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.
In the seventeenth century Descartes fundamentally transformed mathematics, and this transformation enabled in turn Newton’s revolution in the practice of fundamental physics. It was left to Kant, in the eighteenth century, to revolutionize the practice of philosophy. In nineteenth-century Germany, the practice of mathematics was again transformed, this time by Riemann, Dedekind, and others, and this transformation enabled in turn both Einstein’s revolution in the practice of fundamental physics and the emergence of quantum mechanics. Has philosophy similarly been again revolutionized? Some, I think, would say that it has as evidenced, and catalyzed, by the development of mathematical logic and concomitant rise of analytic philosophy. But this is a mistake. Mathematical logic, in particular, our standard first-order quantificational logic, as well as the philosophical work to which it has given rise, remains merely Kantian. The revolution in philosophy that is needed in the wake of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century revolutions in mathematics and physics has yet to happen. I aim to help it along not only by showing that it has not yet been achieved but also by uncovering some of the resources required for a transformed logic.
Dec. 4–Alexander Altonji, M.A. student at the New School for Social Research, “Self Knowledge and our Capacity for Conscious Reflection: How Finkelstein can Respond to Boyle,” 6 E. 16th St, room 1101
In the early 2000s two Wittgensteinian inspired books on self-knowledge and first-person authority appeared: Richard Moran’s Authority and Estrangement and David Finkelstein’s Expression and the Inner. Finkelstein is critical of Moran’s predominant concern with issues of beliefs (and intentions and attitudes), while ignoring the ‘authority’ with which we speak about, say, sensations. In his Kantian inspired defense of Moran, Boyle reads Finkelstein (and others) as subscribing to the ‘uniformity assumption’, i.e., to account for first-person authority in the same basic way. As a result of this assumption, Boyle argues that Finkelstein is insensitive to our representational (in contrast to ‘manifestation’) capacities. In the paper to be presented, I challenge Boyle’s reading and criticisms of Finkelstein by arguing that Finkelstein is neither committed to the uniformity assumption nor is he insensitive to our representational capacities.
Robin Celikates (Humanities Department, Philosophy and Public Affairs Group, University of Amsterdam), will give a lecture titled:
“Epistemic Injustice, Looping Effects, and Ideology Critique”
How should we think about and criticize ideology today? In this talk, Professor Robin Celikates will first sketch three challenges— normative, methodological and explanatory—any critical theory of society has to face if it seeks to retain the concept of ideology. In a second step, he will discuss prominent recent suggestions about how to conceptualize ideology (especially in the work of Miranda Fricker, Sally Haslanger, and Jason Stanley). While providing partial answers to these challenges, as he will show, these approaches exhibit common shortcomings that make it necessary to introduce a more social-theoretical account of the structural dimension of ideology. In the final section, he will outline an understanding of ideology critique as second-order critique that acknowledges the structural dimension of ideology and is able to address the three challenges.
Sponsored by the New School for Social Research
This Essentialism Which is Not One
Topic areas
- Continental Philosophy
- Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality
- Social and Political Philosophy
Details
Taking its title from Naomi Schor’s text with the same name, this conference reformulates the question that Schor posed 20 years ago concerning feminist debates around the writing of Luce Irigaray: is essentialism in contemporary critical thought still anathema? How can we think about essentialism today alongside and across different disciplines that might both nourish and contest one-another such as philosophy, feminist thought, queer theory, critical race studies, and biology? Have past outright rejections of essentialism undercut political agendas, by denying shared connections that might motivate collectivity? What can we say about essentialist, anti-essentialist, and more contemporary anti-anti-essentialist (or strategic essentialist) stances?
The 2016 Philosophy Graduate Student Conference at The New School for Social Research seeks to explore these questions, and we invite all of you to engage with us in thinking about them. We welcome non-traditional presentations, including works of arts or creative writing as well as traditional philosophical papers. Papers should be roughly 3000 words. Performances should be no more than 20 minutes in length. Any accommodations you may need must be specified in your submission.
Potential topics include considerations of essentialism with respect to: social constructivism, gender/sexuality, nature/animals, race, trans feminisms, femininity, identity, technology, disability, queer theory, revolution/political transformations. Please send all submissions formatted for blind review to essentialism2016@gmail.com on or before December 1.
We look forward to hearing from you!
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.
A Memorial conference for Hilary Putnam
Pragmatic Themes in the Philosophy of Hilary Putnam
Sponsored by Department of Philosophy, New Social for Social Research
10 A. M. Richard J. Bernstein Pragmatist Enlightenment
11 A. M. Alice Crary Putnam and Propaganda
12-2 P. M. Lunch
2 P.M. Naoko Saito Pragmatism, Analysis, and Inspiration
3 P.M. Brendan Hogan and Lawrence Marcelle: Putnam,
Pragmatism and the Problem of Economic Rationality
4 P. M. Philip Kitcher Putnam’s Happy Ending? Pragmatism
and the Realism Debates
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.
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.