Our world is changing. Rising seas, spiking temperatures, and extreme weather imperil global infrastructure, crops, and water supplies. Our greatest enemy, it turns out, is ourselves. The warmer, wetter, more chaotic world we now live in—the Anthropocene—demands an intensive rethinking of the project of our species-being.
Might the various traditions of critical theory be a resource for thinking the Anthropocene? This is the topic that Roy Scranton, Stephanie Wakefield and McKenzie Wark will attempt to broach in this event.
Author, journalist, Iraq war veteran, and Princeton Ph.D candidate, Roy Scranton‘s journalism, essays, and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Boston Review, Contemporary Literature, and elsewhere. His book, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene has just been published by City Lights.
Stephanie Wakefield is co-founder of Woodbine, in Ridgewood, Queens, and a geographer at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is currently finishing a book on oysters and the ‘becoming infrastructure of nature/becoming nature of infrastructure,’ and teaching Urban Environmental Studies at Queens College.
McKenzie Wark is the author, most recently, of Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (Verso Books), and teaches in Liberal Studies at the New School for Social Research
This event is sponsored by The New School for Social Research.
This symposium is conceived and designed to explore Nietzsche’s ideas on science and technology. While critiquing modern science and its foundation in Greek thought, Nietzsche envisions a new way of ‘knowing’ and doing science, which can be found in such notions as ‘gay science.’ Notions such as the will to power and eternal recurrence have been developed partly in response to contemporary science. Some of the proposed topics to explore are: Socratic rationality, modern science and objectivity, Nietzsche’s study of sciences in his own times, intuitive thinking vs. abstract thinking, art vs. science, cognitive knowing vs. knowing in general (Erkennen vs. Wissen), Nietzsche on mostly scientific schools of philosophy such as atomism, materialism and positivism, Nietzsche’s influence on science and scientists, and gai saber as a new way of knowing.
Call for Papers: See details here (30 September deadline)
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When
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Saturday, November 7, 2015, 2:00-6:00 PM |
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Where
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Babbio Center, Room 122 Stevens Institute of Technology Hoboken, New Jersey |
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RSVP
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Registration and further info: Please contact by sending an email to Luke Trusso at trussol@nietzschecircle.com |
Theorizing the Web 2015
April 15–16 in New York City
Venue: the Museum of the Moving Image, in Queens
Abstract submission deadline: 11:59 pm (EST), January 24, 2016
Theorizing the Web is an annual event featuring critical, conceptual discussions about technology and society. We began in 2011 to advance a different kind of conversation about the Web, one which recognizes that to theorize technology is also to theorize the self and the social world. Given that technology is inseparable from society, the ideas and approaches that have historically been used to describe social reality must not be abandoned. Instead, these historical approaches must be applied, reworked, and reassessed in light of the developing digitization of social life.
We are now seeking presentations for our sixth annual event, which will take place on April 15 and 16 at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City. We invite submissions that engage with issues of social power, inequality, vulnerability, and justice from a diverse range of perspectives. Theorizing the Web is not an event just for academics or “tech” thinkers: activists, journalists, technologists, writers, artists, and folks who don’t identify as any of the above are all encouraged to submit a presentation abstract.
We are looking for abstracts that feature clear conceptual arguments and that avoid jargon in favor of more broadly accessible critical insight. Submissions on any topic are welcome, but some specific topics we’d like to address this year include:
- moving images, gifs, video, live streaming, copcams
- social photography, filters, selfies, posing
- race, racism, race posturing, ethnicity, #BlackLivesMatter
- sex, gender, feminism, queer and trans* politics
- sexuality, sexting, sex work, consent
- mental health, illness, neurodiversity
- (dis)ability and ableism
- non-Western Web(s), language barriers, hegemony, globalization
- social movements, protest, revolution, social control, censorship
- hate, harassment, intimidation, trolling, bullying, resistance
- pain, sickness, loss, death and dying
- parenting, birth, life course
- bodies, cyborgs, wearables, trans/post-humanism, bots
- the self, identity, subjectivity, (in)authenticity, impression management
- privacy, publicity, surveillance
- encryption, anonymity, pseudonymity
- presence, proximity, face-to-face, (dis)connection, loneliness
- capitalism, Silicon Valley, venture capital
- crowd funding, micro currencies, crypto currencies, blockchains
- work, labor, “gig” or “sharing” economy, “Uber for”, exploitation
- transportation, self-driving cars, drones, cities
- code, affordances, infrastructure, critical design
- knowledge, “big” data, data science, algorithms, positivism
- memes, virality, metrics, (micro-)celebrity, fame, attention, click-baiting
- underground markets, child porn, revenge porn, the extra-legal web
- fiction, literature, visual narratives, storytelling, self-publishing, fandoms
- time, (a)temporality, ephemerality, history, memory, right to forget
- games, gaming, gamification, free-to-play, fantasy sports, gambling
- elections, campaigns, presidential politics
Successful abstracts will address intersections of gender, race, class, age, sexual orientation, disability, and other forms of inequality as they pertain to any of the topics above.
