Women in academia, law, medicine, and business earn less than men in most subfields and are promoted more slowly. Women in academia are underrepresented among invited speakers at conferences and among award winners. Two concepts – gender schemas and the accumulation of advantage – together explain women’s slower advancement compared to men’s. A review of current observational and experimental data suggests that although people have meritocratic and egalitarian intentions, those very intentions interfere with meritocratic and egalitarian behavior. Valian presents experimental data that demonstrate how gender schemas – held by men and women alike – produce subtle overvaluations of men and undervaluations of women. She reviews the small imbalances in the treatment of men and women that add up to major disparities in success. She offers a hypothesis about the origin of gender schemas.
There are remedies, both at an institutional level and at an individual level. Institutions can improve their procedures for hiring, retaining, and promoting men and women to achieve genuinely fair organizations that make full use of everyone’s talents. Individuals can act more in keeping with their values and be more effective in their professional lives.
Virginia Valian is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Hunter College and is a member of the doctoral faculties of Psychology, Linguistics, and Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the director of the Language Acquisition Research Center, which has been funded by the NSF and NIH. She is also the director of the Hunter College Gender Equity Project, which has been funded by NSF, NIH, and the Sloan Foundation.
Dr Valian works in the psychology of language and gender equity. In language, Dr Valian works in two areas. One area is first language acquisition, where Dr Valian performs research with the aim of developing a model of acquisition that specifies what is innate, how input is used by the child, and how the child’s syntactic knowledge interacts with knowledge in other linguistic and extra-linguistic domains. Dr Valian’s second language area is the relation between bilingualism and higher cognitive functions in adults.
In gender equity Dr Valian performs research on the reasons behind women’s slow advancement in the professions and proposes remedies for individuals and institutions. She is currently particularly interested in who receives awards and prizes, and invitations to speak at conferences. In a 2014 Chronicle of Higher Education article on ‘What book changed your mind?’, Valian’s book, Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women was one of 12 non-fiction books published in the last 30 years that was showcased. Her current book with Abigail Stewart, titled, The Inclusive Academy: Achieving Diversity and Excellence, will be published by MIT Press.
Dr Valian’s most recent talks were at Stony Brook University, the University of Illinois, Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, and Birkbeck College in London. Her evidence-based approach has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Nature, Scientific American, The Women’s Review of Books, and many other journals and magazines.
SWIP-Analytic’s session, “Women in Philosophy: Publishing, Jobs, & Fitting In” will be a roundtable featuring Elise Crull (City College, CUNY), Una Stojnic (NYU), and Denise Vigani (Drew University). They will discuss work habits, publishing, and job searches, among other things.
Elise Crull is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy, City College, CUNY. She received a B.Sc in Physics from Calvin College, and holds an M.A. in Philosophy and Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Notre Dame. Among her primary interests is the historical and philosophical foundations of quantum mechanics (cf. her book, The ‘Einstein Paradox’: Debates on Nonlocality and Incompleteness in 1935, Cambridge University Press 2017, and an edited volume, Grete Hermann: Between Physics and Philosophy, Springer 2017 – both with G. Bacciagaluppi). She has also published on the metaphysics of quantum decoherence and on interpretational issues within quantum gravity and relativistic cosmology, and enjoys puzzling over more general topics at the intersection of physics and ontology.
Una Stojnic is a Bersoff Assistant Professor/ Faculty Fellow in Philosophy at NYU and a Research Fellow in Philosophy at the School of Philosophy at ANU. In fall 2017, she will join the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy. She earned her PhD in Philosophy and a Certificate in Cognitive Science from Rutgers University in 2016. She mainly works in philosophy of language, formal semantics and pragmatics of natural languages, and philosophical logic. Her research aims at understanding and modeling language and linguistic communication. This situates her work within a network of traditional questions in philosophy of language, as well as within a set of empirical questions in linguistics and cognitive sciences.
Denise Vigani is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Drew University. She recently earned her Ph.D. in Philosophy and Certificate in Women’s Studies from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her primary areas of research are virtue ethics and moral psychology. Her current research agenda is to offer an empirically plausible moral psychology of neo-Aristotelian virtue. While virtue may be an ideal that is hard to cultivate and perhaps rarely fully attained, she contends that it is very much a human ideal. It does not, as some have alleged, require us to become super-human or to cultivate traits that are beyond our psychological capabilities.
Everyone (men & women, philosophers & non-philosophers) is welcome at our public events.
