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This talk focuses on two concepts that are central to discussions of minority politics and social justice: intersectionality and the epistemic privilege of the oppressed. Both concepts are often misunderstood as leading to separatism and essentialism, but this paper shows why they should be seen instead as crucial components of an adequate social theory and a cogent theory of social identity, theories that can be the basis of a progressive politics of coalition and solidarity.

Satya P. Mohanty was born in Orissa, India, and was educated in India and the United States. His work in literary criticism and theory has focused on issues that are shaped by his bi-cultural background and his commitment to a vision of culture as “a field of moral inquiry” (on this view of culture, see chapter 7 of Literary Theory and the Claims of History). In the field of literary and cultural theory, Mohanty is best known for his “post-positivist realist” theory, a position that is simultaneously a critique of postmodernist theory and an elaboration of a radical alternative to it. Postpositivist realism draws on recent analytic philosophy and has major implications for such key theoretical questions as the nature of social identity, the value of objectivity as an epistemic goal, and the epistemic status of our moral and political values.  Mohanty’s theory of identity has been the subject of a major book published by the U of California Press, a collection of essays by literary scholars, intellectual historians, and philosophers that is titled Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism (edited by Paula Moya and Michael Hames-Garcia).

Mohanty has edited or coedited the following books: Colonialism, Modernity, Literature: A View From India; Identity Politics Reconsidered; The Future of Diversity; and the forthcoming China, India and Alternative Asian Modernities.  He is completing a book titled Thinking Across Cultures, to be published by Duke Univ Press.

Presented by The New School for Social Research (NSSR) Philosophy Department.

Drawing on literary accounts of grief, I argue that by paying close attention to the phenomenology of grief we can arrive at a better understanding of the ethical significance of our emotions. We find, I argue, that the rationality of a person’s state of mind is partly determined by its place in the person’s life considered over time. More specifically, I argue that grief is a stage in a fitting process of repair and I show that various disagreements about the normal, healthy, or fitting duration of grief reflect underlying ethical disagreements about what process of repair is fitting in response to the loss of a loved person. Thus, by attending to grief philosophically we find a new space of ethical reflection that has not been acknowledged, namely, reflection about fitting processes of repair.

According to my ameliorative definition, misogyny is, roughly, 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), there is also the flipside of misogyny which deserves to be considered: the exonerating narratives and excessive sympathy of which comparatively privileged men tend to be the beneficiaries. I call the latter ‘himpathy.’

This talk departs from the main example of himpathy I discuss in my recent book, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny: 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.) But, as I will argue, this turns out to be only one variety of himpathy among many. Himpathy comprises a family of emotional biases that distort our moral thought and attention in ways that not only serve to obscure, but may even plausibly cause, damaging forms of misogyny—e.g., the hostility girls and women face when they try to testify against or seek justice vis-à-vis an antecedent recipient of himpathy for his misogynistic behavior, sexual violence, and so on. The talk will close by exploring some implications of this claim about moral/social psychology for the future of the #MeToo movement.

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

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

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.