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The extraordinary power of music to communicate complex emotions and thoughts has fascinated scholars for centuries. Music taps into cognitive mechanisms that govern our daily interactions with the world, such as expectations and violations of these expectations, and appears to have much in common with language. In addition, music plays social and ethical functions that can be understood from philosophical, historical, and cultural perspectives.

Join us for a discussion with three renowned scholars from the humanities and cognitive science who will show how these modes of inquiry bear on each other – and explain what makes music mean.

Speakers:

David Huron, Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor, School of Music & Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Ohio State University

Aniruddh D. Patel, Professor of Psychology, Tufts University

Elizabeth Tolbert, Professor of Musicology, Peabody Institute, Johns Hopkins University

Moderators:

Andrew Goldman, Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience, Columbia University

Jacqueline Gottlieb, Professor of Neuroscience, Columbia University

The event is co-sponsored by the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies and Presidential Scholars in Society and Neuroscience. Free and open to the public.

This event explores the conceptual force of metaphors in neuroscience.  How do metaphors shape how we think and communicate? How are they represented in the brain? To answer these questions, this event engages with the everyday persistence of these rhetorical tools by examining scientific studies of metaphor use and metaphors in scientific discourse.  Featuring perspectives from neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy, our speakers probe the distinction between metaphors and models that emerge from thinking and reasoning.  These models are further taken up in different social and political circumstances and are used to describe a range of phenomenon from mental health to climate change that articulate and obscure our efforts to make sense of the world.

Speakers:

Dedre Genter, Director of Cognitive Science Program, Northwestern University

Stephen Flusberg, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Purchase College, SUNY

Respondent:

Stephen Casper, Associate Professor of History, Clarkson University

Additional speakers to be announced shortly.

This study explores the increasingly troubled relationship between humankind and the Earth, with the help of a simple example and a complicated interlocutor. The example is a pond, which, it turns out, is not so simple as it seems. The interlocutor is Jean-Paul Sartre, novelist, playwright, biographer, philosopher, and, despite his several disavowals, doyen of twentieth-century existentialism. Standing with the great humanist at the edge of the pond, the author examines contemporary experience in the light of several familiar conceptual pairs: nature and culture, fact and value, reality and imagination, human and nonhuman, society and ecology, Earth and world. The theoretical challenge is to reveal the critical complementarity and experiential unity of this family of ideas. The practical task is to discern the heuristic implications of this lived unity-in-diversity in these times of social and ecological crisis. Interdisciplinary in its aspirations, the study draws upon recent developments in biology and ecology, complexity science and systems theory, ecological and Marxist economics, and environmental history. Comprehensive in its engagement of Sartre’s oeuvre, the study builds upon his best-known existentialist writings, and also his critique of colonialism, voluminous ethical writings, early studies of the imaginary, and mature dialectical philosophy. In addition to overviews of Sartre’s distinctive inflections of phenomenology and dialectics and his unique theories of praxis and imagination, the study also articulates for the first time Sartre’s incipient philosophical ecology. In keeping with Sartre’s lifelong commitment to freedom and liberation, the study concludes with a programmatic look at the relative merits of pragmatist, prefigurative, and revolutionary activism within the burgeoning global struggle for social and ecological justice. We learn much by thinking with Sartre at the water’s edge: surprising lessons about our changing humanity and how we have come to where we are; timely lessons about the shifting relation between us and the broader community of life to which we belong; difficult lessons about our brutal degradation of the planetary system upon which life depends; and auspicious lessons, too, about a participatory path forward as we work to preserve a habitable planet and build a livable world for all earthlings.

Matthew C. Ally was supposed to be an ecologist. During the same semester in which he took a required course in “Temperate Forest Ecosystems,” he took an elective philosophy course called “Tyranny and Freedom.” The rest is history. He is professor of philosophy at the Borough of Manhattan Community College of the City University of New York and coordinator of the BMCC Sustainability Studies Project. He has published articles on Sartre’s philosophy, progressive and radical pedagogy, philosophical ecology, environmentalism, and sustainability.

