Calendar

Mara Marin (Go-In Post-doctoral Fellow in the Exzellenzcluster Normative Orders at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt) will give a lecture entitled “Connected by Commitment: Rethinking Relations of Oppression and Our Responsibility To Undermine Them”.

The lecture will advocate for a novel model of thinking of our responsibility to dismantle structures of racial and gender oppression.

From the abstract: I start from the observation that racial and gender oppression in its current form in North American and Western European societies endures in spite of the fact that there are no sexists or racists, which raises a puzzle: How can we explain the endurance of racism and sexism given that, as belief systems, they have been publicly and, to some extent, personally disavowed? What makes structures of oppression enduring, and how do individuals contribute to their endurance? I call this “the endurance question.” I argue that our actions perpetuate oppressive structures regardless of our intentions and beliefs, but rather in virtue of their cumulative effects. While other theorists emphasize the negative aspects of the unwitting support we give to unjust structures, I emphasize its transformative potential: if currently our actions support these structures, we have the ability to transform these structures by acting repeatedly in ways that fail to conform to their norms.

To make sense of this relation between individual actions and larger social structures I propose a new notion I call “commitment.” Drawing on intuitive understandings of friendships and long-term intimate partnerships, I define a commitment as a relationship of obligations developed over time through the accumulated effect of open-ended actions and responses. In commitments agents incur obligations via their voluntary actions but without knowing in advance the precise content of their obligations. I argue that the notion of commitment is necessary to help us address not only the endurance question, but also the related question of our responsibility for transforming oppressive structures.

Mara Marin is a political theorist with interests in feminist theory, the regulation of sexuality, the social contract tradition, theories of oppression, domination, justice, political obligation and authority. She is the author of “Marriage as Commitment: A Revisionary Argument” (published in American Multicultural Studies, ed. Sherrow O. Pinder) and “Care, Oppression and Marriage” (published in Hypatia). She received her PhD in political science from the University of Chicago.

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.

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.