Many academics work on issues of social justice, and in this politically tumultuous moment, we want to ask: What is our social responsibility as academics? What does it mean to assume this responsibility?
In response to the untimely suspension of all Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature programs at Stony Brook University, the final graduate conference (co-sponsored by Minorities and Philosophy, NSSR) will be an interdisciplinary event where we aim to confront the limitations of our position as academics and conceive possibilities for moving beyond those limitations.
Schedule
9:45–10:15 Participant Registration/ Coffee & Bagels
10:15–10:30 Opening Remarks
10:30–12:00 Panel 1: Humanities & Political Insight
10:30–11:00 Amy Cook (Associate Professor of Theatre Arts and English, Stony Brook University): “Disciplinary Futures and the Political Impact of Counter Casting”
11:00–11:30 Jack Wilson (PhD Student History, UCLA): “The View from the Waste Land: Poetry as Anti-Totalitarian Critique in Postwar Japan and Beyond”
11:30–12:00 Sabrina Tremblay-Huet (LLD Student Université de Sherbrooke, Visiting Research Fellow Fordham School of Law): “Human Rights and the Trap of Speaking for Others: Law in Literature as a Better Source of Resistance Discourse?”
12:00–1:30 Lunch Break
1:30–2:30 Panel 2: Institutional Critique
1:30–2:00 Jonathan Rawski (PhD Student Linguistics, Stony Brook University): “Pirates and Emperors: On Publishers, Journalists, and Academic Elites”
2:00–2:30 Forrest Deacon (PhD Student, Politics, The New School for Social Research): “Foucault’s Clinic and the Academy: Systems of Truth, Intelligibility, and Repetition”
2:30–2:45 Coffee Break (light refreshments)
2:45–3:45 Panel 3: The Praxis of Academics
2:45–3:15 Andrew Dobbyn (PhD Student Philosophy, Stony Brook): “Praxis Makes Perfect: Why Politics Isn’t like Riding a Bike”
3:15–3:45 Laura Pérez (Postdoctoral Fellow in Philosophy, Cornell University Society for the Humanities): “The Objects of Philosophical Inquiry as Public Entities”
3:45–4:00 Coffee Break (light refreshments)
4:00–5:00 Keynote: Professor Patrice Nganang (Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature, Stony Brook University, Visiting Professor Princeton University): Title TBA
5:00–5:15 Closing Remarks
5:15–6:30 Reception (wine and refreshments)
Presented by The New School for Social Research.
The Minorities and Philosophy (MAP) Chapters of Columbia, The New School, Rutgers, CUNY, NYU, and Princeton invite submissions from graduate students and postdoctoral fellows from underrepresented groups for a workshop series (NY-MAPWorks) in spring 2018.
Dates: Jan 30th (NYU), Feb. 20th (New School), March 6th (CUNY), April 17th (Columbia), May 8th (NYU), 7-9:30pm.
Submission Guidelines:
To apply, please compete the following by December 15th, 2017:
- Send an extended abstract of 750-1,000 words (.pdf or .doc), prepared for blind review, suitable for a 25-30 minute presentation to a general philosophical audience to nymapshop@gmail.com.
- Provide your contact information by completing this google form.
Applications will only be accepted from individuals from groups underrepresented in academic philosophy.
Accepted participants will be notified by January 14th. For further details, see our philpapers posting at https://philevents.org/event/show/37294.
Apology constitutes an essential part of the hard work of being an imperfect moral agent, over time and amongst others. Apology is one component of our “reparative responsibilities” (Bell 2012), of responding well to one’s past wrongdoing, and is more broadly part of the ongoing effort to come to terms with what one’s deeds will mean for one’s life (Williams 69). So how is this work achieved? In this paper I argue that the basic structure of apology is more puzzling, because more paradoxical, than has been recognized. I argue that in apologizing one must at once identify with one’s wrong action, in order to take moral responsibility for it, and at the same time dis-identify with it, in order to morally reject it. That is, I must at once own and disown what I did. While the paradox of forgiveness has been widely discussed, the paradoxicality of apology has been almost entirely overlooked. I end the paper by proposing that the paradox need not undermine the practice; rather, there is, I suggest, an internal connection between apology’s very instability and the possibility of moral change.
PhD student Mariam Matar will respond.
Presented by the NYC Wittgenstein Workshop
The New School for Social Research Graduate Student Conference in Philosophy
Discourse concerning the role of bridges and walls has become commonplace in our contemporary political scene. Xenophobic, racist, and nationalistic calls for the building of walls are opposed by calls to construct bridges by those seeking to form coalitions of solidarity and resistance. An example of this is given by the way in which colonialism/imperialism has repeatedly used ‘bridges’ as Trojan horses of sorts, by means of which distances were lessened and inequality worsened. Thus, this conference wishes to explore the normative consequences of the ubiquitous discourse of epistemic and geographic stratification by interrogating the way in which this metaphor is used—implicitly and explicitly—within philosophy, to the extent that the latter, as a frame of epistemological and experiential articulation, also builds its own bridges and walls.
It is with this in mind that at this year’s NSSR Graduate Student Philosophy conference we wish to provide a platform for a very particular kind of ‘philosophical investigation’ in which a vast range of approaches concerning the significance and use of spatial metaphors within philosophical debates could take place. Such an investigation of margins, bridges, walls, localization and beyond should be undertaken in a manner that makes room for ontological, ethical, epistemological, phenomenological, political and psychoanalytic discourses. To this end, we encourage full liberty and creativity with how this topic could be approached. This is because we conceive this investigation as an open, interdisciplinary kind of quest whose aim will be to rethink the way in which we conceive of boundaries, gaps, stages and common spaces for the purpose of interrogating the tensions underpinning our current political discourse, while also showing the ways in which these affect the way in which we conceive of Philosophy.
