind of remit? To what kind of scrutiny, by what kind of body, should proposed reforms be subjected? How should criminal law reform bodies be constituted? What relationship should they have to legislatures, courts, prosecutors, and other constituencies?

Different jurisdictions approach criminal law reform in different ways: Some use  government-appointed law reform bodies; others rely on private, self-appointed expert bodies. Some rely on a “civilian”-type approach to codification; others on a common law-inspired one. By drawing on the experience conference attendees might have had participating in, or observing, the process of criminal law reform in their own or other jurisdictions, we hope to be able to find what general lessons (if any) can be learned about the principles, methods, and problems of systematic criminal law  reform.

Participating in the conference will be a collection of leading authorities in criminal law reform and criminal law theory, some of whom will present papers, and others of whom will serve as commentators. Confirmed participants (so far) include Vera Bergelson, Roger Clark, Antony Duff, Lindsay Farmer, Pamela Ferguson, Stuart Green, Adil Haque, Jeremy Horder, Tatjana Hörnle, Douglas Husak, Jørn Jacobsen, Margo Kaplan, Karl Laird, Paul Robinson, Alec Walen, and Gideon Yaffe.

Submission of abstracts and papers

Our aim is to feature a total of twelve short papers of approximately 5,000 words each. Approximately half of these will come from invited participants. The other half will come from this Call for Papers.

Interested parties are invited to submit an abstract of approximately 500 words describing the paper they would like to write and have discussed at the conference, along with a CV. Abstracts and CVs are due by May 15, 2016, and should be sent, in Word or PDF format, to Ms. Mimi Moore (mmoore@kinoy.rutgers.edu).

Applicants will be advised by June 30, 2016 whether their abstract has been accepted.

Successful applicants will then have until February 15, 2017 to submit a full, original draft of approximately 5,000 words. We hope you will consider publishing your contribution in a book of journal symposium that would come out of the conference, though you would not be obligated to do so, and we will not decide what the next steps in the process should be until we have had a chance to confer with attendees and to work out how the project can best be developed.

Each draft will have a commentator assigned to it. Workshop attendees will be expected to read the drafts in advance.

We invite submissions from both younger and older scholars and law reformers from diverse backgrounds and with diverse perspectives on, and experience, in the field.

Funding

We have secured initial funding sufficient to pay hotel and other local costs for all  participants whose papers are selected. We hope that participants will be able to find their own funding for travel, but we will do what we can to help with the travel costs of those who cannot find funding themselves.

Stuart Green (Rutgers Law) – sgreen@kinoy.rutgers.edu
Alec Walen (Rutgers Law and Philosophy) — awalen@law.rutgers.edu
Antony Duff (Stirling Philosophy) – r.a.duff@stir.ac.uk
Jeremy Horder (LSE Law) — J.Horder@lse.ac.uk

A one-day workshop at Fordham University, NYC, intended  to provide academic and networking opportunities for early career women working in Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy.

The workshop aims to achieve three goals: (1) to provide an opportunity for early career women working in the area to present their work and receive feedback, (2) to help foster networking opportunities with medieval philosophers working in the NYC area, and (3) to help increase the visibility of research in the area and women’s contributions to it.

Keynote speakers: Marilyn McCord Adams and Therese Scarpelli Cory.

Date: 22 April 2017

Location: Fordham University, 150 W 62nd St, New York, NY 10023

Organizers: Giorgio Pini, Zita V. Toth, Shane Wilkins.

Speakers:

Una Stojnić (NYU/Columbia)
Karen Lewis (Barnard)
Ray Buchanan (University of Texas at Austin)
Hartry Field (NYU)
Crispin Wright (NYU)
Ian Rumfitt (Oxford University)

Sponsored by the New York Institute of Philosophy

For information, contact: nyip.events@nyu.edu

Speakers: Una Stojnic, Karen Lewis, Ray Buchanan, Hartry Field, Crispin Wright, Ian Rumfitt

Location: New York University

CALL FOR PAPERS

7th Annual New York City Workshop
in Early Modern Philosophy
Fordham University
Lincoln Center Campus
12th Floor Lounge
May 13-14, 2017

Keynote Speakers:

François Duchesneau (Université de Montréal)
Christia Mercer (Columbia)
Anja Jauernig (NYU)

The workshop aims to foster exchange and collaboration among scholars, students, and anyone with an interest in Early Modern Philosophy. We welcome presentations of papers on any topic in early modern philosophy (roughly covering the period 1600-1800).

