Please join us in conversation with Philip Kitcher as we discuss themes from his new book, Life after Faith. While atheist writers gleefully cataloguing religion’s intellectual and moral vices have been numerous of late, too few have treated their target with the respect it deserves for successfully providing emotional comfort and social cohesion. Kitcher changes that, acknowledging religion’s virtues even as he constructs a secular humanist alternative to replace it.
Talk with him about this on Monday, February 23, 2015 at 7:00pm at Book Culture, 536 West 112th St., NY, NY (212) 865-1588
8th Annual Conference of the American Association of Mexican Philosophers will take place at Columbia this spring (April 24-26). The Association is mainly a group of Mexican philosophers based in the United States. We hold a conference every year to discuss our work and get to know each other better, as well as the philosophical community of the hosting institution. The topics of the talks reflect the interests of each year’s presenters, and this year they go from the philosophy of mind & language, to the philosophy of physics, metaphysics, and metaethics.
CUNY PhD Students Adriana Renero and Javier Gómez-Lavín will present.
8th Annual Conference
Columbia University, New York
April 24-26, 2015
FRIDAY, APRIL 24
Room: 304 Hamilton
8:00 – 9:00 am Coffee & Bagels
9:00 – 10:15 am Jorge Pablo Oseguera Gamba (Florida State University) “Debunking Ethical Intuitionism” Commentator: Carlos Núñez (Stanford University)
10:35 – 11:50 pm Viorica Ramírez de Santiago (UNAM) “An alternative interpretation of Plato’s beard” Commentator: Azenet López (University of Miami)
12:00 – 2:10 pm Lunch
2:10 – 3:15 pm Elías Okón (UNAM) “Benefits of objective collapse models for cosmology and quantum gravity”
Commentator: Porter Williams (Columbia University)
3:45 – 5:00 pm Sofía Ortiz-Hinojosa (MIT) “Transformative Experiences and Imagination”
Commentator: Carla Merino (Arizona State University)
SATURDAY, APRIL 25
Room: 716 Philosophy Hall
9:00 – 10:00 am Coffee & Bagels
10:00 – 11:15 am Ricardo Mena (UNAM) “Vagueness”
Commentator: Martín Abreu (NYU)
11:45 – 1:00 pm Teresa Bruno (Syracuse University) “Externalism meets Alienation”
Commentator: Jesús Aguilar (Rochester Institute of Technology)
1:00 – 3:00 pm Lunch
3:00 – 4:15 pm Felipe de Brigard (Duke University) “Vivacity and the distinction between memory and imagination”
Commentator: Javier Gómez-Lavín (CUNY)
8:00 pm Dinner at a local restaurant
SUNDAY, APRIL 26
Room: 716 Philosophy Hall
9:00 – 10:00 am Coffee & Bagels
10:00 – 11:15 am Miguel Ángel Sebastián (UNAM) “A Naturalist Model of the Subjectivity of Experience”
Commentator: Sergio Gallegos (MSU Denver)
11:45 – 1:00 pm Adriana Renero (CUNY) “Introspection”
Commentator: Laura Pérez (Harvard University)
1:00 – 3:00 pm Lunch
3:00 – 4:15 pm Agustín Rayo (MIT) (co-authored with Adam Elga) “Fragmentation and Information Access”
Commentator: Nemira Gasiunas (Columbia University)
The 1st Latinx Philosophers Conference is an initiative of some Latin American PhD candidates in the Columbia Philosophy Department. We hope to initiate a tradition of annual conferences to serve the following ends. First, to foster the creation and development of a Latinx Philosophers Network in the United States. This network, in turn, will help us provide a space for camaraderie and collaborative work, as well as identify and pursue the common interests of Latinx Philosophers in the U.S. Second, to provide a space for discussing issues of particular relevance to Latinx from a philosophical perspective.
The conference will take place on April 29-30 and will be organized around two clusters of topics. The first day will be devoted to issues in Epistemology, Logic, Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science. The second day will focus on Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy, Philosophy of Race, and Latin American Philosophy. We are happy to announce that Otavio Bueno and Jorge Gracia will be our keynote speakers for each day, respectively.
We invite graduate students who identify as Latinx or who are interested in forming part of the Latino/a Philosophers Network to submit papers on any of the topics mentioned above. We encourage submissions by women. We also encourage submissions that discuss issues relevant to the Latinx experience.
Papers should not exceed 4000 words (or the equivalent of a 30-minute presentation). They should be prepared for blind review and sent as a PDF file to latinophilosophersnetwork@gmail.com. In a separate PDF attachment, please include your name, academic affiliation, email address, telephone number, paper title, and an abstract of no more than 250 words. Any questions can be directed to César Cabezas (cgc2125@columbia.edu), or Ignacio Ojea (ignacio.ojea@columbia.edu). Acceptances will be announced by March 15.
