The first speaker for the Fall 2014 Thursday Workshop is Professor Alice Crary, chair of NSSR Philosophy who will deliver a talk entitled: “The Value of Humanity: Reflections on Cognitive Disability and the Dead”
Alice Crary is a moral philosopher best known for Beyond Moral Judgment(Harvard, 2007) which addresses the moral dimension of language. While finishing her doctorate in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, she co-edited and wrote the introduction to the volume, The New Wittgenstein, which continues to influence debates over Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Her interests include moral philosophy, Wittgenstein, philosophy and literature, feminism and philosophy, and philosophy and animals. Crary is currently finishing a book on humans, animals, and ethics titled Inside Ethics. Crary is a member of a number of international research groups devoted to subjects such as feminist philosophy and ordinary language philosophy.
Alexander Nehamas (Department of Philosophy, Humanities, and Comparative Literature, Princeton University), will give a lecture entitled “Nietzsche, Intention, and Action”
Beginning from Nietzsche’s thought that “in order to become what one is one must not have the faintest idea what one is,” Nehamas will try to articulate his understanding of intention and action.
From the abstract: “A large swath of human behavior cannot possibly be explained if we assume, as is common both in everyday talk and in philosophy today, that an intention is a mental state that precedes, causes, and rationalizes our actions. Most interesting behavior, beyond lifting an arm or turning on a light—behavior encapsulated in ”becoming what one is” and most clearly observable in the production and interpretation of works of art—requires that intention, whatever exactly it is, comes into being along with the actions with which it is connected. That has important consequences for the interpretation of both Nietzsche and human action more generally.”
In the seventeenth century Descartes fundamentally transformed mathematics, and this transformation enabled in turn Newton’s revolution in the practice of fundamental physics. It was left to Kant, in the eighteenth century, to revolutionize the practice of philosophy. In nineteenth-century Germany, the practice of mathematics was again transformed, this time by Riemann, Dedekind, and others, and this transformation enabled in turn both Einstein’s revolution in the practice of fundamental physics and the emergence of quantum mechanics. Has philosophy similarly been again revolutionized? Some, I think, would say that it has as evidenced, and catalyzed, by the development of mathematical logic and concomitant rise of analytic philosophy. But this is a mistake. Mathematical logic, in particular, our standard first-order quantificational logic, as well as the philosophical work to which it has given rise, remains merely Kantian. The revolution in philosophy that is needed in the wake of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century revolutions in mathematics and physics has yet to happen. I aim to help it along not only by showing that it has not yet been achieved but also by uncovering some of the resources required for a transformed logic.
In continuation with our conference last spring, The New York Phenomenology Research Group once again invites regional phenomenologists to a works in progress conference emphasizing collaborative research. This event will take place on Saturday, February 27th at The New School for Social Research in New York City.
The theme for our conference is phenomenology and the mind. We construe this topic broadly, as covering anything from the intersections between phenomenology and psychoanalysis, philosophy of mind, neuroscience, etc. to the way in which the phenomenological mind operates experientially in its own right, or with respect to, embodiment, aesthetic experience, design, identity, gender/race/ability, and more.
This conference encourages participants to research and work through ideas with one another rather than having them present completed papers in a traditional conference style. It’s our sincere hope to bring together students working through similar problems in phenomenology, in order to build a supportive network of emerging phenomenologists and philosophers in the New York area. For this reason, this event will not host any keynote speakers. Rather, the structure of this conference will be focused on encouraging student research and community in a collaborative environment.
We welcome short, in-progress papers that deal with topics in both the canonical tradition and phenomenological methods as mediums of inquiry. Papers should be no longer than 10-15 minutes when presented, and will be organized into panels (4-5) according to topic. Each panel will be approximately two hours, with the first hour dedicated to brief presentations and the second hour to open conversation, Q&A, and collaborative research. Group research and panel proposals are also welcome.
Please submit your paper, prepared for blind review, to phenomenology@newschool.edu along with any questions you may have, by January 8, 2016.
