Unless otherwise noted, colloquia are held in the Seminar Room at Gateway Bldg, 106 Somerset Street, 5th Floor at 3:00 p.m.
Fall 2015
- 09/01/2015 Fall 2015 Semester Begins
- 09/18-9/20/15 Fitelson Workshop 9:00 am-5:00 pm
- 10/2-10/3/15 Lepore’s Semantics Workshop all day
- 10/08/2015 Imogene Dickie (U of Toronto)
- 10/22/2015 Patrick Byrne Lecture
- 10/30-11/1/15 Aristotle Workshop all day
- 11/05/2015 Inaugural Mellon Lecture, Prof. Ted Sider (5:30-10:00 pm)
- 11/12/2015 Victor Tadros (U of Warwick)
- 12/10/2015 Scott Soames (USC)
- 12/17-12/18/15 Philosophy & Emily Dickinson Workshop (Liz Camp & CCA) 10:00 am-5:00pm
RECONCILING NOMINALISM AND PLATONISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS
Department of Philosophy, Columbia University
April 22–23, 2016
FRIDAY APRIL 22 (Philosophy Hall, Room 716)
14:00–14:15
Achille Varzi (Columbia University), Marco Panza (IHPST)
Welcome and Introduction
14:15-15:45
John Burgess (Princeton University)
Reconciling Anti-Nominalism and Anti-Platonism in the Philosophy of Mathematics
15:45–16:00 Break
16:00-17:30
Haim Gaifman (Columbia University)
Reconfiguring the Problem: “Platonism” as Objective, Evidence-transcendent Truth
17:30-19:00
Sébastien Gandon (Université Blaise Pascal)
Describing What One is Doing. A Philosophy of Action Based View of Mathematical Objectivity
SATURDAY, APRIL 23 (Philosophy Hall, Room 716)
9:30–11:00
Mirna Džamonja (University of East Anglia and IHPST)
An Unreasonable Effectiveness of ZFC Set Theory at the Singular Cardinals
11:00–11:30 Break
11:30–13:00
Hartry Field (New York University)
Platonism, Indispensability, Conventionalism
13:00–15:00 Lunch
15:00-16:30
Justin Clarke-Doane (Columbia University)
The Benacerraf Problem in Broader Perspective
16:30–17:00 Break
17:00-18:30
Michele Friend (George Washington University)
Is the Pluralist Reconciliation between Nominalism and Platonism too Easy?
18:30 Conclusions
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.
The new season of Brooklyn Public Philosophers is upon us! Ask a Philosopher is coming back in a big way, and we have some, dare I say, dope af talks lined up for the semester – Elvira Basevich on W.E.B. Du Bois and the metaphysics of race, Christia Mercer on women in the history of philosophy, Chris Lebron on the philosophy of Black Lives Matter. Coming up on February 23rd at 7:00 P.M., Ben Abelson (Mercy College) will be kicking things off with a talk on what science fiction can teach us about what it means to be a person (human or otherwise). Here’s more about the talk, in Dr. Abelson’s own words:
“Persons in Science Fiction”
There is a crucial distinction between the concepts “human” and “person”. To be a person, one need not be a member of the human species. Science fiction is filled with a variety of non-human persons, including artificially intelligent robots, intergalactic aliens, super-evolved animals, and more. But what are the qualities that are essential to something counting as a person? This talk will examine the nature of personhood by considering myriad examples from sci-fi literature and film.
As usual, we meet at the Dweck Center at the Grand Army Plaza branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. Bring a date! Or at least bring a sci-fi nerd! Come prepared with your favorite example of a marginal case of a person!
See you there, I hope!
Upcoming events:
3/23 – Elvira Basevich, “W.E.B. Du Bois’s Racialism and Two Liberal Conceptions of Plurality” @ the Dweck Center // 7:00 P.M.
4/27 – Christia Mercer on women in the history of philosophy @ the Dweck Center // 7:00 P.M.
5/18 – Chris Lebron on the philosophy of Black Lives Matter @ the Dweck Center // 7:00 P.M.
World renowned and revered French writer, literary critic, and philosopher Hélène Cixous celebrates her 80th birthday in 2017. To mark this occasion, New York University is organizing a major event that will bring Hélène Cixous to the Washington Square Campus once again, together with a number of distinguished scholars and writers from Europe and the United States. Cixousversaire, A Celebration of Hélène Cixous will include, from September 14 to 16, 2017, a keynote address by Hélène Cixous; a discussion with Hélène Cixous, Karen Finley, and Avital Ronell; a screening by filmmaker Olivier Morel; readings by director Daniel Mesguich; a roundtable on Cixous’ theater, including Anne Bogart, Hélene Cixous, and Judith Miller; and presentations by Cixous specialists Peggy Kamuf, Marta Segarra and others; and writers Camille Laurens and Bertrand Leclair.
For further information, contact Melanie Hackney at 212-992-9848 or Tom Bishop at 212-998-8710.
Speakers:
Yann LeCun (Data Science, NYU; Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research)
Gary Marcus (Psychology, NYU; Founder, Geometric Intelligence)
Thursday, October 5, 5:00 – 7:00 pm
Tishman Auditorium
NYU School of Law
40 Washington Square South
No registration required. Seating is first-come first-served.
