Calendar

The philosopher Moses Mendelssohn paved the way for Jewish entry into the German mainstream by promoting secular education and advocating for a pluralistic society in which Jews could enjoy civil rights while maintaining their traditions and faith. In the new volume Moses Mendelssohn: Enlightenment, Religion, Politics, Nationalism (University of Maryland Press, 2015) leading scholars explore the questions that shaped Mendelssohn’s life and occupied his mind: How compatible are faith and reason, religious loyalty and civic loyalty, religious commitment and cosmopolitanism? The book’s co-editor, Michah Gottlieb (NYU) will introduce a panel discussion on how these same tensions resonate in today’s world. With moderator Abraham Socher (Oberlin/Editor, Jewish Review of Books) and panelists David Sorkin (Yale) and Leora Batnitzky (Princeton).

Michah Gottlieb is Associate Professor of Jewish Thought & Philosophy at New York University. He earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Indiana University (2003) and has published widely on the theological and political Moses Mendelssohn and on Jewish approaches to the faith-reason debate, analyzing Jewish thinkers from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries. Most recently, he has been writing on the role of the Bible in German Judaism.

Abraham Socher is a professor at Oberlin College in the Department of Religion and directs the Program in Jewish Studies. He is the author of The Radical Enlightenment of Solomon Maimon: Judaism, Philosophy, Heresy (2006), and has published essays and reviews on topics in Jewish intellectual history, literary criticism and baseball. In 2010 he founded the Jewish Review of Books, which he continues to edit.

David J. Sorkin is Lucy G. Moses Professor of Modern Jewish at Yale University. His work is situated at the intersection of Jewish history and European history since the 16th century. He first examined the formation of Jewish culture in the German states in The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780-1840 (1987). His Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (1996) emphasizes the neglected Hebrew works. In The Religious Enlightenment:  Protestants, Jews and Catholics from London to Vienna (2008), he crossed confessional boundaries and national borders to reconceive the relationship of the Enlightenment to religion. He is currently writing a history of Jewish emancipation in Europe.

Leora Batnitzky is the Ronald O. Perelman Professor of Jewish Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of Idolatry and Representation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered (2000), Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation (2006), and How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton, 2011). Her current book project, tentatively titled “Conversion Before the Law: How Religion and Law Shape Each Other in the Modern World,” focuses on a number of contemporary legal cases concerning religious conversion in the U.S., Great Britain, Israel, and India.

Hegel famously charges that Spinoza’s monism involves an unacceptable elimination of all finitude and all determinacy, leaving Spinoza’s God a “shapeless abyss”. I argue that the criticism is not best understood as claiming that Spinoza specifically denies finitude and determinacy. Nor as uncharitably importing Hegel’s own view of determinacy as negation. The criticism rather rests on an interpretation of Spinoza as arguing from the principle that everything must be explicable. I defend Hegel’s interpretation, or the need of Spinoza’s case for monism for this principle. Hegel’s critical point is then that precisely this principle, used in just the ways required by the proof of monism, should also force Spinoza to eliminate all determinacy and finitude. I defend the criticism, and draw out some implications about Hegel’s own project.

James Kreines is Professor of Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College, in Claremont, California. He publishes work on Kant, Hegel, and German idealism, and the history of metaphysics, and metaphilosophy. His monograph on Hegel and his response to Kant—Reason in the World: Hegel’s Metaphysics and its Philosophical Appeal—was published in 2015 by Oxford University Press. Current projects include the relation between Kant, Hegel and Spinoza; the topic of biological teleology in Kant and Hegel, in comparison to previous views of the is topic and more recent debates; and Kant’s position on reason, critique, and things in themselves.

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

The Department’s colloquium series typically meets on Thursdays in the Seminar Room at Gateway Bldg, 106 Somerset Street, 5th Floor at 3:00 p.m. Please see the Department Calendar or scheduled speakers and more details.

