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
Dan Kabat (Lehman College) will be giving a talk on the Black Hole Information Loss Paradox on Wednesday, May 6th. The talk will be held from 4:00-6:00pm in Room 716, Philosophy Hall (Columbia). Hope to see you all there!
Title TBA
Dan Kabat, Lehman College
Abstract TBA
There will be a dinner after the talk. If you are interested, please email nyphilsci@gmail.com as soon as possible so that I can make the reservation for the appropriate number of people (please note that all faculty and grad students are welcome, but only the speaker’s dinner will be covered). If you have any other questions, please email nyphilsci@gmail.com.
Science can explain the body, but can it explain the mind? The failure of scientists and philosophers to reach a consensus explanation of consciousness has led to a revival of interest in theories once widely dismissed, such as panpsychism. Robert Wright, Visiting Professor of Science and Religion at Union Theological Seminary, explores the mind-body problem with renowned philosopher David Chalmers and the MacArthur-Award-winning novelist and philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein.
DAVID CHALMERS is Professor of Philosophy and co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at New York University. He is best known for his work on consciousness, especially for his formulation of the “hard problem” of consciousness and his arguments against materialism, and is the author of the books The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, The Character of Consciousness, and Constructing the World. Chalmers has also written extensively about artificial intelligence and computation, metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of language.
REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN is a philosopher and novelist and the recipient of numerous honors, including a MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’ and the National Humanities Medal, awarded this past September by President Obama at a ceremony at the White House, as well as having been named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association. Her books include The Mind-Body Problem, Thirty-Six Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, and, most recently, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away. She has also written studies of philosophers Kurt Gödel and Baruch Spinoza. As of 2016 Goldstein will be a Visiting Professor at New York University.
ROBERT WRIGHT is the author, most recently, of The Evolution of God, which was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His other books include The Moral Animal, which The New York Times Book Review named one of the ten best books of 1994, and Nonzero, which Bill Clinton called “astonishing” and instructed White House staff members to read. In 2009 Wright was named by Foreign Policy magazine as one of the top 100 global thinkers. Wright has written for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Foreign Policy, and the op-ed pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Financial Times. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages, and his awards include the National Magazine Award for Essay and Criticism. Wright is Visiting Professor of Science and Religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York, and is editor-in-chief of the websites Bloggingheads.tv and MeaningofLife.tv.
This event is part of “Contentions,” an interview and debate series hosted by Robert Wright, Visiting Professor of Science and Religion at Union Theological Seminary. Through conversations with prominent intellectuals, “Contentions” examines the relationship between science and spiritual questions.
Robert Wright, Visiting Professor of Science and Religion at Union Theological Seminary, interrogates prominent physicist and ‘new atheist’ Lawrence Krauss on the origins of the universe, quantum weirdness, and the limits of scientific knowledge.
LAWRENCE KRAUSS is director of the Origins Project and Professor of Physics at Arizona State University. He has won numerous international awards and is the only physicist to have received the top awards from all three U.S. Physics Societies. He is the author of over 300 scientific publications and is also the author of 9 books including bestsellers The Physics of Star Trek and A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing. Krauss has recently delved into the film world as executive producer and subject of The Unbelievers, a documentary film that discusses science and reason. He has dedicated his time, throughout his career, to issues of science and society and has helped spearhead national efforts to educate the public about science, ensure sound public policy, and defend science against attacks at a variety of levels. In 2015 Krauss was named Humanist of the Year.
ROBERT WRIGHT is the author, most recently, of The Evolution of God, which was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His other books include The Moral Animal, which The New York Times Book Review named one of the ten best books of 1994, and Nonzero, which Bill Clinton called “astonishing” and instructed White House staff members to read. In 2009 Wright was named by Foreign Policy magazine as one of the top 100 global thinkers. Wright has written for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Foreign Policy, and the op-ed pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Financial Times. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages, and his awards include the National Magazine Award for Essay and Criticism. Wright is Visiting Professor of Science and Religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York, and is editor-in-chief of the websites Bloggingheads.tv and MeaningofLife.tv.
