Professor Kristin Boyce (Mississippi State University) will present her paper, “A Philosophical History of Analytic Philosophy of Literature“; graduate student Elliot Trapp (NSSR) will respond.
February 27th Friday 4:30-6:30, 80 Fifth Ave. Room 529, The New School
Abstract:
The history of analytic philosophy of literature could be written as a narrative of the efforts to formulate and solve a series of interrelated paradoxes. This kind of approach will strike many as uncontroversially part and parcel of an analytic philosophy of literature. I argue, though, that this is neither the only nor the best form that a distinctively “analytic” philosophy of literature can take. Instead of writing a survey of paradoxes formulated and solutions attempted, I shift to what I call “the paradox of philosophy and literature.” On one hand literature (along with the arts more generally) has consistently been of marginal importance as an object of philosophical reflection. On the other, or so I will argue, it has been of special methodological importance for analytic philosophy from the beginning.
The marginalization of aesthetics within analytic philosophy is no secret. By contrast, the methodological centrality of the literary arts for analytic philosophy has not until recently been recognized at all. From its inception, the analytic tradition has worked hard to disentangle itself from other humanistic enterprises, especially art and religion, and to secure its proximity to modern science. Recent work in the history of early analytic philosophy by Cora Diamond and others, though, has made it possible to see how deeply tied the “analytic” ways of doing philosophy that emerged were not just to developments in the sciences, but to those in the literary arts and criticism as well. I argue that this work has important implications for aesthetics generally, and for philosophy of literature in particular, that have not yet been recognized or explored. A philosophical self-understanding, which more adequately reflects the proximity of the work of philosophy to the work of literature, should make possible new and by some measures better ways of reflecting philosophically on art.
*For a copy of the paper, please email nycwittgensteinworkshop@gmail.com
This seminar is a discussion of a pre-circulated paper. It can be found on the GIDEST site for attendees to read in advance.
Orit Halpern presents “The Architecture Machine: Demoing, the Demos, and the Rise of Ubiquitous Computing.”
Orit Halpern is Assistant Professor in History at The New School of Social Research and Eugene Lang College, and an affiliate in the Design Studies Graduate Program at Parsons, The New School for Design.
Her research centers on histories of digital media, cybernetics, cognition and neuroscience, architecture, planning, and design. Her recent book Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Duke, 2014) is a genealogy of big data and interactivity. Halpern’s published works and multimedia projects have appeared in numerous venues including the Journal of Visual Culture, Public Culture, BioSocieties, Configurations, and at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany. She has also published essays in numerous exhibition catalogues.
Halpern is currently working on exhibitions — http://furnishingthecloud.net/ — and has a number of future projects on histories of “smartness,” self-organization as a virtue and a democratic ideal, and the relationship between calculation, territory, and utopia throughout history.
This event is part of the bi-weekly GIDEST Seminars presented by the Graduate Institute of Design, Ethnography, & Social Thought at The New School.
David Kishik (Emerson College), Dr Zed Adams (New School for Social Research)
Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, Joe Gould’s Oral History of Our Time, and Joseph Mitchell’s memoir each existed more in their respective author’s imagination than on the written page. In this Friday evening event, David Kishik will discuss the significance of such imaginary literary works for his own Manhattan Project (Stanford, 2015), which draws upon Benjamin, Gould, Mitchell, and others to develop a theory of Manahattan as the capital of the twentieth century. At the event, Kishik will be introduced and interviewed by New School faculty member Zed Adams.
A number of philosophers working on Buddhist traditions have recently explored similarities between the cultivated experience of not-self, and the clinical experience of depersonalization. In this talk, I will offer some reflections on this theme. But my primary aim will be to push a similar kind of exploratory project one step further. Drawing on tools from cognitive and computational neuroscience, as well as insights from Yogācāra Buddhist philosophy, I will explore some of the most significant similarities and differences between anomalous experiences evoked by meditation, and anomalous experiences that are commonly labeled as hallucinations. I will then argue that understanding how such experiences are produced offers a powerful framework for thinking about the socially and historically situated nature of everyday experience.