Fall 2017

• 10/19/17 Break It Down For Me Lecture Series: Alex Guerrero
• 10/30/17 Inaugural Rutgers Lecture: Sir Richard Sorabji, Alexander Library Teleconference Lecture Hall, Room 403, CAC 3:00-8:00pm
• 11/2/17 Inaugural Rutgers Lecture: Sir Richard Sorabji, Alexander Library Teleconference Lecture Hall, 3:00-8:00 pm
• 11/3/17 Inaugural Rutgers Lecture: Sir Richard Sorabji, 3:00-5:00pm
• 11/6/17 Dr. Daniel DeHaan (https://www.divinity.cam.ac.uk/directory/dehaan) – “Souls and Contemporary Neuroscience: the Possibility of Reconciliation,” 7:30pm
• 11/9/17 Break It Down For Me Lecture Series: Jeff King
• 11/16/17 Prof. Jenann Ismael (University of Arizona), 3:00-5:00 pm
• 11/30/17 Dr. Eleonore Stump (https://sites.google.com/site/stumpep/) – “Aquinas on the Atonement”, 7:30 pm
• 12/15-12/16/17 Parfit Memorial Conference, Theological Seminary, Hageman Hall, 9:30 am-5:00 pm

In the ruins of a medieval palace in Delhi, a unique phenomenon occurs: Indians of all castes and creeds meet to socialize and ask the spirits for help. The spirits they entreat are Islamic jinns, and they write out requests as if petitioning the state. At a time when a Hindu right wing government in India is committed to normalizing a view of the past that paints Muslims as oppressors, Anand Vivek Taneja’s Jinnealogy provides a fresh vision of religion, identity, and sacrality that runs counter to state-sanctioned history.

The ruin, Firoz Shah Kotla, is an unusually democratic religious space, characterized by freewheeling theological conversations, DIY rituals, and the sanctification of animals. Taneja observes the visitors, who come mainly from the Muslim and Dalit neighborhoods of Delhi, and uses their conversations and letters to the jinns as an archive of voices so often silenced. He finds that their veneration of the jinns recalls pre-modern religious traditions in which spiritual experience was inextricably tied to ecological surroundings. In this enchanted space, Taneja encounters a form of popular Islam that is not a relic of bygone days, but a vibrant form of resistance to state repression and post-colonial visions of India.

Anand Vivek Taneja is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Anthropology at Vanderbilt University.

Debashree Mukherjeeis an Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University.  Her research and teaching centers on the history of modern South Asian visual cultures and industries, with a focus on late colonial Bombay cinema. Her current book project, “Parallel Action: Bombay Cinema and the Practice of Modernity,” presents a material history of early Bombay cinema (1920s-1940s) that privileges practice, circuits of work, and technologies of production, and draws inspiration from her own experience of working in Mumbai’s film and television industries in the early 2000s. Select publications include “Creating Cinema’s Reading Publics: The Emergence of Film Journalism in Bombay,” in No Limits: Media Studies from India (2013), “Scandalous Evidence: Looking for the Bombay Film Actress in an Absent Archive”, in Doing Women’s Film History: Reframing Cinema’s Past and Future (2015), and “Tracking Utopias: Technology, Labor, and Secularism in Bombay Cinema,” in Media/Utopia (2016). Debashree is an Editor with the peer-reviewed journal BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies.

The Center for International History is housed within the Department of History at Columbia University. It provides a forum for discussion and to foster historical perspectives on international issues of contemporary intellectual concern. It draws upon the collective intellectual resources, not only of the faculty and graduate students of the Department of History, but also of scholars from anthropology, political science, sociology, law and other adjacent fields as well as policy-makers, journalists and other practitioners. Its aim is to feature speakers and events that transcend or transform the public/academic divide and which critically engage with the production and consumption of historical knowledge across divisions of class, race and gender in our global communities.

Upcoming and Past Events at The Center for Global Ethics and Politics

*all events open to the public and held at The Graduate Center, CUNY (365 Fifth Avenue at 34th St.)*  |  for video of past events please see here)

Spring 2018

• Linda Bosniak, Rutgers University, “‘Here To Stay’ and The Contested Ethics of Presence” Monday, February 5 @ 6:30 pm, room 9204-05.
  • Co-sponsored by the Social and Political Theory Student Association
• Daniele Archibugi, Birkbeck University of London, “Do we Need a Global Criminal Justice?”, Monday April 9 @ 6.30 pm, room 9204.
• Seyla Benhabib, Yale University, “Isaiah Berlin. A Judaism between Decisionism and Pluralism,” Monday, April 23 @ 6.30 pm, room 9204.