Abstract submissions should be 300 to 500 words (only the first 500 words will be reviewed). Arguments should be scaled to fit 12-minute panel presentations, and titles should appeal to a general audience. Your submission should not only describe your topic and question but also summarize your thinking and your conclusions. Good abstracts will provide a specific, original argument with clear stakes. Please do not ask questions in your abstract without answering them, or state “I will make an argument about X” without making the argument.
Note that, because Theorizing the Web deeply values public engagement, we expect all TtW16 presentations to be both comprehensible and rewarding to people from outside the presenter’s specific areas of expertise.
Abstract submissions are due by 11:59 EST on January 24, 2016, and can be submitted through our form located at theorizingtheweb.org/submit. The TtW16 selection committee will blindly review all submissions. Space is limited, and selection is competitive. Our acceptance rate is typically 20% to 35%.
Please note that we have a separate submissions process for art and alternative-format presentations. If you would like to participate in some way that isn’t giving a spoken presentation (e.g., displaying a piece of art; giving a performance; doing something else entirely), please use this separate submission form.
Registration for Theorizing the Web remains “pay what you can,” and we ask that you donate whatever amount you deem fair or can afford (minimum $1). More information (including the registration form) can be found at theorizingtheweb.tumblr.com/2016/registration.
Stay tuned to theorizingtheweb.org for announcements about invited panels, and mail us at theorizingtheweb@gmail.com if you would like to help out with our all-volunteer event in any way.
The conference hashtag is #TtW16.
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This week will explore Robot Ethics, sound strange? Not really, when you consider how we treat ‘human’ looking robots might influence how we treat each other. Things get even more interesting when we remember that some robots will be designed to be consciousness. What that means is still to be determined, but the technology is move fast.
Instead of reading, this week we’ll list to a Podcast by Sam Harris.
Please remember to bring $3 for the Setauket Neighborhood house.
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.
New technologies increasingly mediate our interactions with each other and the institutions on which we depend. What special moral problems do these new technologies pose? Are existing moral categories and practices up to the task? For the April edition of Philosophy in the Library, three philosophers–Joanna Smolenski, Tony Doyle, and Samir Chopra–present short talks on the ethics of ongoing developments in genetic engineering, big data, and artificial intelligence, followed by a Q&A with the audience.
Part 1: Editing the Genome–How CRISPR/CAS9 is Changing the Game
Joanna Smolenski of CUNY Graduate Center discusses CRISPR technology, and how it can be used to modify both somatic cells and the germline (i.e., reproductive cells). Our talk will consider the pros and cons of such modification, as well as unique ethical challenges it could present. For instance, could we ever legitimately consent to the editing of our germlines? Ultimately, it would seem that our existing consent protocols are inadequate to ensure robust informed consent to germline editing, and so we should hold off on such interventions until we have a better understanding of their downstream impacts.
Part 2: Big Data & the Future of Privacy
Tony Doyle of Hunter College considers how big data, with its massive collection, thorough aggregation, predictive analysis, and lightning dissemination of personal information has produced previously unfathomable benefits and insights. Analysis is replacing intuition; the gut is yielding to algorithm. However, as our digital wake ripples out, big data is putting privacy on the run with unnerving inferences about our preferences, commitments, aspirations, and vulnerabilities. How we are sorted by big data’s analytics can determine the opportunities that come our way: a reasonable mortgage, a good job, or a decent apartment. Privacy matters because it promotes autonomy, that is, our ability to make choices, free of coercion or manipulation, in the light of our considered conception of the good life. But ultimately, is privacy doomed to be a lost cause?
Part 3: Artifacts & Agency
Samir Chopra of Brooklyn College considers how thinking about the agency–both moral and legal–of artifacts can be helpful in thinking about the puzzles that artificial intelligence creates for us. Thinking about agency lets us think about actions and powers and ends–the kinds of things we should be thinking of, in considering how to ‘fit’ AI into our world.
https://www.facebook.com/events/207736016496883/
There are numerous books about the philosophy of science, but relatively few focus on the philosophy of engineering. Why has the philosophy of engineering been undeveloped in contrast to science? While many engineers prefer to build new things rather than philosophize, a key explanation for the neglect of engineering is an unjustified misconception about the importance of abstract theoretical and scientific knowledge versus engineering knowledge.
