- February 2: Samuel Lebens (Rutgers)
- March 7: Eleonore Stump (SLU)
- March 8: John E. Hare (Yale)
- April 5: Jada Twedt Strabbing (Fordham)
- February 2: Samuel Lebens (Rutgers)
- March 7: Eleonore Stump (SLU)
- March 8: John E. Hare (Yale)
- April 5: Jada Twedt Strabbing (Fordham)
- February 2: Samuel Lebens (Rutgers)
- March 7: Eleonore Stump (SLU)
- March 8: John E. Hare (Yale)
- April 5: Jada Twedt Strabbing (Fordham)
This Essentialism Which is Not One
Topic areas
- Continental Philosophy
- Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality
- Social and Political Philosophy
Details
Taking its title from Naomi Schor’s text with the same name, this conference reformulates the question that Schor posed 20 years ago concerning feminist debates around the writing of Luce Irigaray: is essentialism in contemporary critical thought still anathema? How can we think about essentialism today alongside and across different disciplines that might both nourish and contest one-another such as philosophy, feminist thought, queer theory, critical race studies, and biology? Have past outright rejections of essentialism undercut political agendas, by denying shared connections that might motivate collectivity? What can we say about essentialist, anti-essentialist, and more contemporary anti-anti-essentialist (or strategic essentialist) stances?
The 2016 Philosophy Graduate Student Conference at The New School for Social Research seeks to explore these questions, and we invite all of you to engage with us in thinking about them. We welcome non-traditional presentations, including works of arts or creative writing as well as traditional philosophical papers. Papers should be roughly 3000 words. Performances should be no more than 20 minutes in length. Any accommodations you may need must be specified in your submission.
Potential topics include considerations of essentialism with respect to: social constructivism, gender/sexuality, nature/animals, race, trans feminisms, femininity, identity, technology, disability, queer theory, revolution/political transformations. Please send all submissions formatted for blind review to essentialism2016@gmail.com on or before December 1.
We look forward to hearing from you!
Lydia Goehr, Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University gives a lecture entitled:
“Moses and the Monochrome. Thought Experiments in the Art and Theology of Modernism”
About the speaker:
Lydia Goehr is a Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. She teaches courses in the history of aesthetic theory, the contemporary philosophy of the arts, critical theory, and the philosophy of history. Her research interests are in German aesthetic theory and in particular in the relationship between philosophy, politics, history, and music. With Gregg Horowitz, she is series editor of Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts, Columbia University Press. She also leads the Faculty-Students Aesthetics Group which meets weekly during the semester and welcomes students and faculty from many disciplines, from Columbia and the New York area.
Goehr is the author of The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music(1992; second edition with a new essay, 2007, with translations in Greek and Chinese); The Quest for Voice: Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy[essays on Richard Wagner] (1998); Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory [essays on Adorno and Danto] (2008), and co-editor with Daniel Herwitz of The Don Giovanni Moment. Essays on the legacy of an Opera (2006). She has written many articles on the work of Theodor W. Adorno, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Arthur Danto (see below for publications list). Her current book is titled Red Sea – Red Square. Bohemian Tales of Wit and Melancholy. She is co-editor with Jonathan Gilmoreof Handbook on Arthur C. Danto, contracted with Wiley-Blackwell.
In 2009/2010 she received a Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award, in 2007/8 The Graduate Student Advisory Council (GSAC)’s Faculty Mentoring Award (FMA), and in 2005, a Columbia University Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching.
Sponsored by the Department of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research.
“Secularism and Its Discontents”
The New School for Social Research
16th Annual Philosophy Graduate Student Conference
Keynote Speaker: Gil Anidjar (Columbia)
Keynote Roundtable Featuring: Simon Critchley (The New School) and others TBA
With the increased social secularization in the West, philosophy, politics, and religion have become strange bedfellows. This emphasis on secularization has sparked controversies concerning the role of religion in the political sphere that have taken the form of lawsuits against forced funding of birth control, liberal democratic states outlawing hijabs, and increased focus on religious extremism as a way to define marginalized social classes. Unfortunately, in many liberal rationalizations of the political sphere there is a failure to give accounts of contemporary and historical forms of theology and specifically secularism. Questions are then raised: have politics and religion been separated by secular movements and relegated to their own jargons, ideas, and concepts, or are they both necessary to give fuller accounts of the interplays between them? With new arguments forming both in support of increased space for religion in politics and also in support of the complete separation of religion and politics under the guise of secularization – and both in the name of“freedom,” “equality,” and “rights” – one is forced to ask a fundamental question: what is the role of religion in politics? And what are the political, theological, and philosophical ramifications of this role? From ancient thought to contemporary philosophy, issues of transcendence, absence, silence, resistance, and action have been raised as theological questions within the realm of the political. However, the extent to which religion and politics intersect in the contemporary world has become increasingly contentious in terms of religious expression and secular movements.
From political theology to radical orthodoxy to studies on political myth, the meaning of the relation between the sacred and the secular has yet to secure a consistently meaningful definition despite an increased popular rhetoric among various camps in the secularism debates. As such, the question of the influence that politics and religion have on one another is of significant import. This question holds major sway in any debate concerning the possibility of and warrant for a secular society, and to understand secular movements, one must first understand the contemporary and historical connections between the secular and the sacred. In light of this question, the liberal answer to the problem of the role of religion in politics is seemingly simple: new age, new order, a new secular approach to the political. But is the answer really this simple? This is the question we wish to explore.
