Calendar

NY German Idealism Workshop Spring 2018

Johannes-Georg Schulein – March 2

Terry Pinkard – April 6

Lydia Goehr – April 20

Thomas Khurana – April 27

The Epistemology and Ethics group is composed of faculty and graduate students at Fordham and other nearby universities. Papers are read in advance, so the majority of the time is devoted to questions and discussion. If interested in attending, email dheney[at]fordham[dot]edu.

September 19th  Kate Manne (Cornell)

October 17th  Sandy Goldberg (Northwestern)

November 14th  Eden Lin (Ohio State)

February 27th  Nathan Ballantyne (Fordham)

March 20th  Sophie Horowitz (UMass, Amherst)

April 24th  Nomy Arpaly (Brown)

AY 2018 – 19 Workshop Schedule

AY 2018 – 19 Workshop Schedule

AY 2018 – 19 Workshop Schedule

Miranda Fricker is Presidential Professor of Philosophy at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research is mainly in Moral Philosophy, and Social Epistemology with a special interest in virtue and feminist perspectives. She is the author of Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing; and co-editor of a number of edited collections, the most recent of which is The Epistemic Life of Groups: Essays in the Epistemology of Collectives. She was Director of the Mind Association, which overseas the philosophy journal MIND, from 2010-2015; and currently serves as Moral Philosopher on the Spoliation Advisory Panel, a UK government body of expert advisers that considers claims concerning loss of cultural property during the Nazi era. She is an Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Philosophical Association; and a Fellow of the British Academy.

New York German Idealism Workshop

Our upcoming events for this fall (2018):

Robyn Marasco – September 28 (Columbia)
Francey Russell – October 26 (NSSR)
Samantha Matherne – November 30 (Columbia)
Allegra de Laurentiis – December 7 (NSSR)

Wilfrid Sellars (1912-1989) is well-known for his “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (EPM) in which he criticizes empiricist theories of knowledge acquisition. Empiricism, he argues there, relies on what he calls “the Myth of the Given.” The Myth of the Given is often understood as a dilemma for epistemological foundationalism. However, Sellars also remarks that not even Kant and Hegel (“that great foe of immediacy” EPM §1) were entirely free of “the entire framework of givenness”). This suggests that the Myth of the Given is not limited to the epistemological foundationalism of pre-critical dogmatic metaphysics. I shall argue (following James O’Shea) that the Myth of the Given is primarily a problem about how we should account for our cognitive awareness of the categorial structure of experience. I shall then argue that Sellars should be interpreted as arguing for a non-semantic mind-world relation, which he calls “picturing”, to explain how the Myth of the Given should be overcome.
By doing so Sellars shows how to avoid both the Given and idealism, thus overcoming a long-standing opposition within the history of philosophy since Kant. This argument is also relevant for the divide between “left-wing Sellarsians” (Rorty, McDowell, Brandom, Williams) and “right-wing Sellarsians” (Churchland, Dennett, Millikan); the left-wing Sellarsians developed the criticism of the Myth of the Given and the right-wing Sellarsians developed picturing into an account of animal cognition. On my interpretation, this divide itself is unfortunate because it leads us to overlook a fundamental coherence to Sellars’s views.

AY 2018 – 19 Workshop Schedule