Thursday Night Workshop @ New School
Omri Boehm Descartes on Impossible Thinking | 9.8.16
Ursula Renz The Value of Thinking for Oneself: Spinoza and Kant on Epistemic
Autonomy | 9.15.16 In Cooperation with international workshop: Spinoza and Kant.
Metaphysics, Ethics, Politics
Paul Kottman Love as Human Freedom | 9.22.16
Jessica Moss No Beliefs about Forms: Doxa in Plato and Aristotle | 9.29.16
Lydia Goehr Moses and the Monochrome. Thought Experiments in the Theology
of Modernism | 10.6.16
Angelica Nuzzo Hegelian Reflections on a Time of Crisis | 10.13.16
Moshe Halbertal : ‘As a’| 10.20.16
Jason Stanley Non-Ideal Philosophy of Language | 10.27.16
Monique David-Menard Body of the drives, bodies in politics: anonymous or
impersonal? | 11.10.16 In cooperation with SIPP’s 9 th Annual conference | Anybody:
The Matter of the Unconcious
Seyla Benhabib Legalism: A Reconstruction and Critique of Shklar’s Theory | 11.17.16
Michael Della Rocca The Elusivness of the One and the Many in Spinoza | 12.1.16
Markus Gabriel How to Concieve the Mind After Naturalism’s Faliure(s) | 12.15.16
Hegel returns to the theme of human bodily expression repeatedly throughout his writings. While his early Phenomenology of Spirit offers a scathing criticism of contemporary physiognomy and phrenology, his later works contain a more nuanced view of the expressive capacities of the human body. In his late philosophy of mind, Hegel is particularly concerned with the question of how mental states which involve complex intellectual and social capacities, such as moral emotions, come to be expressed in the human body. This talk takes Hegel’s discussion of human bodily expression in his late philosophy of mind as a prism through which to approach a central question raised by Hegel’s philosophy: the question of how, for Hegel, spirit and reason on the one hand relate to nature on the other hand. I suggest that Hegel’s account of human bodily expression shows in paradigmatic fashion how he attempts to find a theoretical space between dualism and naturalistic reductionism. Furthermore, I argue that there are reasons to believe that this attempt fails: ultimately, the phenomenon of human bodily expression therefore emerges as a problem for Hegel which puts into question his central philosophical ambitions.
JULIA PETERS is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tübingen, Germany. Her research interests include Kant’s moral philosophy, German Idealist philosophy (especially Hegel), aesthetics and moral philosophy.
She is the author of Hegel on Beauty (2015); she has also published articles on Kant and Hegel in the European Journal of Philosophy, the British Journal for the History of Philosophy and the Journal of the History of Philosophy (among other periodicals).
Presented by The New School for Social Research (NSSR) Philosophy Department.
Wilfrid Sellars (1912-1989) is well-known for his “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (EPM) in which he criticizes empiricist theories of knowledge acquisition. Empiricism, he argues there, relies on what he calls “the Myth of the Given.” The Myth of the Given is often understood as a dilemma for epistemological foundationalism. However, Sellars also remarks that not even Kant and Hegel (“that great foe of immediacy” EPM §1) were entirely free of “the entire framework of givenness”). This suggests that the Myth of the Given is not limited to the epistemological foundationalism of pre-critical dogmatic metaphysics. I shall argue (following James O’Shea) that the Myth of the Given is primarily a problem about how we should account for our cognitive awareness of the categorial structure of experience. I shall then argue that Sellars should be interpreted as arguing for a non-semantic mind-world relation, which he calls “picturing”, to explain how the Myth of the Given should be overcome.
By doing so Sellars shows how to avoid both the Given and idealism, thus overcoming a long-standing opposition within the history of philosophy since Kant. This argument is also relevant for the divide between “left-wing Sellarsians” (Rorty, McDowell, Brandom, Williams) and “right-wing Sellarsians” (Churchland, Dennett, Millikan); the left-wing Sellarsians developed the criticism of the Myth of the Given and the right-wing Sellarsians developed picturing into an account of animal cognition. On my interpretation, this divide itself is unfortunate because it leads us to overlook a fundamental coherence to Sellars’s views.