Calendar

This presentation weaves together two themes that have been recurrent in philosophical and political debates of recent years. The first is a revival of interest in Walter Benjamin’s concept of “leftwing melancholy” and the identification of melancholia as an intrinsic element of the left’s “structure of feeling” or desire; the second is the call for a return to the question of political organisation. By contrasting different accounts of left melancholia, I suggest that we might be dealing not with one, but two different melancholias whose mutual opposition both prevents them from being fully avowed and blocks the possibility of fruitful engagements with the question of organisation. I finish by suggesting a way of posing that question that might help us escape this deadlock and claim the legacies of both 1917 and 1968 without the baggage of an unhealthy attachment to past defeats.

Rodrigo Nunes is professor of modern and contemporary philosophy at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Brazil. He is the author of Organisation of the Organisationless. Collective Action After Networks (London: Mute, 2014) and of numerous articles in publications such as Les Temps Modernes, Radical Philosophy, South Atlantic Quarterly, International Journal of Communication, Nueva Sociedad, Viewpoint and others. His new book, Beyond the Horizontal. Rethinking the Question of Organisation, is forthcoming with Verso.

I argue we can make progress in three contemporary debates about transnational feminisms by a) clarifying the normative commitments central to feminism and b) rethinking the role of normative ideals in transnational political practices. These debates concern the purported tension between taking seriously critiques of Western imperialism and retaining feminism’s status as a normative doctrine. Understanding feminism as opposition to sexist oppression unthethers feminism from commitments to controversial forms of individualism and antitraditionalism. Understanding transnational feminist praxis as a practice of nonideal justice-enhancement permits a universalist feminist position that is not monist about the endpoint of gender justice or the strategies that should be taken to achieve it.

PEN America presents Jason Stanley and Timothy Snyder in conversation on the occasion of the publication of Stanley’s How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (Random House). Jelani Cobb will moderate a discussion on this critical debate playing out on a national and international scale on democracy vs. authoritarianism.

Doors for this event will open at 6:30pm, the event will begin at 7pm.

Jelani Cobb has been contributing to The New Yorker since 2012, and became a staff writer in 2015. He writes frequently about race, politics, history, and culture. His most recent book is The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress. He’s a professor of journalism at Columbia University. He won the 2015 Sidney Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism, for his columns on race, the police, and injustice

Timothy Snyder is an author, historian, and the Levin Professor of History at Yale University. His books include Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, which won him the Hannah Arendt prize for political thought; Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning; On Tyranny; and The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. Snyder is a member of the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. Before coming to Yale in 2013, he was Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers University. Stanley is the author of Know How, Languages in Context, and Knowledge and Practical Interests, which won the 2007 American Philosophical Association book prize; and How Propaganda Works, which won the 2016 PROSE Award for Philosophy from the Association of American Publishers. His first book, Knowledge and Practical Interests, won the American Philosophical Association Book Prize, awarded to one philosopher every year, for 2005-06. He is a frequent contributor The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Review, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among other publications. Stanley lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with his family.

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.

David E. McClean, PhD
Department of Philosophy, Rutgers University (Newark)

Just days after the 2016 presidential election a good deal of attention was given to passages from Richard M. Rorty’s book, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, published in 1998, for those passages seemed to predict the rise of Donald J. Trump and his stunning election to the presidency. Those passages, though sketchy, seem to provide a tenable explanation for such an unlikely series of events in American politics. While some have criticized this “Rorty, American Prophet” conclusion, the insights and worries that Rorty articulated in Achieving Our Country (and elsewhere) should not be brushed aside. Rorty wrote, “Nobody is setting up a program in unemployed studies, homeless studies, or trailer-park studies because the unemployed, the homeless, and the residents of trailer parks are not ‘other’ in the relevant sense.” What was Rorty trying to get us to see? Had we seen it, could the 2016 election, as well as the Republican primaries preceding it, have turned out differently? Is the current political tribalism rooted in dualisms and binaries with which we must come to terms and dissolve if we are to prevent a continued descent into balkanization and incommunicability?

