Calendar

We often make our thoughts clear to ourselves in the process of putting them into words. In this lecture I introduce a new puzzle about this process—one that’s reminiscent of the famous paradox about inquiry in Plato’s Meno. The puzzle is that, on the one hand, coming to know what we’re thinking seems to require finding words that would express our thought; yet, on the other hand, finding such words seems to require already knowing what we’re thinking.

I consider and reject two possible solutions to this puzzle. The first solution denies that language contributes to our knowledge of our thoughts. The second solution denies that we have a fully formed thought that we try to articulate in the first place. The failure of these solutions points to a positive account of the role of language in the pursuit of self-knowledge, on which language mediates between two different “formats” or modes of thought. Among the broader implications of this account is a richer conception of the aims and methods of philosophy.

According to my ameliorative definition, misogyny is, roughly, the “law enforcement” branch of patriarchy, which serves to police, enforce, or restore patriarchal social order—often by visiting hostility on girls and women for perceived violations of gendered norms and expectations. As well as complementary ideologies (most notably, sexism), there is also the flipside of misogyny which deserves to be considered: the exonerating narratives and excessive sympathy of which comparatively privileged men tend to be the beneficiaries. I call the latter ‘himpathy.’

This talk departs from the main example of himpathy I discuss in my recent book, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny: that of Brock Turner, the convicted sexual assailant and then student at Stanford University. (Turner’s trial became notorious when he received disproportionate and inappropriate sympathy over his female victim from multiple sources, including the judge who found him guilty.) But, as I will argue, this turns out to be only one variety of himpathy among many. Himpathy comprises a family of emotional biases that distort our moral thought and attention in ways that not only serve to obscure, but may even plausibly cause, damaging forms of misogyny—e.g., the hostility girls and women face when they try to testify against or seek justice vis-à-vis an antecedent recipient of himpathy for his misogynistic behavior, sexual violence, and so on. The talk will close by exploring some implications of this claim about moral/social psychology for the future of the #MeToo movement.

Apology constitutes an essential part of the hard work of being an imperfect moral agent, over time and amongst others.  Apology is one component of our “reparative responsibilities” (Bell 2012), of responding well to one’s past wrongdoing, and is more broadly part of the ongoing effort to come to terms with what one’s deeds will mean for one’s life (Williams 69).  So how is this work achieved?   In this paper I argue that the basic structure of apology is more puzzling, because more paradoxical, than has been recognized.  I argue that in apologizing one must at once identify with one’s wrong action, in order to take moral responsibility for it, and at the same time dis-identify with it, in order to morally reject it.  That is, I must at once own and disown what I did.  While the paradox of forgiveness has been widely discussed, the paradoxicality of apology has been almost entirely overlooked. I end the paper by proposing that the paradox need not undermine the practice; rather, there is, I suggest, an internal connection between apology’s very instability and the possibility of moral change.

PhD student Mariam Matar will respond.

Presented by the NYC Wittgenstein Workshop

NSSR Philosophy Speaker Series Presents:

“ETHICS, ANTHROPOLOGY, AND WORDS NOT AT HOME”

Veena Das in Conversation with Alice Crary.

April 12, 2018

6:00-8:00 PM 

6 East 16th Street Room D1009

CO-SPONSORED BY:

Gender and Sexuality Studies

Minorities and Philosophy

NYC Wittgenstein Workshop

A roundtable based on Sharing Common Ground (Bloomsbury, 2017)

ROBERT HARVEY
Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, Stony Brook University; author of Witnessness: Beckett, Levi, Dante and the Foundations of Ethics; Les Écrits de Marguerite Duras; De l’exception à la règle; Sharing Common Ground

with

EDWARD S. CASEY (Philosophy, Stony Brook University)

JEANNE ETELAIN (French Literature, Thought, and Culture, NYU)

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.

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.