At this year’s NSSR philosophy student conference, we wish to consider the role of religion in politics and all of the tensions and consequences this role entails specifically in relation to movements toward secularization. By bringing politics, religion, and philosophy into conversation with one another, one will be able to more clearly understand the causes, consequences, and meanings of secularization. At this conference we will think both with and against theology, politics, and philosophy in order to think more deeply about the secular.
We invite the submission of papers no longer than 4000 words prepared for a 30 minute presentation. Papers should be submitted as .pdf files and formatted for blind review. Please include as a separate document a cover letter including your name, paper title, institutional affiliation, and contact information.
Submissions should be sent to secularismanditsdiscontents@gmail.com by January 21st, 2017.
Possible Paper Topics Include:
- · Political Theology
- · Radical Orthodoxy
- · Politics and the Problem of Ontotheology
- · The Lowtich-Blumenberg Debate
- · Theological Materialism
- · Political Myth
- · Politics and a Phenomenology of Religious Experience
- · Silence and the Political
- · Feminism and Religious Experience
- · Presence and Absence in the Political
- · The Politics of Religion
- · When Religion Becomes Law
- · Mystical Anarchism
- · Political Revolution and Religious Revelation
- · Liberation Theology
- · Race and Philosophy of Religion
- · The Doctrine of Religious Restraint
- · Religious Existentialism
- · Violence and Religion
- · Neoliberalism and Religion
The 2017 Departmental Faculty Lecture will be delivered by Prof. Giorgio Pini on September 12 at 4:30 pm in Flom Auditorium of the Walsh Family Library. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Todd May is Class of 1941 Memorial Professor of the Humanities at Clemson University. He is the author of fourteen books of philosophy, most recently A Fragile Life and A Significant Life, both from University of Chicago Press.
Abstract:
Ineffability is in the air these days, and has been for some time. In many areas of Continental philosophy, it is the very ethos in which thought is conducted. I argue that the realm of the normative, at least, is deeply linguistic. In contrast to the attempt of some thinkers to remove the normative from the conceptual or the linguistic, I try to show that it is central to normativity to have a linguistic reference, a reference rooted precisely in the sense of conceptual categories that so concern thinkers of the ineffable.
Presented by The New School for Social Research (NSSR) Philosophy Department.
Hegel famously charges that Spinoza’s monism involves an unacceptable elimination of all finitude and all determinacy, leaving Spinoza’s God a “shapeless abyss”. I argue that the criticism is not best understood as claiming that Spinoza specifically denies finitude and determinacy. Nor as uncharitably importing Hegel’s own view of determinacy as negation. The criticism rather rests on an interpretation of Spinoza as arguing from the principle that everything must be explicable. I defend Hegel’s interpretation, or the need of Spinoza’s case for monism for this principle. Hegel’s critical point is then that precisely this principle, used in just the ways required by the proof of monism, should also force Spinoza to eliminate all determinacy and finitude. I defend the criticism, and draw out some implications about Hegel’s own project.
James Kreines is Professor of Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College, in Claremont, California. He publishes work on Kant, Hegel, and German idealism, and the history of metaphysics, and metaphilosophy. His monograph on Hegel and his response to Kant—Reason in the World: Hegel’s Metaphysics and its Philosophical Appeal—was published in 2015 by Oxford University Press. Current projects include the relation between Kant, Hegel and Spinoza; the topic of biological teleology in Kant and Hegel, in comparison to previous views of the is topic and more recent debates; and Kant’s position on reason, critique, and things in themselves.
Presented by The New School for Social Research (NSSR) Philosophy Department.
Abstract: On the standard reading, Heidegger’s account of authenticity in Being and Time amounts to an existentialist theory of human freedom. Against this interpretation, John Haugeland reads Heidegger’s account of authenticity as a crucial feature of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology: i.e., Heidegger’s attempt to determine the meaning of being via an analysis of human beings. Haugeland’s argument is based on the notion that taking responsibility for our existence entails getting the being of entities right. Specifically, Haugeland says that our ability to choose allows us to question and test the disclosure of being through which entities are intelligible to us against the entities themselves, and he adds that taking responsibility for our existence involves transforming our disclosure of being when it fails to meet the truth test. Although I agree that Heidegger’s existentialism is a crucial feature of his fundamental ontology, I argue that the details of Haugeland’s interpretation are inconsistent. My objection is that if, as Haugeland claims, entities are only intelligible via disclosures of being, then it is incoherent for Haugeland to say that entities themselves can serve as intelligible standard against which disclosures can be truth-tested or transformed. Finally, I offer an alternative to Haugeland’s truth-based take on authenticity and cultural transformation via an ends-based onto-methodological interpretation of Heidegger and Kuhn. Here I argue that the ends pursed by a specific community determine both the meaning of being and the movement of human history.
Bio: Aaron James Wendland completed his PhD at Somerville College, Oxford and he is currently Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the HSE’s Center for Advanced Studies in Moscow. Aaron is the co-editor of Wittgenstein and Heidegger (Routledge, 2013) and Heidegger on Technology (Routledge, 2018), and he has written scholarly articles on Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, and Kuhn. Aaron has also published several pieces of popular philosophy in The New York Times, Public Seminar, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He currents serves as an art critic for The Moscow Times and Dialogue of Arts. And as of January 2019, Aaron will be the Director of the Center for Philosophy and Visual Arts at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art.