Crafting Ancient Identities: Mythological and Philosophical Approaches to the Self and Society in Antiquity
Tenth Annual Graduate Conference in Classics
Friday, March 31, 2017
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Keynote Speaker: Professor Kathryn Morgan, UCLA
In Greek and Roman antiquity, mythology and philosophy helped individuals understand their world and define their place in society. From the supernatural exploits in Homer to the etiological accounts of Ovid, mythology humanized natural phenomena and preserved cultural history. Philosophy, meanwhile, reflects an effort to systematize knowledge and answer questions about our place in the world. Both mythological narratives and philosophic thought participated in the crafting of ancient identities, whether as individuals, communities, or nations. The Romans, for example, turned to mythology to identify themselves as the descendants of Aeneas, just as the Athenian philosophers attempted to define what it meant to be a citizen.
The PhD/MA Program in Classics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York invites graduate students in Classics or related fields to submit abstracts of papers that explore how mythology and philosophy contribute to the development of identity in the Greco-Roman world.
Possible paper topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Etiological myths
- Autochthony and migration stories
- Philosophic schools and communities
- Philosophical poetry and the Presocratics
- Reception and transformation of myth in antiquity
- Hero cults and religious communities
- The role of myth in philosophical discourse
Please send an anonymous abstract of approximately 300 words as an email attachment to cunyclassicsconference@gmail.com by January 16, 2017. Please include, in the body of the email, your name, university affiliation, and the title of the presentation. Speakers will have 15 minutes to present. Selected applicants will be notified in early February. Submissions and questions will be received by conference co-organizers Federico Di Pasqua and Thomas Moody.
Even though ancient philosophy and rhetoric have many overlapping interests (education, persuasion, politics, etc.), their relationship has long been a contentious subject, especially among ancient philosophers. Contemporary scholarship on the topic is equally divided: philosophers tend to approach the topic primarily through the works of Plato and Aristotle and regard rhetoric (and rhetorical compositions) as a second-rate notion/discipline which has little interest in shedding light on philosophically relevant questions about human nature and society, whereas classicists research oratorical compositions to get a better understanding of Greek prose style, historical details and context, but often shy away from philosophical questions that the texts might hint at. This workshop aims to bring together scholars working on ancient rhetoric and argumentative techniques on the one hand, and scholars working on ancient philosophy, on the other in order to open up a space for a constructive engagement with philosophy/rhetoric, one which might enrich our understanding of ancient texts as well as the context in which they were produced.
Confirmed speakers: Jamie Dow (Leeds), Richard Hunter (Cambridge), Joel Mann (St Norbert), Jessica Moss (NYU), Usha Nathan (Columbia), James Porter (Berkeley), Edward Schiappa (MIT), Nancy Worman (Barnard). All papers will be followed by a response and general discussion.
Attending the workshop is free, but in order to have an idea of numbers it would be greatly appreciated if those interested in participating in the event would email the organizers, Laura Viidebaum and Toomas Lott.
This Workshop is generously sponsored by the Department of Philosophy (NYU), Department of Classics (NYU) and NYU Center for Ancient Studies.
The 2017 Departmental Faculty Lecture will be delivered by Prof. Giorgio Pini on September 12 at 4:30 pm in Flom Auditorium of the Walsh Family Library. The lecture is free and open to the public.
In a famous passage from Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Sextus Empiricus presents four different accounts of the conditional in increasing strength. Contemporary analogues have been identified (subject to various degrees of controversy) for the first three, but the last, which even fails to satisfy A>A, has proved elusive. In this talk, I discuss ways of modeling this heterodox conditional. Taking a cue from Sextus, I regard the characteristic feature of this conditional as one of proper (conceptual) containment and approach it using the framework of containment logic. Different implementations of this approach are discussed and evaluated both for their historical and technical merits. In the course of the talk, I will discuss (among other things) the relationship between Sextus’ third and fourth accounts, how Kripke semantics can be and has been used to deepen our understanding of various ancient conditionals, and how ancient notions of containment might yield interesting new (old) perspectives on contemporary containment logic.
Saul Kripke Center, Young Scholars Series: Yale Weiss, “Sextus Empiricus’ Fourth Conditional and Containment Logic”
SWIP-Analytic Schedule for Spring 2018
Here is a sneak peak at our exciting line-up of speakers and events for Spring 2018. Some times and rooms TBA.
Elanor Taylor, February 8, CUNY Graduate Center, The Committee for Interdisciplinary Science Studies, Room 5307, 4:00-6:00pm
Virginia Aspe Armella and Ma. Elena García Peláez Cruz (co-sponsored with SWIP-Analytic Mexico), March 2, NYU Room 202, 2:00-4:30pm
Round Table Women in Philosophy: Publishing, Jobs, and Fitting In (co-sponsored with NYSWIP), March 8, CUNY Graduate Center, The Committee for Interdisciplinary Science Studies, Room 5307, 4:30-7:30pm
Graduate Student Essay Prize Winner Presentation, April 12
Sophie Horowitz (UMass, Amherst), April 26
It makes the world go round. It is the root of all evil. It offers security. It enslaves. It will protect you. It will corrupt you. To have some is necessary, but no amount seems sufficient. It is reputedly unable to buy love, yet the lack of it can destroy relationships. What price would you pay to accumulate as much as you can? And can anyone actually afford to forsake it?