This event is supported by:
MAP (Minorities and Philosophy), and
The Center for Race, Philosophy and Social Justice at Columbia University
THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY
Welcomes:
TAO JIANG (Rutgers University)
With responses from:
ESKE MØLLGAARD (University of Rhode Island)
Please join us at Columbia University’s Religion Department on FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 23rd at 5:30PM for his lecture entitled:
“Between Philosophy and History: The Challenge of Authorship to Classical Chinese Philosophy in the Western Academy”
The tension between philosophical and historical inquiries has been a perennial problem. Within the modern academy, the disciplines of philosophy and history are protected by their respective institutional norm and practice, without much need for interaction. However, Chinese philosophy, situated between Sinology and philosophy in the western academy, has encountered extraordinary challenges from both Sinologists (most of whom are historians) and (Western) philosophers. At the root of the difficulty facing Chinese philosophy lies its very legitimacy, torn between the historicist orientation of Sinology and the presentist orientation of mainstream contemporary Western philosophy. Such divergent disciplinary norms have put scholars of Chinese philosophy in a difficult position. On the one hand, they have to defend the philosophical nature, or even the philosophical worthiness, of classical Chinese texts in front of contemporary Western philosophers whose interests tend to be more issue-driven and in the philosophical integrity of ideas, rather than the historicity of ideas. At the same time, these scholars of Chinese philosophy, when dealing with Sinologists, need to justify the basic premise of their philosophical approach to the classics due to the historical ambiguity and compositional instability of these texts.
This presentation focuses a particular aspect of Sinological challenge to the modern project of classical Chinese philosophy through the lens of authorship, using the Zhuangzi as a case study. It explores profoundly troubling philosophical implications for texts whose authorship is in doubt as it undermines the legitimacy of the project of Chinese philosophy, at least in the eyes of many Sinologists. In order to counter such a challenge, I develop a new heuristic model of authorship and textuality in order to carve out a more robust intellectual space for the philosophical discourse on Chinese classics from the dominant historicist Sinological discourse. To do so, I propose a heuristic model to distinguish two sets of scholarly objects operative in Sinology and philosophy respectively, namely original text versus inherited text, historical author versus textual author, and authorial intent versus textual intent. These two sets of scholarly objects are related, at times overlapping but often irreducibly distinct, with the former in the pairs belonging to Sinologists and the latter to philosophers.
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 23
5:30-7:30 pm
Rm. 101, 80 Claremont Ave, Columbia University
Hagop Sarkissian (City University of New York, Baruch College | Graduate Center) will present his paper
“Experimental Philosophy and the Confucian Philosophical Tradition: A Brief History and Comparison.”
ABSTRACT:
Projects in contemporary experimental philosophy can be fruitfully divided into three broad types (Sarkissian and Nichols 2016): 1) Psychological Modeling aims to uncover the psychological mechanisms that underwrite and generate the application of concepts (such as free will and intentionality); 2) Extended Conceptual Analysis attempts to expand, verify, and strengthen traditional armchair methods by gathering data from a wider range of competent users of relevant concepts; and 3) Philosophical Restrictionism aims to curtail the ambition of traditional philosophical methods by showing that they recruit processes that are, in some way or other, unreliable. The latter two projects share in common a suspicion of traditional armchair analysis, or the reliability of methods that rely on intuition to a significant degree.
Experimental philosophy as so described is a development of the last twenty years or so—a reaction against many of the methods that gained prominence in Anglo-American philosophy departments during the last half of the 20th century. Hence, it is natural to think of experimental philosophy as a movement that has developed only at a certain time and place. In this paper, though, I argue that it is possible to see this basic dynamic—that is, the tension between intuition-driven philosophical methods on the one hand, and suspicion-driven experimentalism on the other—as expressed in a tradition far removed from the current context.
Historically, philosophers working within the Confucian tradition of Chinese thought have been divided about not only the substantive commitments of Confucian ethics, but also the proper methods of acquiring moral knowledge. Indeed, this latter division can be seen as analogous to the contemporary divide in Anglo-American analytic philosophy. A debate emerges in the classical period of Chinese thought among the Confucian thinkers Mengzi (or Mencius, ca. 4th century BCE) and Xunzi (ca. 3rd century BCE) concerning the proper role of innate knowledge or intuition on the hand, and systematic investigation on the other, in moral development. After lying dormant for several centuries, this debate re-emerges in later Neo-Confucian thinkers such as Zhu Xi (12th century CE) and Wang Yangming (15th to 16th century CE), who develop this dynamic in a sophisticated manner. I outline this debate, suggest reasons for its emergence and persistence, and assess the extent to which it is similar to (or departs from) the contemporary experimental philosophy debate.
All are welcome to attend. More information is available from the organizers: Ari Borrell , Tao Jiang, On-cho Ng, or Deborah Sommer.
Columbia Fall 2018 Colloquium Series
Laura Franklin-Hall (New York University)
Reception to follow
Thursday, November 15th, 2018
Simona Aimar (UCL)
Title: TBA
4:10 PM – 6:00 PM, 716 Philosophy Hall
Reception to follow