Ursula Renz, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria, gives a lecture entitled “The Value of Thinking for Oneself: Epistemic Autonomy in Spinoza and Kant”
In her talk, Renz discusses the views of Spinoza and Kant on epistemic autonomy. Departing from a brief sketch of Descartes’ epistemic individualism, she will argue that while both Spinoza and Kant dismissed Descartes’ views on concept formation, they remain loyal to his reasons for epistemic individualism. She will conclude by showing how these reasons may help us to understand why enlightenment, understood as a philosophical and not just historical concept, essentially relies on the exercise of individual judgments, requiring epistemic autonomy rather than only freedom of speech and thought.
About the speaker:
Ursula Renz is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria, where she teaches classes in Theoretical Philosophy (epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy) and Early Modern Philosophy.
She is author of Die Rationalität der Kultur: Kulturphilosophie und ihre transzendentale Begründung bei Cohen, Natorp und Cassirer (2002), Die Erklärbarkeit der Erfahrung: Realismus und Subjektivität in Spinozas Theorie des menschlichen Geistes (2010), editor of Self-Knowledge. A History (forthcoming 2017) and coeditor of the Handbuch Klassische Emotionstheorien (2008, second edition 2012) and Baruch de Spinoza: Ethica more geometrico demonstrata. A Collective Commentary. She has written numerous articles on Early Modern Philosophy (Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Shaftesbury), Kant, the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism (Cohen, Natorp, Cassirer), on meta-philosophy and the history of philosophy, and more recently, also on self-knowledge, testimony and the problem of epistemic trust.
Her book Die Erklärbarkeit der Erfahrung has been awarded the Journal of the History of Philosophy Book Prize 2011, and from 2014-2015, she received an Humboldt Fellowship for Advanced Researchers to spend three terms at the University of Konstanz. She recently received a grant from the Austrian Research Foundation (FWF) for her project on Spinoza and the Concept of the Human Life Form.
For more information see her academia page: https://uni-klu.academia.edu/UrsulaRenz
This Thursday Workshop is in cooperation with the international workshop: Spinoza and Kant. Metaphysics, Ethics, Politics
Sponsored by the Department of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research.
Jason Stanley, Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, gives a lecture entitled “Non-Ideal Philosophy of Language”
Science requires idealizations. Physicists, for example, often work with ideal models of reality that abstract from the existence of friction. The theory of meaning, both in philosophy and linguistics, is no different. Virtually all work in the theory of meaning presupposes an idealized model, which Stanley calls the standard model, in which various idealizations have been made to focus on attention on the putatively most central aspects of linguistic communication. In this talk, part of co-authored work with the linguist David Beaver, Stanley isolates five idealizations that are made by the vast majority of work in the theory of meaning, and argues that these idealizations are scientifically problematic and politically flawed. Stanley uses the critique of the standard model to sketch a new program for the theory of meaning, one that places at the center of inquiry into linguistic communication precisely the features of communication that the idealizations of the standard model seem to almost deliberately occlude.
About the speaker:
Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. Before coming to Yale in 2013, he was Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers University. He has also been a Professor at the University of Michigan (2000-2004) and Cornell University (1995-2000). His PhD was earned in 1995 at the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT (Robert Stalnaker, chair), and he received his BA from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1990.
Professor Stanley has published four books, two in epistemology, one in philosophy of language and semantics, and one in social and political philosophy. His first book was Knowledge and Practical Interests published in 2005 by Oxford University Press. It was the winner of the 2007 American Philosophical Association book prize. Professor Stanley’s second book, Language in Context, also OUP, was published in 2007. This is a collection of his papers in semantics published between 2000 and 2007 on the topic of linguistic communication and context. His third book, Know How, was published in 2011, also with OUP. Professor Stanley’s fourth book, How Propaganda Works, was published by Princeton University Press in May, 2015. It was the winner of the 2016 PROSE award for the subject area of philosophy.
http://www.aesop.com/usa/the-fabulist/jason-stanley/
Sponsored by the Department of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research.
The concept of invisibility is powerful, pervasive, and multifaceted. It is paradoxically double-edged, affording the possibility of great power as well as the complete absence of power. It is both magical and a spur to scientific experimentation and exploration. It is a central concept in science—whether as something to be achieved or overcome. It is evident in the development of technologies that allow us to find new evidence of the invisibly small (e.g. the Large Hadron Collider revealing the Higgs boson) and the invisibly far-away (a new planet in the solar system); conversely, it is also evident in devices that allow us to render objects invisible, devices that may have implications for warfare and for medicine.
In addition, invisibility is present in the social sciences, as evidenced most clearly by the economic concept of the “invisible hand” and by the troubling phenomenon of social invisibility, which affects large groups of people who are ignored, underrepresented and under-served by the dominant culture. But that is not all. The concept of invisibility has also played a central role in the thinking of many philosophers, literary figures, and in theological thinking.