This event is part of “Contentions,” an interview and debate series hosted by Robert Wright, Visiting Professor of Science and Religion at Union Theological Seminary. Through conversations with prominent intellectuals, “Contentions” examines the relationship between science and spiritual questions.
Speakers:
Nicola Clayton, PhD, Professor of Comparative Cognition, Cambridge University
Additional speakers forthcoming.
This event is free and open to the public. Reception to follow.
This event is part of the Presidential Scholars in Society and Neuroscience, Seminars in Society and Neuroscience series.
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
Embodied cognition theorists emphasize the role of the body and the environment in constituting mental processes. By examining how our brains interact with the rest of our bodies and how our entire bodies interact with the environment, we can learn much about human behavior and the human mind. Tools can be understood as extensions of the body, and in some cases as becoming part of the body. Does our mind extend to our tools? How does this change our world? How should we understand this relationship? In order to help us think through these fascinating questions, we will hear from an archaeologist who has theorized about the evolution of this human capacity, a biomedical engineer who uses computers to make robotic prostheses more fluidly extend human bodies, and a music theorist who shows how musical instruments become part of our bodies.
This event is free and open to the public, however, registration is required via Eventbrite.
Speakers:
— Lambros Malafouris (Johnson Research and Teaching Fellow in Creativity, Cognition and Material Culture; University of Oxford)
— Sunil Agrawal (Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Rehabilitation/Regenerative Medicine; Columbia University)
— Jonathan De Souza (Assistant Professor of Music Theory; University of Western Ontario)
Respondent:
— Lan Li (Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience, Center for Science & Society)
This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Science and Society and the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities.
How is the ancient exhortation to “know thyself” related to consolation, virtue, and the study of nature? How did the commitment to self-knowledge shift over the centuries in writings by Islamic, Jewish, Christian, and early modern natural philosophers? How did medieval women contribute to modern notions of self, self-knowledge, and knowledge of nature? This conference explores the meditative “reflective methodology” from its ancient roots, through medieval Christian, Muslim, and Jewish traditions to the so-called “new” methodologies of early modern science. Speakers include Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Pierre Force, Clémence Boulouque, Christia Mercer, and Pamela Smith.
Points of focus will be: (1) the relation between the ancient imperative to “know thyself” and medieval concerns to reflect on one’s self as a means to find ultimate truths; (2) the meditative genre as it developed from Augustine’s Confessions through Christian and Islamic spiritual exercises to late medieval Christian meditations and early modern kabbalist writings; (3) the continuity between medieval meditations and the reflective methodology of early modern science; and (4) the meditative genre’s afterlife in Freud, Foucault, Arendt, and contemporary science.
Conference co-sponsored by the Center for New Narratives in Philosophy, the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, the Departments of Philosophy, French, English and Comparative Literature and the Maison Française
To download a PDF about this event click here.
It is commonly claimed that mind-body dualism is entirely foreign to China—or “the East” more generally. This talk will explore how engaging with the cognitive sciences and digital humanities undermines claims such as this, and more broadly can help us to do our work as scholars of comparative philosophy. Embracing an embodied view of human cognition gets us beyond strong social constructivism and its accompanying cultural essentialism. In addition, new tools from the science and digital humanities can, in combination with traditional archaeological and textual evidence, allow us to more accurately and rigorously assess claims about the philosophical and religious historical record. Specifically, I will focus on novel large-scale textual analysis techniques, online databases for sharing scholarly knowledge, and work in contemporary evolutionary anthropology and cognitive science relevant to the mind-body issue. I will conclude by considering how early Chinese views of mind-body relations do, in fact, differ from some modern Western conceptions, and how taking a more reasonable view of cultural differences can allow us to genuinely learn from other cultures.
With a response from:
Paul Goldin (University of Pennsylvania)