Please submit abstracts of 250-300 words to newyorkcityearlymodern@gmail.com no later than January 15, 2017.

Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus is located on the western side of Manhattan at 60th Street and Columbus Avenue, about two blocks from Columbus Circle at the southwest corner of Central Park. More details about the program, accommodation options, and other practical matters will be made available On This Website.

Conference Organizers:
Ohad Nachtomy, Bar-Ilan (ohadnachtomy@mac.com)
Reed Winegar, Fordham (bwinegar@fordham.edu)

Even though ancient philosophy and rhetoric have many overlapping interests (education, persuasion, politics, etc.), their relationship has long been a contentious subject, especially among ancient philosophers. Contemporary scholarship on the topic is equally divided: philosophers tend to approach the topic primarily through the works of Plato and Aristotle and regard rhetoric (and rhetorical compositions) as a second-rate notion/discipline which has little interest in shedding light on philosophically relevant questions about human nature and society, whereas classicists research oratorical compositions to get a better understanding of Greek prose style, historical details and context, but often shy away from philosophical questions that the texts might hint at. This workshop aims to bring together scholars working on ancient rhetoric and argumentative techniques on the one hand, and scholars working on ancient philosophy, on the other in order to open up a space for a constructive engagement with philosophy/rhetoric, one which might enrich our understanding of ancient texts as well as the context in which they were produced.

Confirmed speakers: Jamie Dow (Leeds), Richard Hunter (Cambridge), Joel Mann (St Norbert), Jessica Moss (NYU), Usha Nathan (Columbia), James Porter (Berkeley), Edward Schiappa (MIT), Nancy Worman (Barnard). All papers will be followed by a response and general discussion.

Attending the workshop is free, but in order to have an idea of numbers it would be greatly appreciated if those interested in participating in the event would email the organizers, Laura Viidebaum and Toomas Lott.

This Workshop is generously sponsored by the Department of Philosophy (NYU), Department of Classics (NYU) and NYU Center for Ancient Studies.

The aim of this conference is to bring scholars from numerous disciplines into conversation across the historical timeline. Just as freedom and liberty are slippery concepts, so are ideas of debt, value, and payment. But rather than simply viewing these terms as rhetorical devices that make freedom seem worthwhile, we deploy debt, value,and payment as analytical tools for understanding how freedom works – while also keeping in mind that these are concepts that themselves demand investigation. These ideas unite the discourses of freedom and liberty, from ethical and economic discourses, which describe freedom as either physical labor or a mental activity, as well as the language of religion and science. Often our innumerable ways of assessing value bleed one into another, especially in conversations regarding individual and shared liberties.

By explicitly juxtaposing the different methodologies used in asking “what does freedom cost?” from Greco-Roman antiquity to the present, we hope to explore overlapping areas of research and help expand the existing conversations in each discipline. In addition to providing vocabularies, practices and theories of freedom that we still use today, Ancient Greece and Rome provide many examples of peoples who lacked freedom but strove to obtain it, including slaves, women and conquered peoples. By simultaneously examining the Greco-Roman antiquity and modernity, we bring to light recurrent historical patterns of the costs that people have and continue pay for freedom.

We will be offering a minimum of six bursaries of up to 500 dollars to be awarded on the basis of greatest need, taking into account access to institutional funding and the distance of the conference from the participant’s home institution.

31 October 2016 is the deadline for the submission of abstracts. Please include the following as separate files:  (1) title, abstract of 300-500 words, a one page bibliography (no self identifying information please!); (2) your name, title of your proposed talk, institutional affiliation, short academic bio, and an indication of whether you’d like to be consider for a bursary, a budget for the amount requested, and any information we should take into consideration when making our bursary allocations.

Margaret Atherton
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

William Bristow
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Michael Friedman
Stanford University

James Kreines
Claremont McKenna College

Samantha Matherne
University of California, Santa Cruz

Kris McDaniel
Syracuse University

Ian Proops
University of Texas, Austin

Sam Rickless
University of California, San Diego

Dorothy Rogers
Montclair State University

Eric Watkins
University of California, San Diego

Organisers:

Don Garrett
New York University

Anja Jauernig
New York University

Béatrice Longuenesse
New York University

John Richardson
New York University