The New York German Idealism Workshop is happy to announce our fall conference: A Symposium on Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right.
In conjunction with Cambridge University Press, we have invited several speakers to work through this sometimes overlooked masterpiece of German Idealism.
Our speakers include: Angelica Nuzzo (City University of New York), Frederick Neuhouser (Barnard College and Columbia University), James A. Clarke (The University of York), Paul Franks (Yale University), Gabriel Gottlieb (Xavier University), Michelle Kosch (Cornell University), Wayne Martin (University of Essex), Dean Moyar (Johns Hopkins University), Michael Nance (University of Maryland Baltimore County), John Russon (University of Guelph), Jean-Christophe Merle (Universität Vechta).
We invite you to join us from October 2nd to the 4th for what looks to be a provocative event. If you plan to attend the workshop, and would like to receive the papers prior to the conference, then feel free to email NYGIW.
Ross Poole (Adjunct Professor of Political Science and Philosophy, NSSR), will give a lecture entitled “Recovering the Human in Human Rights”
From the abstract:
“In this paper, I defend the old-fashioned idea that humans have rights in virtue of being human. I suggest that this claim requires, not a metaphysical and certainly not a religious conception of human nature, but rather an ethical understanding of what it is to be human amongst other humans. However, this ethical understanding is inadequate on its own. It requires a legal and political form: that of a right attributed to each and every human.”
Abstract || Traditionally privacy is valued for protecting individual freedom and autonomy. Such concepts of privacy and the underlying idea of autonomy have drawn criticism from various quarters. Feminist thinkers and critical theorists have advanced such criticism on normative grounds. In the recent years, they have been joined by arguments on a pragmatic level, which show that such concepts of privacy no longer can orient life in a world permeated with new threats to privacy, in particular due to the development of information technology. In consequence, many theories have reconstructed concepts privacy in light of this criticism, often by invoking more relational concepts of autonomy. The talk proposes a different approach. Using a more socially situated concept of the subject, which is derived from Hannah Arendt’s thought, it shows that privacy plays a more fundamental value for the constitution of subjectivity, beyond autonomy.
Presented by The New School for Social Research
Tobias Matzner works in political philosophy and philosophy of technology. He is a visiting scholar at the Department of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research, and a member of the International Centre for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities in Tübingen, Germany.