One dimension of cognitive success is getting it right, i.e gaining knowledge of facts. Another dimension of cognitive success is using the right concept, i.e. framing a topic in the right way. This view, if correct, tasks inquirers with critically examining the concepts they are using and perhaps replacing those concepts with new and better ones. This task is often known as “conceptual engineering”.
The idea that conceptual engineering is an important task for inquirers in and outside philosophy has recently gained traction. Some philosophers think conceptual engineering is an important task for inquirers to pursue. The conference is focused on foundational issues in connection with conceptual engineering. Topics to be addressed include the following:
- What are the semantic mechanisms that underlie conceptual engineering?
- What are concepts, and which role (if any) do they play in conceptual engineering?
- How can a theory of conceptual engineering be integrated with large-scale semantic theories?
- Which precise changes does a language undergo when its speakers engineer concepts?
- Is conceptual engineering something that speakers can ever purposefully bring about?
- What is the relation between changing concepts and changing reality?
The planned conference will focus especially on the semantic foundations of conceptual engineering and push towards a better understanding of the process.
The conference is organized collaboratively by members of NYU (Vera Flocke and David Chalmers) and members of the research project ConceptLab, located at the University of Oslo (Herman Cappelen and Andrew Peet).
The conference is funded by the New York Institute of Philosophy and ConceptLab.
To attend, please register by following this link no later than August 31, 2018.
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.
The Minorities and Philosophy Chapters of The Graduate Center CUNY, NYU, Princeton, Columbia, Rutgers, and the New School present: Oppression and Resistance, a conference on understanding and resisting oppression inside and outside the academy.
Highlights include:
- an afternoon of practical workshops
- a panel on activism and philosophy with Linda Martín Alcoff, Lori Gruen, Kate Ritchie, and Briana Toole
- six fantastic talks on the topic of the conference
- a keynote address by José Medina, “Resisting Racist Propaganda”
- delicious all-vegan food and a house party!
The full schedule is below. We hope to see you there!
You can register (optionally) here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScbVIij40xlFYKPpBRbIFB1NqiqB-xJNMStKn-wNhwZYgHuCA/viewform
FULL SCHEDULE:
Friday Oct 12
- Panel 1 – MAP Panel: 1.00-2.00pm (6th Floor)
Elise Woodard, Carolina Flores, Keyvan Shafiei - Panel 2 – Graduate Employee Unions and Social Justice: 2.10-3.10pm (6th Floor)
Danny Echikson, Nadia Mehdi, Chris Nickell
- Panel 3 – Teaching outside the Academy & Inclusive Pedagogy: 3.20-4.20pm (6th Floor)
Sukaina Hirji, Allysa Lake, Victoria Emery
- Panel 4 – Faculty Panel on Activism and Public Philosophy: 4.30-6.30pm (202)
Linda Martín Alcoff, Lori Gruen, Briana Toole, Kate Ritchie
- Reception: 6.30-7.30pm
Saturday Oct 13
- Session 1: 10.00-11.30am (101)
Rebecca Harrison, “Experiencing Resistance: Disruptive Protest as a Site of Moral Learning”
Claryn Spies, “Ideas Spring from Deeds: Rethinking Black Bloc Aesthetically” - Session 2: 11.45am-1.15pm (101)
Noel Dominguez, “Are We Blameworthy for Implicit Biases? We Might As Well Be”
Javiera Perez-Gomez, “Microaggressions: Failings and Prospects” - Session 3: 2.30-4.00pm (101)
Emmalon Davis, “What we Owe To Ourselves: Resisting a Self-Directed Duty to Resist Oppression”
Matt Andler, “What Is Sexual Identity?” - Keynote: 4.30-6.30pm
José Medina, “Resisting Racist Propaganda: Distorted Visual Communication and Epistemic Activism” (101) - Reception: 6.30-7.30pm
Philosophers
Economists
Ethan Lewis, Dartmouth
Giovanni Peri, University of California, Davis
Chad Sparber, Colgate University
Organizers
K. Anthony Appiah, NYU Philosophy and Law
Jess Behabib, NYU Economics
Giovanni Peri, UC Davis Economics; Director, UC Davis Migration Research Cluster
The Department of German at NYU and Deutsches Haus at NYU present a discussion between Slavoj Žižek, Rebecca Comay, and Frank Ruda which will revolve around Comay and Ruda’s book The Dash—The Other Side of Absolute Knowing.
