Calendar

Nicola Marcucci (Marie Curie Post-Doc Fellow, NSSR; École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris), will give a lecture entitled “History of a Sign with No Memory: Wonder, Reason, and Revelation in Spinoza”

From the abstract:
“My contribution aims to discuss an apparent paradox of Theological-Political Treatise concerning the real nature of Moses’ Revelation. Moses heard the real voice of God, or he just imagined it. Apparently, Spinoza supports both hypotheses. In this essay, I try to explain this apparent paradoxical issue of Spinoza’s conception of religion, according a central role to the notion of wonder. To do this, I try to show how Ethics’ conception of wonder allows us to distinguish two different uses of this notion in TTP: one directly connected with Moses’ revelation—and more generally with religious obedience and transmission—the other with superstition. This way, I intend to escape both a pure secularist interpretation and the theological-political critique of Spinoza’s thought, revisiting its place in the history of Enlightenment.”

Eric Pommier (Pontifical Catholic University of Chile),author of Ontologie de la vie et éthique de la responsabilité selon Hans Jonas, Vrin, Paris 2013, will give a talk entitled: “Life and Anthropology: A Discussion between Kantian Criticism and Jonasian Ontology”

Abstract:

Critical anthropology can be seen as the common ground of investigation of Kant and Jonas. However I would like to show that it is because Kant does not see the true root of our finitude that Jonas criticizes him. As human finitude is due to the finitude of life, morals and epistemology have to be founded in an ontology of life that reveals its true mode of being. Jonas’s critique of Kant does not mean however that we have to forget the theoretical and practical lessons of criticism. On the contrary, it deals with the necessity to justify in a radical way our limitations thanks to an ontological thought, which does not fall into dogmatism. Then Jonas’s philosophy would be an attempt to found Kantian criticism on a bio-ontological basis.

This event is sponsored by The New School for Social Research.

The Liberal Studies department at the New School for Social Research and the Culture & Media Department at Eugene Lang College are pleased to jointly present “Appetite for Distraction: Social Media and Today’s Attention-Economy,” an evening lecture by Chair and faculty memeber Dominic Pettman, which also marks the publication his forthcoming book Infinite Distraction (Polity Press, 2016).

It is often argued that contemporary media homogenize our thoughts and actions, without us being fully aware of the restrictions they impose. But what if the problem is not that we are all synchronized to the same motions or moments, but rather dispersed into countless different emotional micro-experiences? What if the effect of so-called social media is to calibrate the interactive spectacle so that we never fully feel the same way as other potential allies at the same time? While one person is fuming about economic injustice or climate change denial, another is giggling at a cute cat video. And, two hours late, vice versa. The nebulous indignation which constitutes the very fuel of true social change can be redirected safely around the network, avoiding any dangerous surges of radical activity.

Infinite Distraction examines the deliberate deployment of what Pettman calls hypermodulation, as a key strategy encoded into the contemporary media environment. His account challenges the various narratives that portray social media as a sinister space of synchronized attention, in which we are busily clicking ourselves to death. This critical reflection on the unprecedented power of the Internet requires us to rethink the potential for infinite distraction that our latest technologies now allow.

A Q&A will follow the lecture and refreshments will be on hand.

Pierre Bouretz (L’École des hautes etudes en sciences sociales), Maimonides as Philosopher: Esotericism versus “Popular Philosophy”

[see the linked poster on the department webpage where it says: View this semester’s departmental lecture series.]

Paul Kottman, Associate Professor of Literary Studies, gives a lecture entitled “Love as Human Freedom”.

Rather than see love as a natural form of affection, or as a reflection of reigning ideologies, this lecture presents love as a practice that changes over time, through which new social realities are brought into being. Love brings about, and helps us to explain, immense social-historical shifts—from the rise of feminism and the emergence of bourgeois family life, to the struggles for abortion rights and birth control and the erosion of a gender-based division of labor. Drawing on Hegel, via interpretations of literary works, Kottman argues that love generates and explains expanded possibilities for freely lived lives, and is a fundamental way that we make sense of temporal change, especially the inevitability of death and the propagation of life.

About the speaker:

Paul Kottman is the author of Tragic Conditions in Shakespeare (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), A Politics of the Scene (Stanford University Press, 2008) and is the editor of Philosophers on Shakespeare (Stanford University Press, 2009), and The Insistence of Art: Aesthetic Philosophy and Early Modernity (Fordham UP, forthcoming). His next book is tentatively entitled Love as Human Freedom. He is also the editor of a new book series at Stanford University Press, called Square One: First-Order Questions in the Humanities.

Sponsored by the Department of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research.

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.

Abstract || Traditionally privacy is valued for protecting individual freedom and autonomy. Such concepts of privacy and the underlying idea of autonomy have drawn criticism from various quarters. Feminist thinkers and critical theorists have advanced such criticism on normative grounds. In the recent years, they have been joined by arguments on a pragmatic level, which show that such concepts of privacy no longer can orient life in a world permeated with new threats to privacy, in particular due to the development of information technology. In consequence, many theories have reconstructed concepts privacy in light of this criticism, often by invoking more relational concepts of autonomy.  The talk proposes a different approach. Using a more socially situated concept of the subject, which is derived from Hannah Arendt’s thought, it shows that privacy plays a more fundamental value for the constitution of subjectivity, beyond autonomy.

Presented by The New School for Social Research

Tobias Matzner works in political philosophy and philosophy of technology. He is a visiting scholar at the Department of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research, and a member of the International Centre for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities in Tübingen, Germany.

Kant tried to explain how free moral action was possible.  Unfortunately, he is often interpreted as explaining free choice of action in terms of the unexplained free choice of a Gesinnung by a faculty of choice. By avoiding this mistake, we can see him as offering an informative decomposition of the task of free or moral action.  Further, one of Kant’s reasons for thinking that morality could not be explained by science depended on his assumptions about then current science. Since we can now reject that view of science, it is now possible to give a plausible scientific account, and so metaphysics, for Kant’s plausible account of the necessary conditions for free or moral action.

Patricia Kitcher is Roberta and William Campbell Professor of the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University.  She is the author of two books on Kant’s conceptions of cognition and the self, Kant’s Transcendental Psychology (Oxford University Press, 1990) and Kant’s Thinker (Oxford University Press, 2011).

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.