Calendar

The last BKPP talk before our Winter break is coming up soon! On Monday 11/24, Anna Gotlib (Brooklyn College) will join us to share her work on memory manipulation and the self. Here’s a bit more about Dr. Gotlib’s talk, in her own words:

Memory Holes: Unrestricted Self-Authorship, Memory Manipulation, and the Law

In his play, “The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures,” Tony Kushner’s 72-year-old, generally asymptomatic protagonist Gus Marcantonio, thinking that he is suffering from Alzheimer’s, informs his family that he not only wants to sell the house, but that he intends to kill himself over the weekend. Somewhat similarly, in director Lee Chang-dong’s film “Poetry,” the nearly symptom-free, sixty-something heroine is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and promptly jumps off a bridge (Gullette 2011).

These are no mere flights of artistic imagination, nor would these imagined acts be truly shocking to aging audiences who, according to a 2010 survey by the MetLife Foundation, dread an Alzheimer’s diagnosis more than any other. Perhaps one obvious way to understand these characters, as well as this survey, is to point to a fundamental fear of losing one’s autonomy, one’s ability to go about one’s life in a way that one can endorse and carry out. Another is this: we in the Global North are a culture obsessed with memory — keeping it, sorting it out, controlling it — and when we are faced with its loss, we fall into a profound darkness, sometimes irretrievably. It could be that what we take to be something uniquely and deeply ours — the various meaning-making stories of our lives — is being taken away, unfairly stolen, disintegrating and annihilating the self in the process. Or else, as witnesses to the horror, we fear being forgotten — we despair at the thought of involuntary erasure by the failing memories of those who most matter to us. And as we lose our memories of ourselves and of others, or as we are lost to them, we first rage, and then, inevitably, fall silent.

So, memory matters — this much seems clear. But this is not a paper about how and why we are trying to (merely) save it. In fact, in some ways, it is the opposite: This paper challenges our correlative desires to control and to mold the memories we wish to erase, or otherwise diminish. Specifically, I want to address two emerging practices— one that attempts to edit individual and collective memories through a radical reinterpretation of internet privacy law; and the other that is in the process of rapidly developing the means of biomedical memory modification, and even erasure. I want to challenge these practices as deeply troubling misreadings of what matters, or what ought to matter, both individually and collectively, to memory-dependent, narrative beings such as ourselves. My intent, then, is to examine these emerging memory-modifying practices, addressing the openings that they create for a nearly unlimited self-authorship, no longer encumbered by the burdens of history, the collective nature of remembering, or by the passage of time.

Tell your friends/students/strangers! As usual, we meet at 7:00 P.M. in the Info Commons Lab at the Grand Army Plaza Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library.

See you there, I hope!

At long last, Brooklyn Public Philosophers is back for 2015! Coming up on 2/23 at 7:00 P.M., Geoff Holtzman (NYU Polytechnic Institute) will share his work on why philosophy is so male-dominated, and why it’s important that that changes. Here’s a bit more about the talk, in Geoff’s own words:

Rejecting Beliefs, or Rejecting Believers?

The Troublesome Causes and Effects of Excluding Women in the Philosophy Classroom

Why do so few women major in philosophy, and why are there so few female philosophy professors? Some authors have suggested that the dearth of women in philosophy can be attributed to gender differences in philosophical belief. On this view, college-aged women persistently find their intuitions to be at odds with those of their male classmates and their mostly-male professors, and this leads women to feel out of place and to leave philosophy. I think this suggestion is both false and pernicious, and my first aim in this talk will be to debunk this suggestion with data I have been collecting for the past five years. While there may be gender differences in philosophical belief, the evidence of these differences does not explain the paucity of women in professional philosophy.

I will suggest that, in fact, the nature of philosophical debate enables pre-existing gender biases—similar to those that exist in other fields—to take foot in ways they cannot take foot in many other fields in which women have traditionally been underrepresented. This consideration will segue into the second part of the talk, which will concern the social nature of philosophy. Are philosophical claims only about the ways we see the world, or are they sometimes responses to the ways other people see the world and, as such, partly claims about the ways we see those other people?

As usual, we meet in the Info Commons Lab at the central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library (10 Grand Army Plaza). Events are all 100% free and open to the public, and aimed at a general audience.

See you there, I hope!

Upcoming events:

3/23 – Elvira Basevich, “W.E.B. Du Bois’s Racialism and Two Liberal Conceptions of Plurality” @ the Dweck Center // 7:00 P.M.

4/27 – Christia Mercer on women in the history of philosophy @ the Dweck Center // 7:00 P.M.

5/18 – Chris Lebron on the philosophy of Black Lives Matter @ the Dweck Center // 7:00 P.M.

5/18 – Chris Lebron on the philosophy of Black Lives Matter @ the Dweck Center // 7:00 P.M.

It’s the last Brooklyn Public Philosophers talk of the season! Tomorrow, Thursday May 10th, Kate Manne (Cornell) is coming to the Brooklyn Public Library to discuss her work on misogyny, sexism, the difference between the two, and the weird amount of sympathy that society grants to perpetrators of sexual violence. If you’re interested in #MeToo, excuses, and how to manage one another’s feelings about assaults on patriarchy, this is for you.

In her recent book, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford University Press: 2017), Kate Manne characterizes misogyny as the “law enforcement” branch of patriarchy, which serves to police, enforce, or restore patriarchal social order—often by visiting hostility on girls and women for perceived violations of gendered norms and expectations. As well as complementary ideologies (most notably, sexism), misogyny also has a flipside. And this flipside needs to be examined: the exonerating narratives and disproportionate sympathy of which comparatively privileged men tend to be the beneficiaries. Manne calls the latter ‘himpathy.’

In the May edition of Philosophy in the Library, Manne departs from the main example of himpathy which she discusses in her book—that of Brock Turner, the convicted sexual assailant and then student at Stanford University. Turner’s trial became notorious when he received disproportionate and inappropriate sympathy over his female victim from multiple sources, including the judge who found him guilty.

As Manne will discuss, this turns out to be only one variety of himpathy among many.

May 10 th / 7:30 P.M.
Brooklyn Public Library
10 Grand Army Plaza
100% free and open to the public

On Wednesday, November 7th at 7:30 PM, Sarah Clark Miller (Penn State) joins us to discuss “The Art of Refusal: Overcoming Epistemic Injustice in the #MeToo Era.” She’ll talk about how survivors of sexual assault and harassment can deal with the fact that many people don’t believe them. It’s a difficult topic, but I think it’s really, really important. If you’re interested in the epistemological questions surrounding #MeToo – what standards of evidence are appropriate for sexual misconduct claims made in different sorts of contexts, what are the moral and epistemic reasons to believe women, what new concepts might survivors need to understand their own experiences – this might be one to check out.

As usual, we meet at the Dweck Center at the central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library (10 Grand Army Plaza). You can find more details at the Facebook event. I’d appreciate it if you could help spread the word