Bio:

David E. McClean founded the DMA Consulting Group, a boutique regulatory and enterprise risk consultancy to the financial services industry, in 1992 and currently serves as principal of the firm. DMA’s clients include investment managers, mutual funds, hedge funds, private equity funds, and securities and commodities firms. Prior to working at DMA, Dr. McClean served as a legal compliance officer at Van Eck Global, BV Capital Management (a subsidiary of Bayerische Vereinsbank AG), and National Securities and Research Corporation. He has served on several industry panels over the years, addressing risk and regulation; published articles on securities regulation; and conducted continuing professional education in mutual funds for the NASD Institute and elsewhere.

Dr. McClean received a PhD (2009) and an MA (2003) in Philosophy from The New School for Social Research. His dissertation concerned the work of the influential American philosopher Richard M. Rorty. He also received an MA in Liberal Studies from New York University (1996) and a BA (summa cum laude) from Hunter College-CUNY (1986), where he majored in comparative religion. For a time in the late 1980s, he was matriculated in the MPA program at NYU’s Wagner School for Public Service, focusing on financial management and public finance.

Dr. McClean is a lecturer in philosophy at Rutgers University (Newark), where he conceived and designed courses for a first-of-its-kind program in advanced business ethics and where he teaches undergraduate courses on philosophical and business ethics. In 2017, he will begin teaching comparative religion and philosophy at Norwalk Community College. For many years, until recently, he taught at Molloy College, in Long Island. He has lectured and delivered papers on political philosophy, race theory, and public policy at universities across the country and in Europe.

Dr. McClean’s published writings include peer-reviewed journal articles, book reviews, and two books: Richard Rorty, Liberalism and Cosmopolitanism (2014) and Wall Street, Reforming the Unreformable: An Ethical Perspective (2015). He has contracted for and is currently writing a book on the morality and politics of climate change, expected to be published in 2018.

Cinzia Arruzza (NSSR) in conversation with Jessica Moss (NYU) and Nickolas Pappas (CUNY)

Book discussion: “A Wolf in the City. Tyranny and the Tyrant in Plato’s Republic”

The problem of tyranny preoccupied Plato, and its discussion both begins and ends his famous Republic. Though philosophers have mined the Republic for millennia, A Wolf in the City is the first monograph entirely devoted to the study of tyranny and of the tyrant’s soul in Plato’s Republic. The book argues that Plato’s critique of tyranny intervenes in an ancient debate concerning the sources of the crisis of Athenian democracy and the relation between political leaders and demos in the last decades of the fifth century BCE. It shows that Plato’s critique of tyranny should not be taken as veiled criticism of the Syracusan tyrannical regime, but rather of Athenian democracy. In parsing Plato’s discussion of the soul of the tyrant, the book  also offers new insights into his moral psychology, addressing much-debated problems such as the nature of eros and of the spirited part of the soul, the unity or disunity of the soul, and the relation between the non-rational parts of the soul and reason.

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-wolf-in-the-city-9780190678852?cc=us&lang=en&#.

What do the worlds of global finance and nationalist populism have in common? How can we understand the rise of today’s ‘new fascisms’ through the prism of financialization? This one-day workshop brings together scholars from across disciplines to debate  these key questions for our understanding of contemporary capitalism. The workshop is part of Public Seminar’s Imaginal Politics initiative and is organised jointly with the Department of Social Science, University College London. The workshop will include three panel discussions and will close with a talk by Judith Butler on ‘Anti-gender ideology and the new fascism’.

Vera List Professor of Philosophy, Richard J. Bernstein, will present his new book on Hannah Arendt, Why Read Hannah Arendt Now (2018, Polity Press), followed by a screening of the documentary film Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt.

Free and open to the public.