Thus this conference is designed to explore the multitude of ways in which invisibility figures in our intellectual and social lives, as a thread running through our human endeavors, and the ways in which the power of invisibility can lead to a quest for understanding as well as render us altogether disenfranchised. The first three sessions will address the concept of invisibility in different fields, and the concluding session will bring together experts from various fields who will seek to underscore the shared aspects of invisibility that account for the important role it has played in our lives and in our thinking in the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. Each session will include a Q&A in which panelists can address questions to each other and audience members can address their questions directly to speakers.
This conference will offer a unique opportunity for experts to reach across fields to better understand their own explorations of invisibility, through discussion with others, and with the public.
This conference is made possible with generous funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
This event is part of the Nth Degree Series with the The New School.
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Session of note:
3:00 – 5:30 PM
Location: Theresa Lang Student and Community Center, 55 W. 13th St, NY, NY
SESSION 2: Invisibility in Cultural Context
This session examines invisibility in the context of the humanities, economics, and philosophy. Discussion will range over the philosophical explanatory power of invisibility, e.g. Kant’s noumenon or Plato’s eidos; its role in economic theory, e.g. “the invisible hand”, its place in literature, e.g Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, and in mythology, e.g. the Ring of Gyges
Adam Bradley, Associate Professor of English, University of Colorado, Boulder
Wendy Doniger, Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions and the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago
Mark Johnston, Walt Cerf Professor of Philosophy, Princeton University
William Milberg, Dean of the New School for Social Research, The New School
Moderator: Simon Critchley, Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy, The New School
Todd May is Class of 1941 Memorial Professor of the Humanities at Clemson University. He is the author of fourteen books of philosophy, most recently A Fragile Life and A Significant Life, both from University of Chicago Press.
Abstract:
Ineffability is in the air these days, and has been for some time. In many areas of Continental philosophy, it is the very ethos in which thought is conducted. I argue that the realm of the normative, at least, is deeply linguistic. In contrast to the attempt of some thinkers to remove the normative from the conceptual or the linguistic, I try to show that it is central to normativity to have a linguistic reference, a reference rooted precisely in the sense of conceptual categories that so concern thinkers of the ineffable.
Presented by The New School for Social Research (NSSR) Philosophy Department.
In this paper I draw attention to Sophie de Grouchy’s 1798 distinction between negative and positive right, which, upon examination, prefigures the famous distinction between positive and negative liberty. I analyse her treatment, and I argue that she should be accorded a significant place in the discussions of the tradition(s) of reflection on the famous distinction.
First, I frame my discussion by revisiting Isaiah Berlin’s famous lecture and a recent editorial by Jason Stanley and Vesla Weaver; I note the presence of a paternal liberal tradition going back to Constant which gets invoked alongside the famous distinction between the two concepts of liberty. Insofar as a tradition can be conceived as a lineage or an offspring, it is striking that the matriarchs are absent from it.
Second, I discuss De Grouchy’s neo-Lockean analyses of justice and property rights, which form the context in which she introduces her distinction between positive and negative right. I illuminate her views by way of comparison with the writings of Rousseau and Adam Smith.
Third, I offer evidence and analysis of De Grouchy’s version of the distinction and show how it can be mapped onto the more famous distinction. Fourth, I close by arguing that if there is a liberal tradition worth reviving and extending, De Grouchy ought to have an honoured place in it.
Eric Schliesser (PhD, Philosophy, The University of Chicago 2002) is Professor of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam. He publishes widely on early modern philosophy (especially Spinoza and Hume) and science (including political economy, especially Newton and Smith), philosophy economics, the history of feminism, and so-called meta-philosophy. He has just published Adam Smith: Systematic Philosopher and Public Thinker (OUP) and edited numerous volumes, including most recently Sympathy: A History of a Concept and Ten Neglected Classics of Philosophy (both with OUP).
Presented by The New School for Social Research (NSSR) Philosophy Department.
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.
We often make our thoughts clear to ourselves in the process of putting them into words. In this lecture I introduce a new puzzle about this process—one that’s reminiscent of the famous paradox about inquiry in Plato’s Meno. The puzzle is that, on the one hand, coming to know what we’re thinking seems to require finding words that would express our thought; yet, on the other hand, finding such words seems to require already knowing what we’re thinking.
I consider and reject two possible solutions to this puzzle. The first solution denies that language contributes to our knowledge of our thoughts. The second solution denies that we have a fully formed thought that we try to articulate in the first place. The failure of these solutions points to a positive account of the role of language in the pursuit of self-knowledge, on which language mediates between two different “formats” or modes of thought. Among the broader implications of this account is a richer conception of the aims and methods of philosophy.
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 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
9:15 – 9:30 Coffee & Opening Remarks
9:30 – 10:50 Anna Katsman: Freighted Love
11:00 – 12:20 Federica Gregoratto: Eros and Freedom Today
12:20 – 1:30 Lunch Break
1:30 – 2:50 Sara Macdonald: The Art of Friendship: Hegel and Plato
3:00 – 4:20 Gal Katz, “Love’s Rage Is Shame”: Hegel on Sex
4:20 – 4:45 Break
4:45 – 6.05 Paul Kottman: Love as Human Freedom
New York German Idealism Workshop
A joint undertaking of the philosophy departments of Columbia University & the New School for Social Research presents:
MATTERS OF LOVE: A CONFERENCE