Event information
In The Dash—The Other Side of Absolute Knowing (MIT Press, 2018), the authors present a reading of Hegel’s most reviled concept, absolute knowing. Their book sets out from a counterintuitive premise: the “mystical shell” of Hegel’s system proves to be its most “rational kernel.” Hegel’s radicalism is located precisely at the point where his thought seems to regress most. Most current readings try to update Hegel’s thought by pruning back his grandiose claims to “absolute knowing,” but Comay and Ruda invert this deflationary gesture by inflating what seems to be most trivial: the truth of the absolute is grasped only in the minutiae of its most mundane appearances. What if everything turns out to hinge on the most inconspicuous and trivial detail—a punctuation mark?
About the speakers
Slavoj Žižek, is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a visiting professor at a number of American Universities (Columbia, Princeton, New School for Social Research, New York University, University of Michigan). He obtained his Ph.D. in Philosophy in Ljubljana studying Psychoanalysis. He also studied at the University of Paris. Slavoj Zizek is a Hegelian philosopher, Lacanian psychoanalyst, and Marxist social analyst. He is the author of The Indivisible Remainder, The Sublime Object of Ideology, The Metastases of Enjoyment, Looking Awry: Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, The Plague of Fantasies, and The Ticklish Subject. His latest publications are Disparities, and Antigone (both at Bloomsbury Press, London).
Rebecca Comay, is Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Other publications include Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (Stanford, 2011) and Hegel and Resistance, co-ed with Bart Zandtvoort (Bloomsbury, 2018).
Frank Ruda, is Senior Lecturer for Philosophy at the University of Dundee, UK. Other publications include: Reading Marx (with Slavoj Žižek and Agon Hamza)(Polity, 2018); Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for A Contemporary Use of Fatalism (Nebraska UP, 2016); For Badiou: Idealism without Idealism (Northwestern UP, 2015).
Attendance information
Events at Deutsches Haus are free of charge. If you would like to attend this event, please send us an email to deutscheshaus.rsvp@nyu.edu. Space at Deutsches Haus is limited, please arrive ten minutes prior to the event. Thank you!
“A Dash of Hegel: A Discussion with Slavoj Žižek, Rebecca Comay, and Frank Ruda” is a DAAD supported event.
Fourteenth Annual NYU Conference on Issues in Modern Philosophy
17th/18th Century Philosophy
19th Century Philosophy
20th Century Philosophy
November 9, 2018 – November 10, 2018
Department of Philosophy, New York University
60 Washington Square South
New York 10012
United States
Liberal democratic values seem embattled as never before in the United States, and around the world. The time is right for a serious and wide-ranging exploration of the prospects for liberal democracies in a context that acknowledges the historical and contemporary tensions between democracy and liberal values, both in theory and in practice. This conference convenes a varied group of scholars, journalists, policy expert and veteran public servants, we hope to stage a real meeting of the minds, not the usual partisan sniping that occurs at most academic events – and we are trying to be as inclusive as possible, by inviting thoughtful representatives from the left, right, and center.
Though liberalism and democracy have become intertwined in some contemporary societies, they have evolved along quite distinct paths historically. Democracy is an ancient idea, liberalism a very modern one. Greek democracy was not liberal, nor was the revolutionary democracy championed by the sans-culottes in the French Revolution. To this day, there are many avowedly democratic movements and regimes, both on the left and the right, that explicitly reject liberal values. Moreover, even in liberal democratic societies, there are important tensions between the two traditions.
In this conference, we will examine the prospects for liberal democracies against the backdrop of the historical and contemporary tensions between democracy and liberalism.
Featured speakers and participants
James Miller
Helen Rosenblatt
Robert Boyers
Paul Cartledge
EJ Dionne Jr
Bill Galston
Dipayan Ghosh
Jeffrey Issac
James Kloppenberg
Bill Kristol
Yuval Levin
Marc Plattner
Aziz Rana
Rogers Smith
Michael Tomasky
T Chatterton Williams
Ben Fountain
Fedricho Finchelstein
Jennifer Roberts
Paul Krugman
Teresa Ghilarducci
T. Alexander Aleinikoff
Jessica Pissano
Deva Woodly
Natasha Lennard
Astra Taylor
Ira Katrznelson
Josh Begley
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!
9:15 – 9:30 Coffee & Opening Remarks
9:30 – 10:50 Anna Katsman: Freighted Love
11:00 – 12:20 Federica Gregoratto: Eros and Freedom Today
12:20 – 1:30 Lunch Break
1:30 – 2:50 Sara Macdonald: The Art of Friendship: Hegel and Plato
3:00 – 4:20 Gal Katz, “Love’s Rage Is Shame”: Hegel on Sex
4:20 – 4:45 Break
4:45 – 6.05 Paul Kottman: Love as Human Freedom
New York German Idealism Workshop
A joint undertaking of the philosophy departments of Columbia University & the New School for Social Research presents:
MATTERS OF LOVE: A CONFERENCE
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.