Eric Pommier (Pontifical Catholic University of Chile),author of Ontologie de la vie et éthique de la responsabilité selon Hans Jonas, Vrin, Paris 2013, will give a talk entitled: “Life and Anthropology: A Discussion between Kantian Criticism and Jonasian Ontology”
Abstract:
Critical anthropology can be seen as the common ground of investigation of Kant and Jonas. However I would like to show that it is because Kant does not see the true root of our finitude that Jonas criticizes him. As human finitude is due to the finitude of life, morals and epistemology have to be founded in an ontology of life that reveals its true mode of being. Jonas’s critique of Kant does not mean however that we have to forget the theoretical and practical lessons of criticism. On the contrary, it deals with the necessity to justify in a radical way our limitations thanks to an ontological thought, which does not fall into dogmatism. Then Jonas’s philosophy would be an attempt to found Kantian criticism on a bio-ontological basis.
This event is sponsored by The New School for Social Research.
This seminar is a discussion of a pre-circulated paper. It can be found on the GIDEST site for attendees to read in advance.
Orit Halpern presents “The Architecture Machine: Demoing, the Demos, and the Rise of Ubiquitous Computing.”
Orit Halpern is Assistant Professor in History at The New School of Social Research and Eugene Lang College, and an affiliate in the Design Studies Graduate Program at Parsons, The New School for Design.
Her research centers on histories of digital media, cybernetics, cognition and neuroscience, architecture, planning, and design. Her recent book Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Duke, 2014) is a genealogy of big data and interactivity. Halpern’s published works and multimedia projects have appeared in numerous venues including the Journal of Visual Culture, Public Culture, BioSocieties, Configurations, and at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany. She has also published essays in numerous exhibition catalogues.
Halpern is currently working on exhibitions — http://furnishingthecloud.net/ — and has a number of future projects on histories of “smartness,” self-organization as a virtue and a democratic ideal, and the relationship between calculation, territory, and utopia throughout history.
This event is part of the bi-weekly GIDEST Seminars presented by the Graduate Institute of Design, Ethnography, & Social Thought at The New School.
NSSR Philosophy Adjunct Faculty Bernard Flynn, will give a talk entilted: “The Institution of the Law: Merleau-Ponty/Lefort”
The Thursday Night Workshop is a longstanding tradition of the philosophy department. In the past, speakers have included Robert Brandom, Adriana Cavarero, Michael Frede, Klaus Held, Jürgen Habermas, Claude Lefort, Jean-Luc Marion, and Richard Rorty. Students are encouraged to attend the Thursday night department lecture series as well as the post-lecture reception.
Keynote Speakers:
Alan Bass: New School for Social Research
Rudolf Bernet: Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
James Dodd: New School for Social Research
3:00pm – 9:00pm in EST
(3:00pm – 4:50pm)
James Dodd, “Violence and Religion (On Levinas)”
(5:00pm – 6:50pm)
Rudolf Bernet (K.U. Leuven), “Husserl on Desires, Drive, and Affect”
(7:00pm – 8:50pm)
Alan Bass, “The Handkerchief and the Fetish: ‘Being and Time’ §17”
Beginning in 2003, a seminar or lecture course connected to the Husserl Archives has been occasionally offered by the Department of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. Scholars and advanced students in the field of phenomenology and phenomenological philosophy have been invited to present and discuss their work.
The topic of the fall 2015 seminar will be: Intersections between Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis. This year’s seminar will place the works of Husserl, Heidegger, and Levinas in conversation with psychoanalytic thought through a close reading of selected texts. Our speakers this year will be James Dodd, Rudolf Bernet, and Alan Bass.
(Prof. Dodd’s paper will be circulated in advance – along with a selection from Bataille’s Theory of Religion. We are also soliciting questions for this portion of the seminar. Email P.J. Gorre [gorrp967@newschool.edu] to receive the appropriate materials and to send your questions).
In continuation with our conference last spring, The New York Phenomenology Research Group once again invites regional phenomenologists to a works in progress conference emphasizing collaborative research. This event will take place on Saturday, February 27th at The New School for Social Research in New York City.
The theme for our conference is phenomenology and the mind. We construe this topic broadly, as covering anything from the intersections between phenomenology and psychoanalysis, philosophy of mind, neuroscience, etc. to the way in which the phenomenological mind operates experientially in its own right, or with respect to, embodiment, aesthetic experience, design, identity, gender/race/ability, and more.
This conference encourages participants to research and work through ideas with one another rather than having them present completed papers in a traditional conference style. It’s our sincere hope to bring together students working through similar problems in phenomenology, in order to build a supportive network of emerging phenomenologists and philosophers in the New York area. For this reason, this event will not host any keynote speakers. Rather, the structure of this conference will be focused on encouraging student research and community in a collaborative environment.
