Free and open to the public | ID required
Burning Issues in African Philosophy builds off of the sophisticated work that has now become part of an international conversation on how African philosophy makes unique interventions into almost every important question of politics, ethics, aesthetics, ontology and epistemology. Indeed, the very definition of these fundamental philosophical conceptions is both challenged and enriched. In this way, African philosophy is not only crucial in understanding what constitutes its uniqueness but also in providing us with new and innovative ways to think about some of the most burning issues of our time as far reaching as what is the meaning of being human to how we can effectively challenge climate change. The aim of this seminar then is not simply to bring some of the most important African philosophers to participate so that their work can be known, but perhaps more importantly that they can bring African philosophy into the political and ethical debates about what it might mean to have a more just future. The series begins by challenging the conventional Afro-pessimistic view of time as being unable to organize a future perspective that would allow for adequate industrialization and development. If time is what happens inseparable from events, this does not mean that there is no future in African philosophy. What it means is that there is no future that can be foreclosed or known in advance and thus possibilities for the future remain open. It is therefore up to our actions to bring about the future that we want.
All Seminars are held on Wednesday evening (7-9PM) in the Heyman Common Room.
Wednesday September 28, 2016, 7:00 pm-9:00 pm
Presenter: Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Columbia University
Discussant: Drucilla Cornell, Rutgers University
Location: Heyman Common Room
Wednesday November 2, 2016, 7:00 pm-9:00 pm
Presenter: Michael Monahan, Marquette University
Discussant: Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Columbia University and Drucilla Cornell, Rutgers University
Location: Heyman Common Room
Wednesday January 25, 2017, 7:00 pm-9:00 pm
Presenter: Nkiru Nzegwu, SUNY-Binghampton
Discussant: Doug Ficek, University of New Haven
Location: 208 Knox Hall
Wednesday February 22, 2017, 7:00 pm-9:00 pm
Presenter: Olufemi Taiwo, Cornell University
Discussant: Jane Gordon, University of Connecticut-Storrs
Location: Heyman Common Room
Wednesday March 8, 2017, 7:00 pm-9:00 pm
Presenter: Nadia Yala Kisukidi, Univeriste Paris 8
Discussant: Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Columbia University
Location: 208 Knox Hall
Wednesday April 19, 2017, 7:00 pm-9:00 pm
Presenter: Lewis Gordon, University of Connecticut-Storrs
Discussants: Max Hantel, Dartmouth College and Hamid Dabashi, Columbia University
Location: Heyman Common Room
This series is made possible by financial support from the Provost Office and Arts & Sciences at Columbia University and the Partnership University Fund (PUF) of the French American Cultural Exchange (FACE). The venue for this series is provided by the Heyman Center for Humanities.
Free and open to the public | ID required
Burning Issues in African Philosophy builds off of the sophisticated work that has now become part of an international conversation on how African philosophy makes unique interventions into almost every important question of politics, ethics, aesthetics, ontology and epistemology. Indeed, the very definition of these fundamental philosophical conceptions is both challenged and enriched. In this way, African philosophy is not only crucial in understanding what constitutes its uniqueness but also in providing us with new and innovative ways to think about some of the most burning issues of our time as far reaching as what is the meaning of being human to how we can effectively challenge climate change. The aim of this seminar then is not simply to bring some of the most important African philosophers to participate so that their work can be known, but perhaps more importantly that they can bring African philosophy into the political and ethical debates about what it might mean to have a more just future. The series begins by challenging the conventional Afro-pessimistic view of time as being unable to organize a future perspective that would allow for adequate industrialization and development. If time is what happens inseparable from events, this does not mean that there is no future in African philosophy. What it means is that there is no future that can be foreclosed or known in advance and thus possibilities for the future remain open. It is therefore up to our actions to bring about the future that we want.
All Seminars are held on Wednesday evening (7-9PM) in the Heyman Common Room.
Wednesday September 28, 2016, 7:00 pm-9:00 pm
Presenter: Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Columbia University
Discussant: Drucilla Cornell, Rutgers University
Location: Heyman Common Room
Wednesday November 2, 2016, 7:00 pm-9:00 pm
Presenter: Michael Monahan, Marquette University
Discussant: Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Columbia University and Drucilla Cornell, Rutgers University
Location: Heyman Common Room
Wednesday January 25, 2017, 7:00 pm-9:00 pm
Presenter: Nkiru Nzegwu, SUNY-Binghampton
Discussant: Doug Ficek, University of New Haven
Location: 208 Knox Hall
Wednesday February 22, 2017, 7:00 pm-9:00 pm
Presenter: Olufemi Taiwo, Cornell University
Discussant: Jane Gordon, University of Connecticut-Storrs
Location: Heyman Common Room
Wednesday March 8, 2017, 7:00 pm-9:00 pm
Presenter: Nadia Yala Kisukidi, Univeriste Paris 8
Discussant: Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Columbia University
Location: 208 Knox Hall
Wednesday April 19, 2017, 7:00 pm-9:00 pm
Presenter: Lewis Gordon, University of Connecticut-Storrs
Discussants: Max Hantel, Dartmouth College and Hamid Dabashi, Columbia University
Location: Heyman Common Room
This series is made possible by financial support from the Provost Office and Arts & Sciences at Columbia University and the Partnership University Fund (PUF) of the French American Cultural Exchange (FACE). The venue for this series is provided by the Heyman Center for Humanities.
