Amelie Rorty (Harvard Medical School), Oedipus, Intentional Action, and Three Types of History
[see the linked poster on the department webpage where it says: View this semester’s departmental lecture series.]
Rethinking Philosophy’s Past, 1300-1800: The Philosophy Department and Center for Science and Society at Columbia University invite you to “Rethinking Philosophy’s Past, 1300-1800” (February 17-18). Distinguished historians will share recent scholarship on women and other understudied figures in the history of philosophy to encourage more accurate accounts of philosophy’s past and more inclusive teaching. Sessions rethink standard stories and offer practical ideas about to incorporate understudied figures in our philosophy courses, both historical and non-historical.
http://philosophy.columbia.edu/events/events/events/conferences
When we tell the history of philosophy, we tend to focus on a handful of great men – Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes… The stories we tell are false in the same ways that all Great Man histories are false. But what have we lost by ignoring women’s philosophical thinking in particular? How different would philosophy look today if we paid better attention to the female philosophers of the past?
Coming up on Thursday, April 27th at 7:00 P.M., Christia Mercer (Columbia University) joins us to help answer those questions. Here’s a bit more about the talk in Dr. Mercer’s own words:
How Women Changed the Course of Philosophy, 1300-1700
In this lecture, Professor Christia Mercer explores ideas drawn from medieval Europe’s most innovative women and shows how their views about self-knowledge, cognition, and truth laid the groundwork for early modern philosophy. She concludes with a call to rethink philosophy’s past in light of these women’s long-ignored innovations.
As usual, we meet at the central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library.
Tell your coworkers/students/Facebook friends! Bring a date! Bring (a mental representation of) your favorite female philosopher!
See you there, I hope!
more BKPP:
5/18 – Chris Lebron on the philosophy of Black Lives Matter @ the Dweck Center // 7:00 P.M.
In my talk, I wish to outline an alternative to a chapter in the history of modern philosophy, and present Kant’s tenets in the Critique of Pure Reason in the spirit of the Vienna Circle, the origin of analytic philosophy.
According to the traditional narrative, Kant overcame the limitations of British empiricism (Hume) and German rationalism (Leibniz) and with his “transcendental philosophy” raised philosophy to a new and superior level. Contemporary Leibnizian critics failed to appreciate the novelty of his approach. Although Kant complimented Salomon Maimon (1753-1800) for having best understood him among his critics, he saw no reason to accept Maimon’s criticism.
From the point of view of the Vienna Circle in the 1920-1930, the traditional narrative should be reversed. In the view of its members, there are no synthetic judgments a priori, and the Kantian project was therefore misconceived in principle. The “Kantian intermezzo”, as Neurath called it, should be skipped and philosophy should rather return to Hume and Leibniz. Exactly this was Maimon’s position. He characterized himself as a “rational dogmatist and empirical skeptic”, referring explicitly to Leibniz and Hume respectively.
I will present Maimon’s criticism of Kant’s synthetic judgments a priori and claim that it is valid. With this, questions concerning the progress of philosophy and its historiography will naturally rise.
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Gideon Freudenthal is professor emeritus at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel-Aviv University.
He is the author (or co-author) of:
Atom and Individual in the Age of Newton (1986)
Exploring the Limits of Preclassical Mechanics (1991)
Classical Marxist Historiography of Science: The Hessen-Grossmann-Thesis (2009)
No Religion without Idolatry. Mendelssohn’s Jewish Enlightenment (2012)
Presented by The New School for Social Research (NSSR) Philosophy Department.
Nietzsche argued that some of our most deeply cherished values can be exposed as deeply problematic when we look into their history. He was writing in 19th century Germany and focusing on “Christian values.” But what about the values that are most enshrined in contemporary “liberal” societies like our own? Most Americans, for example, would say they value freedom, equality, democracy, human rights, and empathy. Would these cherished values emerge unscathed if we looked at them through a historical lens? Perhaps not. This talk aims to show that our core values emerged through historical events that are not entirely noble, and they continue to be applied in ways that reflect their troubling past.