We welcome short, in-progress papers that deal with topics in both the canonical tradition and phenomenological methods as mediums of inquiry. Papers should be no longer than 10-15 minutes when presented, and will be organized into panels (4-5) according to topic. Each panel will be approximately two hours, with the first hour dedicated to brief presentations and the second hour to open conversation, Q&A, and collaborative research. Group research and panel proposals are also welcome.
Please submit your paper, prepared for blind review, to phenomenology@newschool.edu along with any questions you may have, by January 8, 2016.
Marcia Morgan (Muhlenberg College), The Affect of Dissident Language and Aesthetic Emancipation at the Margins: A Possible Dialogue Among Adorno, Kristeva, and West
[see the linked poster on the department webpage where it says: View this semester’s departmental lecture series.]
Presentations will tackle the issue of vulnerability and reassess the ontological framework of philosophical and psychological theories in dialogue with the phenomenological tradition and contemporary moral theory. This event is aimed at (1) facilitating institutional cooperation between American and European philosophers working on phenomenology; (2) creating a transatlantic research network for young researchers interested in phenomenology; (3) showcasing the importance of phenomenology for understanding vulnerability in dialogue with other philosophical areas or other fields (anthropology, feminist theory, cognitive science, mind theory etc.); and (4) raising awareness among the general public and promoting contemporary philosophical research on vulnerability and its potential impact on society.
The Husserl Archive at the New School for Social Research was established in 1966 in honor of Alfred Schütz in an effort to promote the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, as well as the phenomenological tradition more generally. To this end, the center hosts small research groups, seminars, workshops, and conferences that bring together international students and scholars working in or near the phenomenological tradition. In concert with this aim, the conference seeks to further establish the Archive as a center for phenomenological research on the east coast for junior scholars working in phenomenology and to strengthen scholarly ties to the Husserl Archives in Leuven and Paris. This conference is the inaugural event of this organization in an effort to facilitate cross-continental collaboration between American and European scholars in addition to strengthening research activities in the area of phenomenology in the U.S. The groundwork for this organization and conference is already in place to the extent that many of the scholars The New School intends to invite already have a record of collaboration. Nonetheless, there has not yet been an umbrella research group linking the Husserl Archives in Louvain, New York, and Paris and affiliated researchers. The two-day conference will include a total of twelve (12) invited presentations with representatives from these respective research centers and others.
Phenomenology is often hailed as one of the most important philosophical movements of the 20th century, impacting virtually every area of continental philosophy, including post-structuralism, deconstruction, feminist theory, as well as areas of psychology, anthropology, and sociology. Today, phenomenology has become influential in philosophical psychology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science for questions of consciousness, and we aim to create a forum for the discussion of phenomenology’s cross and interdisciplinary relevance. Today, the problem of vulnerability has currency for feminist theory, care studies, moral philosophy, as well as for questions of inter-subjectivity and empathy in cognitive science. We hope to reach a wide audience with the conference and to make explicit the importance of phenomenological method and thought for the question of vulnerability, particularly as it relates to the intersection of phenomenology and global issues today.
This event is sponsored by the Husserl Archive, the Department of Philosophy, at The New School for Social Research.
Jason Stanley, Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, gives a lecture entitled “Non-Ideal Philosophy of Language”
Science requires idealizations. Physicists, for example, often work with ideal models of reality that abstract from the existence of friction. The theory of meaning, both in philosophy and linguistics, is no different. Virtually all work in the theory of meaning presupposes an idealized model, which Stanley calls the standard model, in which various idealizations have been made to focus on attention on the putatively most central aspects of linguistic communication. In this talk, part of co-authored work with the linguist David Beaver, Stanley isolates five idealizations that are made by the vast majority of work in the theory of meaning, and argues that these idealizations are scientifically problematic and politically flawed. Stanley uses the critique of the standard model to sketch a new program for the theory of meaning, one that places at the center of inquiry into linguistic communication precisely the features of communication that the idealizations of the standard model seem to almost deliberately occlude.
About the speaker:
Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. Before coming to Yale in 2013, he was Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers University. He has also been a Professor at the University of Michigan (2000-2004) and Cornell University (1995-2000). His PhD was earned in 1995 at the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT (Robert Stalnaker, chair), and he received his BA from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1990.
Professor Stanley has published four books, two in epistemology, one in philosophy of language and semantics, and one in social and political philosophy. His first book was Knowledge and Practical Interests published in 2005 by Oxford University Press. It was the winner of the 2007 American Philosophical Association book prize. Professor Stanley’s second book, Language in Context, also OUP, was published in 2007. This is a collection of his papers in semantics published between 2000 and 2007 on the topic of linguistic communication and context. His third book, Know How, was published in 2011, also with OUP. Professor Stanley’s fourth book, How Propaganda Works, was published by Princeton University Press in May, 2015. It was the winner of the 2016 PROSE award for the subject area of philosophy.
http://www.aesop.com/usa/the-fabulist/jason-stanley/
Sponsored by the Department of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research.
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.
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.