What constitutes evidence is rarely self-evident. We need theories to make sense of evidence—to transform patterns of physical occurrences into something meaningful, i.e., data. This relationship between theory and evidence is often at least partially opaque, particularly in a field like neuroscience that often aims to use physical evidence to characterize mental, and in some cases social, events. Neuroscience navigates this relationship by purporting to offer mechanistic descriptions of “how” mental processes operate. Yet, this inquiry relies on theoretical assumptions that are not fully tethered to data. Neuroscience can certainly generate predictions from theories that have practical implications and link them with mechanistic knowledge of the physical (e.g., anatomy and physiology). But changing the basis of our assumptions can change the kinds of questions we ask and how we interpret experimental findings. So, exactly what kind of knowledge does neuroscience offer? How independent is it from psychology? How do we navigate this potential divide, particularly in cases in which we would want to use neuroscience to characterize constructs that are heavily influenced by theoretical priors?

This event addresses this question from a range of perspectives in neurology, psychiatry, philosophy, and economics.  We consider the relationship between theory and evidence by exploring how practitioners, theorists, and experimentalists negotiate the multiple dimensions of evidence in neuroscience.

Speakers:
Peter Bearman, Jonathan R. Cole Professor of the Social Sciences, Columbia University
Suzanne Goh, Co-Founder & Chief Medical Officer, Cortica

Moderator:
Aniruddha Das, Associate Professor of Neuroscience, Columbia University

More speakers to be confirmed soon.

Free and open to the public, but RSVP is required via Eventbrite. This event is part of the Seminars in Society and Neuroscience series.

Psychopathy is a mental disorder closely associated with marked emotional dysfunctions, limited capacity for moral judgments, recidivistic offending, and poor treatment outcome. Considering its peculiar characteristics, the status of psychopathy in the field of law raises several disputes. While current criminal law holds psychopaths fully responsible and punishable for their misbehavior, some scholars argue that psychopathy is a condition that may severely compromise an individual’s moral agency and capacity for rationality. As such, it should be included among the potential excusing or mitigating factors for criminal responsibility and punishment. This argument finds additional support in the body of studies from neurocriminology showing that people who suffer from psychopathy exhibit (often severe) reduced functioning in the socio-emotional brain regions that are now known to be significantly involved in moral decision-making and prosocial behavior. The insights into the neurobiological roots of psychopathy seem to challenge even more the perennial dilemmas that have occupied the minds of legal scholars and philosophers for many years: Are psychopaths “bad” or “mad” (or both)? And how should criminal law and the justice system deal with them? This seminar aims to examine these issues and explore other contentious arguments about the status of psychopathy in the field law.

Three leading experts in neurocriminology, law, and philosophy will discuss recent neuroscientific findings in psychopathy research. The speakers will consider how these findings might contribute to the reconsideration of the responsibility of psychopathic offenders and how criminal justice should optimally respond to individuals suffering from such a controversial disorder.

Speakers:
Stephen J. Morse; Ferdinand Wakeman Hubbell Professor of Law; Professor of Psychology and Law in Psychiatry; Associate Director, Center for Neuroscience & Society; University of Pennsylvania Law School
Adrian Raine; Richard Perry University Professor, University of Pennsylvania
Katrina L. Sifferd; Professor and Chair of Philosophy, Elmhurst College

Free and open to the public, but RSVP is required via Eventbrite. This event is part of the Seminars in Society and Neuroscience series.

The paper follows and elaborates on a line of argument in my book The Confucian Political Imagination, which was published by Palgrave Macmillan this summer. I do not address the main argument of the book, but sum up a line of thought that has gradually taken form since I began to read Confucian texts. I explain what I learned about reading Confucianism from my teacher Tu Weiming, and why I could not follow the philosophical turn in American Confucian studies. I point to the importance of reading in an emphatic sense, and argue that the philosophical approaches to Confucian texts often leads to an impoverished reading of these texts. Then I provide my own suggestions towards a definition Confucian discourse. I briefly point to the historical reasons Confucian discourse is not philosophy, and finally I ask if all this really matters.

THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY

Welcomes:

Eske Møllgaard (University of Rhode Island)

With a response from:

Andrew Lambert (College of Staten Island, CUNY)

Speakers:
Amanda Pustilnik, Professor of Law, University of Maryland
Tor Wager, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Colorado Boulder

Moderators:
Federica Coppola, Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience, Columbia University
Lan Li, Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience, Columbia University

We will provide additional information as soon as possible.

Free and open to the public, but RSVP is required via Eventbrite. This event is part of the Seminars in Society and Neuroscience series.

Manuel DeLanda (NYC); Philosopher; Pratt GAUD Adjunct Professor
Graham Harman (LA); Philosopher; Distinguished Professor of Philosophy SCI-Arc

New Architectural Contexts