Greek antiquity saw the development of two competing systems of logic: Aristotle’s categorical syllogistic and Stoic propositional logic. Some Ancient logicians took propositional logic to be prior to categorical logic on the grounds that Aristotle’s syllogistic presupposes modes of propositional reasoning such as reductio ad absurdum. By contrast, Peripatetic logicians sought to establish the priority of categorical over propositional logic by reducing various modes of propositional reasoning to categorical syllogisms. In the 17th century, this Peripatetic program was championed by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. In the Specimina calculi rationalis, Leibniz develops a theory of propositional terms which allows him to derive the rule of reductio ad absurdum in a purely categorical calculus in which every proposition is of the form A is B. We reconstruct Leibniz’s categorical calculus and show that it suffices to establish not only reductio but all the laws of classical propositional logic. Moreover, we show that the propositional logic generated by the non-monotonic variant of this categorical calculus is a natural system of relevance logic known as RMI.
Marko Malink (New York University) & Anubav Vasudevan (University of Chicago)
Logic and Metaphysics Workshop Fall 2017:
September 11 Lovett, NYU
September 18 Skiles, NYU
September 25 Jago, Nottingham
October 2 Greenstein, Private Scholar
October 9 GC Closed. No meeting
October 16 Ripley UConn
October 23 Mares, Wellington
October 30 Woods, Bristol
November 6 Hamkins, GC
November 13 Silva, Alagoas
November 20 Yi, Toronto
November 27 Malink, NYU
December 4 Kivatinos, GC
In this talk I will defend a view according to which certain mathematical facts depend counterfactually on certain historical facts. Specifically, I will sketch an alternative possible history for us in which (I claim) the proposition ordinarily expressed by the English sentence “there is a universal set” is true, despite its falsity in the actual world.
Logic & Metaphysics Workshop
Feb 26 Martin Pleitz, Muenster
Mar 5 Vera Flocke, NYU
Mar 12 Roy Sorensen, WUSTL
Mar 19 Alex Citkin, Private Researcher
Mar 26 Chris Scambler, NYU
Apr 2 SPRING RECESS. NO MEETING
Apr 9 Greg Restall, Melbourne
Apr 16 Daniel Nolan, Notre Dame
Apr 23 Mel Fitting, CUNY
Apr 30 Sungil Han, Seoul National
May 7 Andreas Ditter, NYU
May14 Rohit Parikh
It has been common in modernity to think of history as singular and universal, progressively moving forward to a particular end. Although few contemporary philosophers and historians maintain the view that there is strict universality and teleology in history, according to Professor Dmitri Nikulin in his most recent work, The Concept of History (Bloomsbury, 2017), the remnants of these positions still affect our understanding of history. In the account he gives, which he traces back to antiquity, Nikulin interrogates what we mean when we talk of history and the philosophical problems we get into by conceiving of it in certain ways. If we jettison the idea of an objective universal end to history, are we left in a morass of relativism? Can we embrace a view of history as an amalgam of genealogies and geographies while still doing justice to constituents of our accounts of history that seem to be historically invariant?
On Saturday, April 28th from 3:00-5:00pm, the Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal will host a roundtable discussion of Professor Nikulin’s latest book and the philosophy of history, more generally. Professor Nikulin (who is currently serving as Chair of the Philosophy Department, NSSR) will be joined for the roundtable discussion by Jeffrey Bernstein (Professor of Philosophy, College of the Holy Cross), and Massimiliano Tomba (Professor of History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz, and former Visiting Professor at the Department of Philosophy, NSSR).
Please join us for the roundtable event, which will take place in Room E206, 25 East 13th St. (“The Glass Corner”) on Saturday, April 28th, from 3:00pm-5:00pm. A reception with drinks and light refreshments will follow. During the reception, the GFPJ will also be selling recent books from their stacks along with copies of its most recent issue (38:2), which includes papers from the Hilary Putnam memorial conference held at The New School in 2016.
The Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal is a professional biannual journal of the history of philosophy with a distinguished tradition of publishing high-quality scholarly work. In our more than 45 years’ existence, we have published original essays by, among others, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, Judith Butler, Robert Pippin, Giorgio Agamben, Alphonso Lingis, and Julia Kristeva.
Fourteenth Annual NYU Conference on Issues in Modern Philosophy
17th/18th Century Philosophy
19th Century Philosophy
20th Century Philosophy
November 9, 2018 – November 10, 2018
Department of Philosophy, New York University
60 Washington Square South
New York 10012
United States
New York University’s Liberal Studies, in Collaboration with Nietzsche Circle, Presents:
Nietzsche and the Disadvantage of History: The rise of Western Oikophobia
More Info & RSVP:
If you like to attend, Please RSVP by sending email to Luke Trusso at luke.trusso@gmail.com