Hegel returns to the theme of human bodily expression repeatedly throughout his writings. While his early Phenomenology of Spirit offers a scathing criticism of contemporary physiognomy and phrenology, his later works contain a more nuanced view of the expressive capacities of the human body. In his late philosophy of mind, Hegel is particularly concerned with the question of how mental states which involve complex intellectual and social capacities, such as moral emotions, come to be expressed in the human body. This talk takes Hegel’s discussion of human bodily expression in his late philosophy of mind as a prism through which to approach a central question raised by Hegel’s philosophy: the question of how, for Hegel, spirit and reason on the one hand relate to nature on the other hand. I suggest that Hegel’s account of human bodily expression shows in paradigmatic fashion how he attempts to find a theoretical space between dualism and naturalistic reductionism. Furthermore, I argue that there are reasons to believe that this attempt fails: ultimately, the phenomenon of human bodily expression therefore emerges as a problem for Hegel which puts into question his central philosophical ambitions.
JULIA PETERS is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tübingen, Germany. Her research interests include Kant’s moral philosophy, German Idealist philosophy (especially Hegel), aesthetics and moral philosophy.
She is the author of Hegel on Beauty (2015); she has also published articles on Kant and Hegel in the European Journal of Philosophy, the British Journal for the History of Philosophy and the Journal of the History of Philosophy (among other periodicals).
Presented by The New School for Social Research (NSSR) Philosophy Department.
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.
Please join the NY German Idealism Workshop for its next event on Thursday, April 6th, from 4:30 to 6:30pm at 6 East 16th St, room D1009. Terry Pinkard will present a paper entitled “Forms of Life, Forms of Thought: Hegel and Wittgenstein,” and New School’s Jay Bernstein will respond.
For anyone interested in reading the paper ahead of time, please send an e-mail to nygermanidealism@gmail.com
Robyn Marasco (Hunter College) will deliver a paper entitled “Hegel’s Esotericism,” and Jeremy M. Glick (Hunter College) will respond.
Alfredo Ferrarin, professor of Philosophy at the University of Pisa on “Hegel and the Actuality of Thinking”.
The Department of German at NYU and Deutsches Haus at NYU present a discussion between Slavoj Žižek, Rebecca Comay, and Frank Ruda which will revolve around Comay and Ruda’s book The Dash—The Other Side of Absolute Knowing.
Event information
In The Dash—The Other Side of Absolute Knowing (MIT Press, 2018), the authors present a reading of Hegel’s most reviled concept, absolute knowing. Their book sets out from a counterintuitive premise: the “mystical shell” of Hegel’s system proves to be its most “rational kernel.” Hegel’s radicalism is located precisely at the point where his thought seems to regress most. Most current readings try to update Hegel’s thought by pruning back his grandiose claims to “absolute knowing,” but Comay and Ruda invert this deflationary gesture by inflating what seems to be most trivial: the truth of the absolute is grasped only in the minutiae of its most mundane appearances. What if everything turns out to hinge on the most inconspicuous and trivial detail—a punctuation mark?
About the speakers
Slavoj Žižek, is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a visiting professor at a number of American Universities (Columbia, Princeton, New School for Social Research, New York University, University of Michigan). He obtained his Ph.D. in Philosophy in Ljubljana studying Psychoanalysis. He also studied at the University of Paris. Slavoj Zizek is a Hegelian philosopher, Lacanian psychoanalyst, and Marxist social analyst. He is the author of The Indivisible Remainder, The Sublime Object of Ideology, The Metastases of Enjoyment, Looking Awry: Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, The Plague of Fantasies, and The Ticklish Subject. His latest publications are Disparities, and Antigone (both at Bloomsbury Press, London).
Rebecca Comay, is Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Other publications include Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (Stanford, 2011) and Hegel and Resistance, co-ed with Bart Zandtvoort (Bloomsbury, 2018).
Frank Ruda, is Senior Lecturer for Philosophy at the University of Dundee, UK. Other publications include: Reading Marx (with Slavoj Žižek and Agon Hamza)(Polity, 2018); Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for A Contemporary Use of Fatalism (Nebraska UP, 2016); For Badiou: Idealism without Idealism (Northwestern UP, 2015).
Attendance information
Events at Deutsches Haus are free of charge. If you would like to attend this event, please send us an email to deutscheshaus.rsvp@nyu.edu. Space at Deutsches Haus is limited, please arrive ten minutes prior to the event. Thank you!
“A Dash of Hegel: A Discussion with Slavoj Žižek, Rebecca Comay, and Frank Ruda” is a DAAD supported event.
Kant’s conception of action cannot be understood in purely causal terms. The internal structure of action can only be explained in terms of a two-level meaning structure involving both a priori and empirical components.
Short bio:
Alejandro G. Vigo (Buenos Aires, 1958) is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Navarra. Prof. Vigo earned his undergraduate degree in Philosophy (1984) from the University of Buenos Aires and a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Heidelberg (1993). He has been a fellow of the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Tecnológicas (CONICET, Argentina), of the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) and of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Between 1993 and 2006 he taught at the Universidad de los Andes and the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He has published over 120 articles in collective volumes and journals in Latin America, Europe and the United States, along with many books. In 2010 he won the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Prize (Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Bonn) and in 2017 the International Philosophy Award “Antonio Jannone” (Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome).
Søren Kierkegaard’s most famous work, Fear and Trembling, has the distinction of drawing near-universal derision from scholars of political theory and ethics. Dr. Dinan suggests that Kierkegaard’s readers haven’t accounted for his return to Socratic political philosophy as a direct riposte to the politics of G.W.F. Hegel and his successors. He considers the implications of Kierkegaard’s use of the ‘questionable stratagem’ of Socratic irony in relation to politics, ethics, Christian faith, and philosophy. Kierkegaard is concerned not with destroying political philosophy, but with restoring its attentiveness to paradox.
Dr. Matt Dinan, Assistant Professor, St. Thomas University