A talk by Anne Simon, moderated by Eliza Zingesser
Zoopoetics aims to highlight the plurality of stylistic, linguistic and narrative tools used by writers to express the plurality of animal activities, affects and worlds, as well as the intricacies of the interactions between humans and animals. Such an approach helps to understand that all life forms are in a relationship of dependence with an archè (Husserl)—an origin, a reason, a refuge, a dwelling, the Earth— and that animals are more stylistic or rhetorical beings than we usually think of them as being. Evolution and biomorphic logics allow us to intuitively understand other species related to us, to share many of their emotions and expressions, and to be able to account for them through specific human means, such as evocative and figurative language. The lecture will show that perspectivism, metamorphosis and hybridity are universal patterns and experiences that literature embodies in different ways.
Anne Simon is a Research Director at the Centre National de la Recherche Française and a Member of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), where she leads the Project « Animots » ; an author of Trafics de Proust, 2016 and La rumeur des distances traversées, to be published in 2018. Her research focuses on disturbing relationships between philosophy and literature, and on zoopoetics.
Brooklyn Public Philosophers is excited to announce a new program that we’ve put together for the fall! In addition to the Philosophy in the Library speaker series (stay tuned), we’re also starting a philosophy screening and discussion series that I’m calling Onscreen until I come up with a better name.
On Saturday, September 15th at 1:00 PM at the Flatbush Library (22 Linden Blvd.), we’ll be screening Ex Machina, a very good, very creepy movie about hubris, relationships, and what it takes to have a mind. Ian Olasov (CUNY), a.k.a. the person writing this post, will lead a brief discussion of it afterwards.
The screening is free. There will be free popcorn. It will be fun.
Einstein once remarked, “Any fool can know. The point is to understand.” Indeed, discovering the true nature of reality may ultimately hinge on grasping the nature and essence of human understanding. What are the fundamental elements or building blocks of human understanding? And how will superintelligent machines challenge our ideas about cognition, reality, and the limits of human understanding?
The 21st century has seen rapid advancements in the realm of artificial intelligence, or AI, which aims to generate a synthetic capacity to mimic and even surpass human knowledge. But beyond the creation of programs that detect statistical patterns in vast data sets, it remains to be seen whether AI can formalize the basic elements of human understanding into a system of rules that could then be applied in computer programs. Such “knowledge engineering” would constitute a significant breakthrough, enabling machines to share some of our cognitive abilities rather than merely imitating the results of our thinking. These advancements in AI may ultimately force us to confront more profound questions about what it means to be human.
Logician/mathematician Roger Antonsen and computer science pioneer Barbara J. Grosz join Steve Paulson to break down the fundamental elements of human understanding and analyze what lies ahead on the horizon of AI.
*Reception to follow
This event is part of the Conversations on the Nature of Reality series.
Moderated by journalist Steve Paulson, Executive Producer of Wisconsin Public Radio’s To the Best of Our Knowledge, this three-part series at the New York Academy of Sciences brings together leading scientists and thinkers to explore the fundamental nature of reality through the lens of personal experience and scientific inquiry.
To learn more about each lecture and to purchase tickets, click on the links below.
- The Mystery of Our Mathematical Universe, Wednesday, October 10, 2018
- Human Cognition and the AI Revolution, Thursday, December 6, 2018
- Reality is Not As it Seems, Thursday, February 7, 2019
Deutsches Haus at NYU and the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute will jointly present the conference “Political Theology Today as Critical Theory of the Contemporary: Reason, Religion, Humanism,” to be held at Deutsches Haus at NYU, from February 15-17. Reverend Eugene F. Rivers III will deliver one of the keynote speeches. For a detailed conference schedule, please click here.
Across the globe the liberal logic of capitalism and technocracy has seemingly triumphed, and with it a culture of secularism, now the dominant ideology of the liberal establishment that prefers progress to tradition, an individualized identity to a sense of shared belonging, and free choice to common purpose. As much as this regime has produced wealth, it has also generated inequality and dissatisfaction. The populist insurgency that is sweeping the West is in large part a repudiation of this secular politics, opening the space for a post-liberal political theology. A resurgence of religion is underway that marks the failure of the secularization thesis and the need for alternative cultural resources, beyond positivism, to understand the place of humanity within the cosmos. Is this our new “Great Awakening”?
Amid the crisis of rationalism, critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas have sought to rescue the project of a reasonable humanism from the twin threats of religious fundamentalism and secular naturalism. Yet Habermas’s conception of postsecularity remains residually secularist because he does not permit faith to make any substantive or critical contribution to public discussion that could undermine the primacy of formal, procedural reason. In response Pope Emeritus Benedict invoked Adorno and Horkheimer’s dialectic of enlightenment because the slogan “reason alone” leads to the dissolution of reason—to the conclusion that only will and power have any reality. The only way to avoid this outcome is to recall—so Benedict’s argument in his much-commented but poorly understood 2006 Regensburg address—that the West’s commitment to humanist reason is grounded in the classical and Christian idea that human rationality participates in the infinite reason of transcendence. Otherwise the rational is but the illusion of our own and of nature’s will to power.
The 2019 Telos Conference will discuss the role of political theology as critical theory of the contemporary: the reappearance of faith in civic life. The focus will not be on intellectual history but rather on how faith is reshaping politics and culture today.
Please note: Sessions taking place at Deutsches Haus at NYU will be open to the general public. Attendance for break-out sessions will be limited to conference participants who have registered with the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute only. Events at Deutsches Haus are free and open to the public. If you would like to attend this event, please send an email to deutscheshaus.rsvp@nyu.edu. As space at Deutsches Haus is limited, please arrive ten minutes prior to the event to ensure you get a good seat. Thank you!