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Ursula Renz, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria, gives a lecture entitled “The Value of Thinking for Oneself: Epistemic Autonomy in Spinoza and Kant”

In her talk, Renz discusses the views of Spinoza and Kant on epistemic autonomy. Departing from a brief sketch of Descartes’ epistemic individualism, she will argue that while both Spinoza and Kant dismissed Descartes’ views on concept formation, they remain loyal to his reasons for epistemic individualism. She will conclude by showing how these reasons may help us to understand why enlightenment, understood as a philosophical and not just historical concept, essentially relies on the exercise of individual judgments, requiring epistemic autonomy rather than only freedom of speech and thought.

About the speaker:

Ursula Renz is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria, where she teaches classes in Theoretical Philosophy (epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy) and Early Modern Philosophy.

She is author of Die Rationalität der Kultur: Kulturphilosophie und ihre transzendentale Begründung bei Cohen, Natorp und Cassirer (2002), Die Erklärbarkeit der Erfahrung: Realismus und Subjektivität in Spinozas Theorie des menschlichen Geistes (2010), editor of Self-Knowledge. A History (forthcoming 2017) and coeditor of the Handbuch Klassische Emotionstheorien (2008, second edition 2012) and Baruch de Spinoza: Ethica more geometrico demonstrata. A Collective Commentary. She has written numerous articles on Early Modern Philosophy (Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Shaftesbury), Kant, the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism (Cohen, Natorp, Cassirer), on meta-philosophy and the history of philosophy, and more recently, also on self-knowledge, testimony and the problem of epistemic trust.

Her book Die Erklärbarkeit der Erfahrung has been awarded the Journal of the History of Philosophy Book Prize 2011, and from 2014-2015, she received an Humboldt Fellowship for Advanced Researchers to spend three terms at the University of Konstanz. She recently received a grant from the Austrian Research Foundation (FWF) for her project on Spinoza and the Concept of the Human Life Form.

For more information see her academia page: https://uni-klu.academia.edu/UrsulaRenz

This Thursday Workshop is in cooperation with the international workshop: Spinoza and Kant. Metaphysics, Ethics, Politics

Sponsored by the Department of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research.

Nabina Liebow, PhD Georgetown University, gives a lecture entitled:

 “But Where Are You Really From?” Responding to Racial Microaggressions

Liebow will argue that the particular structure of racial microaggressions makes the potential social cost of confronting microaggressors high for microagressees; this is part of what makes patterns of racial microaggressions difficult to disrupt. This difficulty helps make racial microaggressions effective tools for sustaining racial oppression.

In this talk, Professor Russell describes how notions of race have organized the American concept of kinship. She argues that this history of the association of race and kinship in the American imaginary allows race to serve as a proxy for kinship in the contemporary fertility clinic.

Camisha Russell received her PhD in Philosophy from Penn State University in 2013. Her first book, The Assisted Reproduction of Race: Thinking Through Race as a Reproductive Technology, forthcoming with Indiana University Press, explores the role of race and racial identity in the ideas and practices surrounding assisted reproductive technologies. Her primary research and teaching interests are in Critical Philosophy of Race, Feminist Philosophy, and Bioethics. Her publications include “Black American Sexuality and the Repressive Hypothesis: Reading Patricia Hill Collins with Michel Foucault” in Convergences: Black Women & Continental Philosophy, “Questions of Race in Bioethics: Deceit, Disregard, Disparity, and the Work of Decentering” in Philosophy Compass, and “The Race Idea in Reproductive Technologies: Beyond Epistemic Scientism and Technological Mastery” in the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry. She has held both a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (2012-13) and a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship (2013-15). Before attending graduate school, she served as a Peace Corps Volunteer for the Girls’ Education and Empowerment program in Togo, West Africa. She is currently a Riley Scholar-in-Residence in the Philosophy Department at Colorado College.

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.

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.

A number of philosophers working on Buddhist traditions have recently explored similarities between the cultivated experience of not-self, and the clinical experience of depersonalization. In this talk, I will offer some reflections on this theme. But my primary aim will be to push a similar kind of exploratory project one step further. Drawing on tools from cognitive and computational neuroscience, as well as insights from Yogācāra Buddhist philosophy, I will explore some of the most significant similarities and differences between anomalous experiences evoked by meditation, and anomalous experiences that are commonly labeled as hallucinations. I will then argue that understanding how such experiences are produced offers a powerful framework for thinking about the socially and historically situated nature of everyday experience.