The speaker will talk about his experiences in engineering and policy, to show how these philosophical ideas shape engineering, which in turn shapes the world around us. Philosophical claims about engineering date back to at least Socrates, who argued for the value of abstract, theoretical knowledge. The history of U.S. science policy based its post-World War II funding policies off of the linear model of innovation, where advances in engineering are assumed to be traceable to earlier advances in science. Historians and philosophers have shown many of these philosophical views are wrong-headed. In particular, Vincenti’s What Engineers Know and How They Know It illuminates the richness of engineering knowledge, showing that it is not merely applied science. After reviewing how these philosophical ideas manifest in the real world of engineering, the presentation will show how a better understanding of what engineers know also offers a way to better push engineering towards more ethical ends.
Zachary Pirtle recently co-chaired the 2018 Forum on Philosophy, Engineering and Technology. He has worked as an engineer to support exploration systems for human space flight, and was previously a Fulbright scholar to Mexico and a Mirzayan science and technology policy graduate fellow at the National Academy of Engineering.
Co-presented with Brooklyn Public Philosophers.
A panel discussion of Critical Theories and the Budapest School, edited by Jonathan Pickle and John Rundell.
Moderator:Dimitri Nikulin
Panelists: Andrew Arato, Richard J. Bernstein, Jonathan Pickle, and Agnes Heller
Presented by The New School for Social Research.
In Philosophy in the Library, philosophers from around the world tackle the big questions. In February, we hear from Ethan Hallerman.
None of us today can avoid reflecting on the way our thoughts and habits relate to the tools we use, but interest in how technologies reshape us is both older and broader than contemporary concerns around privacy, distraction, addiction, and isolation. For the past hundred years, scholars have investigated the historical role of everyday technologies in making new forms of experience and senses of selfhood possible, from at least as early as the invention of writing. In recent years, philosophers have considered how our understanding of agency and mental states should be revised in light of the role that the technical environment plays in our basic activities. Here, we will look at how some models of the mind illuminate the results of the philosophy of technology to clarify the relationship between technology and the self.
Ethan Hallerman is a doctoral student in philosophy at Stony Brook University. He lives in New York where he prowls the sewers at night, looking for his father.
Deutsches Haus at NYU and the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute will jointly present the conference “Political Theology Today as Critical Theory of the Contemporary: Reason, Religion, Humanism,” to be held at Deutsches Haus at NYU, from February 15-17. Reverend Eugene F. Rivers III will deliver one of the keynote speeches. For a detailed conference schedule, please click here.
Across the globe the liberal logic of capitalism and technocracy has seemingly triumphed, and with it a culture of secularism, now the dominant ideology of the liberal establishment that prefers progress to tradition, an individualized identity to a sense of shared belonging, and free choice to common purpose. As much as this regime has produced wealth, it has also generated inequality and dissatisfaction. The populist insurgency that is sweeping the West is in large part a repudiation of this secular politics, opening the space for a post-liberal political theology. A resurgence of religion is underway that marks the failure of the secularization thesis and the need for alternative cultural resources, beyond positivism, to understand the place of humanity within the cosmos. Is this our new “Great Awakening”?
Amid the crisis of rationalism, critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas have sought to rescue the project of a reasonable humanism from the twin threats of religious fundamentalism and secular naturalism. Yet Habermas’s conception of postsecularity remains residually secularist because he does not permit faith to make any substantive or critical contribution to public discussion that could undermine the primacy of formal, procedural reason. In response Pope Emeritus Benedict invoked Adorno and Horkheimer’s dialectic of enlightenment because the slogan “reason alone” leads to the dissolution of reason—to the conclusion that only will and power have any reality. The only way to avoid this outcome is to recall—so Benedict’s argument in his much-commented but poorly understood 2006 Regensburg address—that the West’s commitment to humanist reason is grounded in the classical and Christian idea that human rationality participates in the infinite reason of transcendence. Otherwise the rational is but the illusion of our own and of nature’s will to power.
The 2019 Telos Conference will discuss the role of political theology as critical theory of the contemporary: the reappearance of faith in civic life. The focus will not be on intellectual history but rather on how faith is reshaping politics and culture today.
Please note: Sessions taking place at Deutsches Haus at NYU will be open to the general public. Attendance for break-out sessions will be limited to conference participants who have registered with the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute only. Events at Deutsches Haus are free and open to the public. If you would like to attend this event, please send an email to deutscheshaus.rsvp@nyu.edu. As space at Deutsches Haus is limited, please arrive ten minutes prior to the event to ensure you get a good seat. Thank you!