Join us for an evening of accessible philosophical thought and erudite fun. Former pro skater and USD philosophy professor Nick Riggle’s debut title, On Being Awesome: A Unified Theory of How Not to Suck draws on pop culture, politics, history, and sports to to illuminate the ethics and culture of awesomeness and pinpoint its origins in America. Philosopher Aaron James (UC Irvine), a longtime globetrotting surfer and author of the bestselling Assholes: A Theory, returns with Surfing with Sartre: An Aquatic Inquiry Into a Life of Meaning, using the experience and the ethos of surfing to explore key concepts in philosophy. Join Nick and Aaron in conversation followed by a reception and book signing.
Hanna Pickard (Princeton)
Title: “Addiction and the Self”
4:10 PM – 6:00 PM, Philosophy Hall 716
Reception to follow
Fall 2017 Series
James Kreines (Claremont McKenna College)
Reception to follow
Thursday, October 19th, 2017
Josh Knobe (Yale University)
Title: “Norms and Normality”
4:10 PM – 6:00 PM, Philosophy Hall 716
Reception to follow
Thursday, November 16, 2017
Andrew Arlig (Brooklyn College)
Title: “On the Priority of the Part”
4:10 PM – 6:00 PM, Philosophy Hall 716
Reception to follow
Young and innocent. Innocent until proven guilty. Is the loss (or theft) of innocence a crime? Or is innocence among the mature a vice? Do the innocent make good citizens? Can innocence lost ever be regained? How are our different conceptions of innocence related? Join us in this communal investigation and help us understand.
Thursday, March 15, 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.
The 21st Annual CUNY Graduate Philosophy Conference will take place on March 23rd, 2018 at the CUNY Graduate Center (365 5th Avenue). This year’s theme is “Self and Other”, broadly construed. The program below features Dr. Akeel Bilgrami (Columbia) and Dr. Daniel Kolak (William Paterson University) as keynote speakers. Eight graduate students from departments across the U.S. and abroad will give 30-minute talks spanning a broad array of philosophical research areas.
Click the links to download PDFs of the the conference flyer and schedule of talks.
Time / Title / Speaker / Affiliation
8:30-9 AM / BREAKFAST
9-9:30 AM / Embedded Love: What it Means for / Love to Structure Your Will / Hunter Gentry / University of Houston
9:30-10 AM / Animal Intimacy: Intra-Species connectivity and care in the Touch / Stephanie Mieko Struble / Western Connecticut State University
10-10:30 AM / BREAK
10:30-11AM / Foundations of Loyalty: Transcending Self and Other / Sara Pope / Fordham University
11-11:30 AM / Self as Other: On the Interpretation of Mirror Self-Recognition / Pengbo Liu / University of Massachusetts
11:30 AM -12:30 PM / LUNCH
12:30-1:30 PM / Keynote
Inquiry and Academic Freedom: Philosophical Reflections on Current Controversies on Campuses
Akeel Bilgrami
Columbia University
1:30-1:45 PM / BREAK
1:45-2:15 PM / Other Minds in Other Traditions: The Problem of Other Minds in Plantinga and Heidegger / Ben Koons / Oxford University, Oriel College
2:15-2:45 PM / The intrinsic epistemic value of primitive introspection / Anna Giustina / Institut Jean Nicod/Ecole Normale Supérieure/PSL Research University
2:45-3 PM / BREAK
3-3:30 PM / Who Do You Speak For? And How? The Management of Identities in Online Abuse / Michael Barnes / Georgetown University
3:30-4 PM / Hospitality and the Political Economy of Care / Lisa M. Madura / Vanderbilt University
4-4:30 PM / BREAK
4:30-5.30 PM / Keynote
Open Individualism: the Five Ways
Daniel Kolak
William Paterson University
5:30 PM / RECEPTION
Fordham University Graduate Conference
The Fordham Philosophical Society invites current graduate students to submit abstracts for presentation at its upcoming conference. Our topic this year is identity and we welcome submissions from all philosophical fields and interests. Some possible areas of exploration include: logical identity, the politics of identity, identity and difference, identity and narrative, personal identity, and other themes related to the critical study of identity.
The Fordham Philosophical Society is a consciously pluralistic organization and welcomes submissions from all philosophical perspectives including, but not limited to, Ancient Philosophy, Medieval Philosophy, Modern Philosophy, Pragmatism, Analytic Philosophy, Process Philosophy, Neo-Thomism, Critical Theory, Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, and Postmodern Philosophy.
Submission Deadline: December 4, 2017
Submissions should be in the form of maximum 300 word abstracts for a paper of 3000 words with a presentation of 30 minutes. To facilitate blind review, do not include any identifying information in the abstract, but instead include your name, institutional affiliation, and phone contact in the body of your email.
All submissions and questions should be emailed to fordhamgradconference@gmail.com.