Join us as we try to measure the true cost of money.
Thursday, April 12, 2018 at 8p.m. At Las Tapas Bar and Restaurant, 808 W 187th Street, New York, NY 10033. (Take the A Train) Admission is $15, which includes one complimentary tapa and drink. Reservations are recommended. (646.590.0142)
Leo Glickman is a partner in Stoll, Glickman & Bellina, LLP. He has devoted his professional life of over two decades to holding the powerful accountable and obtaining justice for the underserved. As a civil rights litigator, he has successfully represented hundreds of people whose rights have been abused by police and correction officers. He has also upheld the rights of protestors, successfully litigating settlements for high-profile Occupy Wall Street participants.
Jane LeCroy is a poet, performance artist and educator who fronts the band The Icebergs and was a part of Sister Spit, the famed west coast women’s poetry troupe. Since 1997 Jane has been publishing student work and teaching writing, literature and performance to all ages through artist-in-the-schools organizations such as Teachers & Writers Collaborative and DreamYard, and as adjunct faculty at the university level. Her poetry book, Names was published by Booklyn as part of the award winning ABC chapbook series, purchased by the Library of Congress along with her braid! Signature Play, her multimedia book from Three Rooms Press, features a poem that was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Joseph S. Biehl, earned earned a B.A. in philosophy from St. John’s University and a Ph.D. from the Graduate School and University Center, CUNY. He has written on ethics, meta-ethics, and politics. He has taught philosophy in New York and in Cork, Ireland, and is a member of the Governing Board and former co-director of the Felician Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs. He is the founder and executive director of the Gotham Philosophical Society and Young Philosophers of New York.
A panel discussion of Critical Theories and the Budapest School, edited by Jonathan Pickle and John Rundell.
Moderator:Dimitri Nikulin
Panelists: Andrew Arato, Richard J. Bernstein, Jonathan Pickle, and Agnes Heller
Presented by The New School for Social Research.
Deutsches Haus at NYU and the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute will jointly present the conference “Political Theology Today as Critical Theory of the Contemporary: Reason, Religion, Humanism,” to be held at Deutsches Haus at NYU, from February 15-17. Reverend Eugene F. Rivers III will deliver one of the keynote speeches. For a detailed conference schedule, please click here.
Across the globe the liberal logic of capitalism and technocracy has seemingly triumphed, and with it a culture of secularism, now the dominant ideology of the liberal establishment that prefers progress to tradition, an individualized identity to a sense of shared belonging, and free choice to common purpose. As much as this regime has produced wealth, it has also generated inequality and dissatisfaction. The populist insurgency that is sweeping the West is in large part a repudiation of this secular politics, opening the space for a post-liberal political theology. A resurgence of religion is underway that marks the failure of the secularization thesis and the need for alternative cultural resources, beyond positivism, to understand the place of humanity within the cosmos. Is this our new “Great Awakening”?
Amid the crisis of rationalism, critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas have sought to rescue the project of a reasonable humanism from the twin threats of religious fundamentalism and secular naturalism. Yet Habermas’s conception of postsecularity remains residually secularist because he does not permit faith to make any substantive or critical contribution to public discussion that could undermine the primacy of formal, procedural reason. In response Pope Emeritus Benedict invoked Adorno and Horkheimer’s dialectic of enlightenment because the slogan “reason alone” leads to the dissolution of reason—to the conclusion that only will and power have any reality. The only way to avoid this outcome is to recall—so Benedict’s argument in his much-commented but poorly understood 2006 Regensburg address—that the West’s commitment to humanist reason is grounded in the classical and Christian idea that human rationality participates in the infinite reason of transcendence. Otherwise the rational is but the illusion of our own and of nature’s will to power.
The 2019 Telos Conference will discuss the role of political theology as critical theory of the contemporary: the reappearance of faith in civic life. The focus will not be on intellectual history but rather on how faith is reshaping politics and culture today.
Please note: Sessions taking place at Deutsches Haus at NYU will be open to the general public. Attendance for break-out sessions will be limited to conference participants who have registered with the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute only. Events at Deutsches Haus are free and open to the public. If you would like to attend this event, please send an email to deutscheshaus.rsvp@nyu.edu. As space at Deutsches Haus is limited, please arrive ten minutes prior to the event to ensure you get a good seat. Thank you!