Calendar

Professor Veronique Foti (Penn State), will deliver a talk titled: “Nascency and Mortality as Phenomenal Non-Donation.”

Beginning with a brief historical retrospect (limited to ancient Greek and rationalist thought), this study addresses the limit phenomena of nascency and mortality. The work of Heraclitus, Plato, and Aristotle as well as Spinoza and Leibniz will serve as reference points. The question of how phenomenology has responded to this heritage is then addressed with reference to Heidegger’s Being and Time and Merleau-Ponty’s late lecture courses on Nature.

Veronique Foti is a Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Penn State. Her areas of specialization are Contemporary European philosophy, Continental Rationalism, Ancient philosophy, Philosophy of art, and Philosophy and literary theory.

Her recent publications include: Revisiting the Tragic Theater with Plato, Aristotle, and Hölderlin, Festschrift for Jacques Taminiaux, ed. Michael Gendre, forthcoming; The Aesthetic Dimension of Paideia in Plato’s Republic, Kostas Boudouris and Mikovja Knešević, eds.; Being-in-the-World and the Phenomenon of World, Robert C. Scharff, ed.,The Blackwell Guide to Heidegger’s Being and Time, forthcoming; and Rethinking Parmenides in Dialogue with Reiner Schūrmann, The Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, forthcoming.

Friday, November 7, 2014 at 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm

Wolff Conference Room, Albert and Vera List Academic Center 6 East 16th Street, New York, NY 10011, Room D1103

Gayatri  Chakravorty Spivak (Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University), will give a lecture entitled “A New Look at an Old Text: De la grammatologie in the Eyes of its Translator, 40 Years Later”

Spivak is University Professor, and a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. B.A. English (First Class Honors), Presidency College, Calcutta, 1959.  Ph.D. Comparative Literature, Cornell University, 1967. D. Litt, University of Toronto, 1999; D. Litt, University of London, 2003; D. Hum, Oberlin College, 2008; D. Honoris Causa, Universitat Roveri I Virgili,  2011; D. Honoris Causa, Rabindra Bharati, 2012; Kyoto Prize in Thought and Ethics, 2012; Padma Bhushan 2013; D.Honoris Causa, Univeridad Nacional de San Martin, 2013; D. Litt, University of St. Andrews, 2014; D. Honoris Causa, Paris VIII (2014), Presidency University (forthcoming).

Fields include: 19th- and 20th-century literature; politics of culture; feminism; Marx, Derrida; globalization. Books include: In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987; Routledge Classic 2002), Thinking Academic Freedom in Gendered Post-Coloniality (1993; 2d ed forthcoming), Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993; Routledge classic 2003), The Spivak Reader (1995), Imperatives to Re-Imagine the Planet / Imperative zur Neuerfindung des Planeten (ed. Willi Goetschel, 1999; 2d ed. forthcoming), Chotti Munda and His Arrow (translation with critical introduction of a novel by Mahasweta Devi, 2002), Death of a Discipline (2003), Other Asias (2005), An Aesthetic Education in the Age of Globalization (2012), Readings (2014), and Du Bois and the General Strike (forthcoming).

Steve G. Lofts (Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, King’s University College at the University of Western Ontario), presents: Toward a Groundwork of the Cultural-Event: A Rethinking of Cassirer and Heidegger and the Implications for Radical Politics.

There are three parts to this paper.

First, it interprets Cassirer’s critique of culture and Heidegger’s thinking of the event as belonging-together by conjoining the event of being with the transcendental structures of cultural signification. In other words, the paper sets out the paradoxical antinomy of what professor Steve Lofts calls the cultural-event as an Auseinandersetzung of thinking and being: “In Auseinandersetzung, a world comes to be.” But, what is the foundation, the groundwork, of this cultural-event?

Second, the paper argues that for both Cassirer and Heidegger, the groundwork of the cultural-event is not some originary-ground (Urgrund), some pure act, be it God, Being, or the subject, but the Un-ground (Ungrund) of pure-possibility (possibility not mixed with a necessary relation to actualization). It is the thinking and naming of this Ungrund of pure possibility that is the source of pure creativity and thus of pure freedom.

Third, the paper ends by way of some reflections on the implications of this view for the project of radical politics by uncovering a deeper sense of freedom that is other than simply a “freedom from” or a “freedom to.”

Sponsored by the New School for Social Research

Wolff Conference Room, Albert and Vera List Academic Center, D1103 6 East 16th Street, New York, NY 10011, Room D1103

Todd May is Class of 1941 Memorial Professor of the Humanities at Clemson University.  He is the author of fourteen books of philosophy, most recently A Fragile Life and A Significant Life, both from University of Chicago Press.

Abstract:

Ineffability is in the air these days, and has been for some time. In many areas of Continental philosophy, it is the very ethos in which thought is conducted. I argue that the realm of the normative, at least, is deeply linguistic. In contrast to the attempt of some thinkers to remove the normative from the conceptual or the linguistic, I try to show that it is central to normativity to have a linguistic reference, a reference rooted precisely in the sense of conceptual categories that so concern thinkers of the ineffable.

Presented by The New School for Social Research (NSSR) Philosophy Department.

Abstract: On the standard reading, Heidegger’s account of authenticity in Being and Time amounts to an existentialist theory of human freedom. Against this interpretation, John Haugeland reads Heidegger’s account of authenticity as a crucial feature of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology: i.e., Heidegger’s attempt to determine the meaning of being via an analysis of human beings. Haugeland’s argument is based on the notion that taking responsibility for our existence entails getting the being of entities right. Specifically, Haugeland says that our ability to choose allows us to question and test the disclosure of being through which entities are intelligible to us against the entities themselves, and he adds that taking responsibility for our existence involves transforming our disclosure of being when it fails to meet the truth test. Although I agree that Heidegger’s existentialism is a crucial feature of his fundamental ontology, I argue that the details of Haugeland’s interpretation are inconsistent. My objection is that if, as Haugeland claims, entities are only intelligible via disclosures of being, then it is incoherent for Haugeland to say that entities themselves can serve as intelligible standard against which disclosures can be truth-tested or transformed. Finally, I offer an alternative to Haugeland’s truth-based take on authenticity and cultural transformation via an ends-based onto-methodological interpretation of Heidegger and Kuhn. Here I argue that the ends pursed by a specific community determine both the meaning of being and the movement of human history.

Bio: Aaron James Wendland completed his PhD at Somerville College, Oxford and he is currently Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the HSE’s Center for Advanced Studies in Moscow. Aaron is the co-editor of Wittgenstein and Heidegger (Routledge, 2013) and Heidegger on Technology (Routledge, 2018), and he has written scholarly articles on Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, and Kuhn. Aaron has also published several pieces of popular philosophy in The New York Times, Public Seminar, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He currents serves as an art critic for The Moscow Times and Dialogue of Arts. And as of January 2019, Aaron will be the Director of the Center for Philosophy and Visual Arts at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art.