Possible Topics (This list is in no way exhaustive):
- Walls and Bridges as Philosophical Metaphor
- Migration and (In)Justice
- Decolonial Theory and the Use of Walls/Bridges
- The role of Bridges and Walls in the construction of Imagined communities
- Walls/Bridges and Political Membership
- Walls and Solidarity
- Walls/Bridges and Globalization
- Social Epistemology and Imagined Walls
- Persuasion as an Epistemological Bridge
- Political Topologies and the Role of Walls/Bridges
- Privacy, Space and the Political
- Walls/Bridges and Human Rights
- Administrative Violence
- Philosophical Topologies/Political Topologies
- Space and Violence
- Localized Violence
- Violence in Bodies
- Bridges/Walls and Cross-cultural Discourse
- Digital divisions and Digital Connections
- Technology and Changing Spatial Relations
Please submit complete papers by December 20th in the form of a Word attachment (.docx) to NewSchoolOnBridgesAndWallsConf@gmail.com
Include your name, institution, and degree-program in the body of the message.
Deadline:
December 20th 2017
Word Limit: 3500
NSSR Philosophy Speaker Series Presents:
“ETHICS, ANTHROPOLOGY, AND WORDS NOT AT HOME”
Veena Das in Conversation with Alice Crary.
April 12, 2018
6:00-8:00 PM
6 East 16th Street Room D1009
CO-SPONSORED BY:
Gender and Sexuality Studies
Minorities and Philosophy
NYC Wittgenstein Workshop
The Minorities and Philosophy (MAP) Chapters of Columbia, The New School, Rutgers, CUNY, NYU, and Princeton invite submissions from graduate students and postdoctoral fellows from underrepresented groups for a workshop series (NY-MAPWorks) in spring 2018.
Dates: Jan 30th (NYU), Feb. 20th (New School), March 6th (CUNY), April 17th (Columbia), May 8th (NYU), 7-9:30pm.
Submission Guidelines:
To apply, please compete the following by December 15th, 2017:
- Send an extended abstract of 750-1,000 words (.pdf or .doc), prepared for blind review, suitable for a 25-30 minute presentation to a general philosophical audience to nymapshop@gmail.com.
- Provide your contact information by completing this google form.
Applications will only be accepted from individuals from groups underrepresented in academic philosophy.
Accepted participants will be notified by January 14th. For further details, see our philpapers posting at https://philevents.org/event/show/37294.
The Minorities and Philosophy (MAP) Chapters of Columbia, The New School, Rutgers, CUNY, NYU, and Princeton invite submissions from graduate students and postdoctoral fellows from underrepresented groups for a workshop series (NY-MAPWorks) in spring 2018.
Dates: Jan 30th (NYU), Feb. 20th (New School), March 6th (CUNY), April 17th (Columbia), May 8th (NYU), 7-9:30pm.
Submission Guidelines:
To apply, please compete the following by December 15th, 2017:
- Send an extended abstract of 750-1,000 words (.pdf or .doc), prepared for blind review, suitable for a 25-30 minute presentation to a general philosophical audience to nymapshop@gmail.com.
- Provide your contact information by completing this google form.
Applications will only be accepted from individuals from groups underrepresented in academic philosophy.
Accepted participants will be notified by January 14th. For further details, see our philpapers posting at https://philevents.org/event/show/37294.
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.
Miranda Fricker is Presidential Professor of Philosophy at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research is mainly in Moral Philosophy, and Social Epistemology with a special interest in virtue and feminist perspectives. She is the author of Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing; and co-editor of a number of edited collections, the most recent of which is The Epistemic Life of Groups: Essays in the Epistemology of Collectives. She was Director of the Mind Association, which overseas the philosophy journal MIND, from 2010-2015; and currently serves as Moral Philosopher on the Spoliation Advisory Panel, a UK government body of expert advisers that considers claims concerning loss of cultural property during the Nazi era. She is an Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Philosophical Association; and a Fellow of the British Academy.
John Dewey, in his resistance to foundational individualism, declares that individual autonomy so conceived is a fiction; for Dewey, it is association that is a fact. In his own language: “There is no sense in asking how individuals come to be associated. They exist and operate in association.” In a way that resonates with Confucian role ethics, the revolutionary Dewey particularizes the fact of associated living and valorizes it by developing a vision of the habitude of unique, defused, relationally-constituted human beings. That is, he develops a distinctive, if not idiosyncratic language of habits and “individuality” to describe the various modalities of association that enable human beings to add value to their activities and to transform mere relations into a communicating community.
In Confucian role ethics, Dewey’s contention that association is a fact is restated in a different vocabulary by appealing to specific roles rather than unique habitudes for stipulating the specific forms that association takes within lives lived in family and community—that is, the various roles we live as sons and teachers, grandmothers and neighbors. For Confucianism, not only are these roles descriptive of our associations, they are also prescriptive in the sense that roles in family and community are themselves normative, guiding us in the direction of appropriate conduct. Whereas for both Confucianism and Dewey, mere association is a given, flourishing families and communities are what we are able to make of our facticity as the highest human achievement.