World renowned and revered French writer, literary critic, and philosopher Hélène Cixous celebrates her 80th birthday in 2017. To mark this occasion, New York University is organizing a major event that will bring Hélène Cixous to the Washington Square Campus once again, together with a number of distinguished scholars and writers from Europe and the United States. Cixousversaire, A Celebration of Hélène Cixous will include, from September 14 to 16, 2017, a keynote address by Hélène Cixous; a discussion with Hélène Cixous, Karen Finley, and Avital Ronell; a screening by filmmaker Olivier Morel; readings by director Daniel Mesguich; a roundtable on Cixous’ theater, including Anne Bogart, Hélene Cixous, and Judith Miller; and presentations by Cixous specialists Peggy Kamuf, Marta Segarra and others; and writers Camille Laurens and Bertrand Leclair.
For further information, contact Melanie Hackney at 212-992-9848 or Tom Bishop at 212-998-8710.
The full program can be viewed here.
The workshop will bring together philosophers working in ancient epistemology with those working in contemporary epistemology to discuss issues relevant to the debates in both fields.
It was assumed until recently that the distinction between doxa and epistêmê, key players in ancient epistemology, maps directly onto the contemporary distinction between knowledge and belief. Recent interpreters of Plato and Aristotle have challenged this assumption. Some argue that epistêmê is closer to understanding than to knowledge because (for example) it requires explanation rather than justification, cannot be transmitted by testimony, is hard to come by, and can only be had of a restricted range of objects. Others argue that doxa is narrower than belief, perhaps closer to opinion, because (for example) doxa is excluded by epistêmê while belief is entailed by knowledge, doxa is imprecise and unclear while these are not essential features of belief, and doxa too has a restricted range of objects.
Contemporary epistemology tackles issues that are related to the debates above. Is knowledge to be distinguished from understanding and if so, which one should be seen as the proper goal of inquiry? Does understanding have value over and above the value of knowledge? Much like Plato and Aristotle, epistemologists aim to elucidate the conceptual relations between knowledge, understanding, justification, explanation, epistemic authority, and testimony. In addition, contemporary epistemologists sometimes produce fictional genealogies of epistemic concepts to arrive at an improved understanding of our epistemic practices. If epistêmê and doxa are distinct from knowledge and belief in a way indicated above, then it seems appropriate to raise the question whether the actual history of epistemic concepts can help to improve these fictional genealogies.
The presentations are followed by a response and a general discussion.Papers by speakers who specialize in Ancient epistemology will be assigned to commentators who specialize in contemporary epistemology and vice versa.
Presenters: Gail Fine (Cornell), Richard Foley (NYU), Jane Friedman (NYU), Allison Hills (Oxford), Robert Pasnau (Colorado), Whitney Schwab (Baltimore/NYU), Katja Vogt (Columbia), Ralph Wedgwood (USC).
Respondents: John Bengson (Harvard), Hugh Benson (Oklahoma), Paul Boghossian (NYU), Toomas Lott (NYU/Tartu), Jessica Moss (NYU), James Pryor (NYU), Michael Strevens (NYU).
Organisers:
September 7, 2017, 7:00pm EST
email tl1972 at nyu
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.
The standard way to show the consistency of a theory, or the independence of a given statement from that theory, is to exhibit a model. But there’s more than one thing that’s been called a “model” as this notion has evolved from its original role in 19th century foundations of geometry to its current role as a universallyapplicable tool in logic. This talk investigates some of the changes that bring us to the modern notion, and asks to what extent various kinds of model do, or don’t, successfully demonstrate various kinds of consistency and independence.
When: Friday October 20, 11:00am-1:00pm (with reception to follow)
Where: NYU Philosophy Department, 5 Washington Place, Room 202
Nina Emery (Mount Holyoke), November 3, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Abstract: Traditional theories of knowledge often focus on the epistemic status of full beliefs. In Probabilistic Knowledge (forthcoming), I argue that like full beliefs, credences and other probabilistic beliefs can constitute knowledge. This talk applies probabilistic knowledge to problems in legal and moral philosophy. I begin by arguing that legal standards of proof require knowledge of probabilistic contents. For instance, proof by a preponderance of the evidence requires the factfinder to have greater than .5 credence that a defendant is liable, and also requires this probabilistic belief to be knowledge. Proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt requires knowledge of a significantly stronger content. The fact that legal proof requires knowledge explains why merely statistical evidence is insufficient to license a legal verdict of liability or guilt. In addition to explaining the limited value of statistical evidence, probabilistic knowledge enables us to articulate epistemic norms that are violated by acts of racial and other profiling. According to these norms, it can be epistemically wrong to infer from statistics that a person of Mexican ancestry is likely undocumented, for instance, even when inferring parallel facts about ordinary objects is perfectly okay.
Reception to follow in 6th floor lounge.
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.
In this short talk, I present a new account of the nature of proof, with the aim of explaining how proof could actually play the role in reasoning that it does, and answering some long-standing puzzles about the nature of proof. Along the way, I’ll explain how Kreisel’s Squeezing argument helps us understand the connection between an informal notion of of validity and the notions formalised in our accounts of proofs and models, and the relationship between proof-theoretic and model-theoretic analyses of logical consequence.
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 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.
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.