Axel Honneth, Columbia University and University of Frankfurt, “Three, not Two, Concepts of Liberty: A Proposal to Enlarge our Moral Self-Understanding”; Thursday, September 17, 2015 @ 4:30pm, Room 5409
Conceptions of unstructured content take contents to be sets of possibilities, or circumstances, or conditions (or functions from such things to truth values). In recent years, a great variety of new conceptions of unstructured content have been developed and applied, often with great formal ingenuity. Debates on relativism and context-sensitivity more generally, on expressivism, de se attitudes, counterfactual attitudes, vagueness, truthmaker semantics, and many more bear witness to these developments. At the same time, not as much attention has been paid to the philosophical foundations of unstructured conceptions.
In sharp contrast, proponents of structured propositions have recently spent a great amount of their time developing and clarifying the foundations of their conceptions in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. This conference encourages new reflexion on the foundations of unstructured conceptions of content, the availability of existing foundational stories to new technical conceptions, the competitiveness of unstructured conceptions vis-a-vis structured conceptions as well as the relationship between the two conceptions. It also aims to establish renewed dialogue between, on the one hand, proponents of structured conceptions and of unstructured conceptions and, on the other hand, between proponents of the various conceptions and applications of unstructured content.
Speakers:
In addition to invited talks, there will be a CFA for 2-4 further talks.
(Non-exhaustive) list of topics:
- Foundations in philosophy of mind of conceptions of unstructured content
- Kinds of unstructured content \& the nature of representation
- Philosophical and / vs formal motivations for unstructured content
- What are the relationships between structured and unstructured conceptions of content? Competition? Complementation?
- Promiscuity on permissible sets of n-tuples: anything goes? (worlds-hyperplans, worlds-languages, worlds-standards of taste, …)
- What is it that gets characterised, or modelled, by a set of possibilities, or circumstances, or conditions?
- What are outstanding problems of fineness of grain?
- What progress has been made on the the problems of deduction / logical omniscience as they arise for unstructured content?
- The role of (unstructured) content in semantic theory
- Truthmaker semantics
- Notions of hyperintensionality with unstructured content
- Mental fragmentation/compartmentalisation
- Metaphysical foundations of unstructured content
- Possible worlds/points in the possibility-space: primitive or construed (e.g. out of structured things/sentences)?
Organisers: Andy Egan (Rutgers), Dirk Kindermann (University of Graz)
Please direct all queries to dirk.kindermann@uni-graz.at. If you’d like to attend the event, please informally register at dirk.kindermann@uni-graz.at.
The Institute for Visual Intelligence
is thrilled to announce its inaugural symposium in New York City in November 2016. We are seeking a philosophical understanding of visual intelligence.
Keynote Speakers:
Dr. Ahmed Elgammal
Director of the Art & AI at Rutgers University
Professor at the Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University. He is the founder and director of the Art and Artificial Intelligence at Rutgers, which focuses on data science in the domain of digital humanities. He is also an Executive Council Faculty at Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science. Prof Elgammal has published over 140 peer-reviewed papers, book chapters, and books in the fields of computer vision, machine learning, and digital humanities. He is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2006. Dr Elgammal’s recent research on knowledge discovery in digital humanities received wide international media attention, including reports on the Washington Post, New York Times, NBC News, the Daily Telegraph, Science News, and many others.
Dr. Gary Hatfield
Director of the Visual Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania
Adam Seybert Professor in Moral and Intellectual Philosophy and Director of the Visual Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. He works in the history of modern philosophy, the philosophy of psychology, theories of vision, and the philosophy of science. In 1990, he published The Natural and the Normative: Theories of Spatial Perception from Kant to Helmholtz; at HOPOS 2016, the 25th anniversary of the book was celebrated. In 2009, Perception and Cognition: Essays in the Philosophy of Psychology appeared from the Clarendon Press; a revised version of his book on Descartes’ Meditations appeared in 2014. He is a member of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, the Penn Perception group, and the History and Sociology of Science Graduate Group. He has directed dissertations in history of philosophy, philosophy of psychology, and philosophy and history of science. He has long been fascinated by visual perception and the mind–body problem.
Dr. Sun-Joo Shin
Professor of Philosophy at Yale University
At Yale Sun-Joo Shin teaches logic, philosophy of logic, history of logic, philosophy of linguistics and, philosophy of language.
In her book “The Iconic Logic of Peirce’s Graphs” Shin explores the philosophical roots of the birth of Peirce’s Existential Graphs in his theory of representation and logical notation. She demonstrates that Peirce is the first philosopher to lay a solid philosophical foundation for multimodal representation systems.
We would consider papers with parameters of the following:
Philosophy of language
Logic
Artificial intelligence
Aesthetics
Analytic philosophy
Philosophy of psychology
Visual studies
Philosophy of science
Data science
Philosophy of mind
Art history & criticism
http://philevents.org/event/show/26754
In this paper I draw attention to Sophie de Grouchy’s 1798 distinction between negative and positive right, which, upon examination, prefigures the famous distinction between positive and negative liberty. I analyse her treatment, and I argue that she should be accorded a significant place in the discussions of the tradition(s) of reflection on the famous distinction.
First, I frame my discussion by revisiting Isaiah Berlin’s famous lecture and a recent editorial by Jason Stanley and Vesla Weaver; I note the presence of a paternal liberal tradition going back to Constant which gets invoked alongside the famous distinction between the two concepts of liberty. Insofar as a tradition can be conceived as a lineage or an offspring, it is striking that the matriarchs are absent from it.
Second, I discuss De Grouchy’s neo-Lockean analyses of justice and property rights, which form the context in which she introduces her distinction between positive and negative right. I illuminate her views by way of comparison with the writings of Rousseau and Adam Smith.
Third, I offer evidence and analysis of De Grouchy’s version of the distinction and show how it can be mapped onto the more famous distinction. Fourth, I close by arguing that if there is a liberal tradition worth reviving and extending, De Grouchy ought to have an honoured place in it.
Eric Schliesser (PhD, Philosophy, The University of Chicago 2002) is Professor of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam. He publishes widely on early modern philosophy (especially Spinoza and Hume) and science (including political economy, especially Newton and Smith), philosophy economics, the history of feminism, and so-called meta-philosophy. He has just published Adam Smith: Systematic Philosopher and Public Thinker (OUP) and edited numerous volumes, including most recently Sympathy: A History of a Concept and Ten Neglected Classics of Philosophy (both with OUP).
Presented by The New School for Social Research (NSSR) Philosophy Department.