An original collection of lauded philosopher Galen Strawson’s writings on the self and consciousness, naturalism and pan-psychism.
Galen Strawson might be described as the Montaigne of modern philosophers, endlessly curious, enormously erudite, unafraid of strange, difficult, and provocative propositions, and able to describe them clearly–in other words, he is a true essayist. Strawson also shares with Montaigne a particular fascination with the elastic and elusive nature of the self and of consciousness. Of the essays collected here, “A Fallacy of Our Age” (an inspiration for Vendela Vida’s novel Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name) takes issue with the commencement-address cliche that life is a story. Strawson questions whether it is desirable or even meaningful to think about life that way. “The Sense of the Self” offers an alternative account, in part personal, of how a distinct sense of self is not at all incompatible with a sense of the self as discontinuous, leading Strawson to a position that he sees as in some ways Buddhist. “Real Naturalism” argues that a fully naturalist account of consciousness supports a belief in the immanence of consciousness in nature as a whole (also known as panpsychism), while in the final essay Strawson offers a vivid account of coming of age in the 1960s.
Drawing on literature and life as much as on philosophy, this is a book that prompts both argument and wonder.
Galen Strawson is a writer and professor of philosophy. He has published seven books of philosophy and is currently the President’s Chair in Philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin.
info soon
Pregnancy is something that affects all of us: Many of us are, have been, or will be, pregnant; and each and every one of us is the result of a pregnancy. But there remain deep and important questions about pregnancy that are yet to be answered.
What is it to be pregnant? How can we understand the complex relationship between the fetus and the mother? What are the myths and assumptions that surround the phenomenon of pregnancy? Should we challenge the medical and paternalistic interpretations of pregnancy? Are our current dominant understandings of and cultural scripts about pregnancy harmful?
Two philosophers discuss these issues regarding pregnancy through a phenomenological and metaphysical lens.
Suki Finn is a Doctor of Philosophy, working as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Philosophy Department at the University of Southampton in the UK, on the ERC funded project ‘Better Understanding the Metaphysics of Pregnancy‘. Suki is currently embarking on a Visiting Research Scholarship at New York University to continue her work on the metaphysics of pregnancy, and she also researches in the areas of metametaphysics and the philosophy of logic. Suki’s research has been published in various academic journals, books, and the popular online magazine Aeon. Her publications can be viewed on Academia or PhilPeople. Suki is also on the Executive Committee for the Society for Women in Philosophy UK, and on the Council for the Royal Institute of Philosophy.
Jennifer Scuro, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the College of New Rochelle in New York and has been recently elected to the governing board of the Cultural Studies Association. She is the author of Addressing Ableism: Philosophical Questions via Disability Studies(Lexington Books, Oct 2017) and The Pregnancy ≠ Childbearing Project: A Phenomenology of Miscarriage, (Rowman & Littlefield International, Feb 2017) a (autobio)graphic novel and feminist phenomenological analysis of pregnant embodiment, miscarriage and the labor of grief. The original tracework art from her graphic novel on miscarriage has been exhibited in several cities with the award-winning arts organization, The ART of Infertility.
This event is co-sponsored by the Gotham Philosophical Society and the CUNY Academy for the Humanities and Sciences. Admission is free and open to the public.
Wednesday, December 19, 2018 at 6:30pm, in the Martin E. Segal Theater
CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue (at 34th Street) New York, New York 10016 (212) 817-7944 cunyacademy@gc.cuny.edu
When we’re asked to give examples of philosophical questions, we’re likely to think of questions that are very, very old. Is the physical world all there is? How should I live? How do we know what we know? But some philosophical problems are quite new, made possible or urgent by new developments in science and culture. These are often the most exciting problems to think through.
On March 7th at 7:30 PM, Derek Skillings joins Brooklyn Public Philosophers to share his work on the philosophical consequences of the fact that we are holobionts – biological units composed of hosts and their associated swarms of microorganisms. If you’re interested in health, the problem of personal identity, the philosophy of biology in general, or the philosophical consequences of the fact that we’re made up of a bunch of little things which are themselves alive in particular, you’ll want to check this one out. Here’s the abstract:
“I, holobiont. Are you and your microbes a community or a single entity?”
You are a holobiont – a biological unit made up of a host and its associated microbiome (bacteria, protists, viruses and other microscopic entities). What consequences does this have for how we understand ourselves and other similar organisms? What are our spatial and temporal boundaries, and what does it mean to be a healthy holobiont? In this talk I will look at some alternatives for making sense of both holobiont individuality and “healthy holobiont/microbiome” talk. I will argue that existing accounts of human health are not appropriate for microbiomes, and that notions of ecosystem health face similar shortcomings. I will end by looking at some possibilities for understanding overall host health given the importance and ubiquity of microbiomes.
As usual, we meet at the Dweck Center at the Grand Army Plaza branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. Here’s the Facebook event! Tell everyone, please!
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.