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Steve G. Lofts (Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, King’s University College at the University of Western Ontario), presents: Toward a Groundwork of the Cultural-Event: A Rethinking of Cassirer and Heidegger and the Implications for Radical Politics.

There are three parts to this paper.

First, it interprets Cassirer’s critique of culture and Heidegger’s thinking of the event as belonging-together by conjoining the event of being with the transcendental structures of cultural signification. In other words, the paper sets out the paradoxical antinomy of what professor Steve Lofts calls the cultural-event as an Auseinandersetzung of thinking and being: “In Auseinandersetzung, a world comes to be.” But, what is the foundation, the groundwork, of this cultural-event?

Second, the paper argues that for both Cassirer and Heidegger, the groundwork of the cultural-event is not some originary-ground (Urgrund), some pure act, be it God, Being, or the subject, but the Un-ground (Ungrund) of pure-possibility (possibility not mixed with a necessary relation to actualization). It is the thinking and naming of this Ungrund of pure possibility that is the source of pure creativity and thus of pure freedom.

Third, the paper ends by way of some reflections on the implications of this view for the project of radical politics by uncovering a deeper sense of freedom that is other than simply a “freedom from” or a “freedom to.”

Sponsored by the New School for Social Research

Wolff Conference Room, Albert and Vera List Academic Center, D1103 6 East 16th Street, New York, NY 10011, Room D1103

Chinese Scholars started translating and introducing Western philosophy in a significant way only at the end of the 19th century. Their understanding of Western philosophy was not purely academic, but a means for inquiring into Western civilization, overcoming backwardness, and searching for ways to increase the wealth and power of the state.

The reception of Western philosophy has been shaped by the following factors. First, the mentality of Chinese scholars toward Western philosophy was practical and short-sighted. They were eager to find a favorable ideology to reform Chinese society. This is the position of the reformists. Second, China has strong cultural traditions, so Chinese scholars emphasized what they perceived as similarities with aspects of Chinese culture. This is the position of the conservatives. Third, Chinese scholars confronting the military and economic backwardness of China insisted on the superiority of Chinese philosophy and culture.  Many mainstream voices criticized and belittled Western philosophy.

Since the 1980s, Western philosophy has become more acceptable in China with less interference by the Party. “Philosophy for Philosophy’s sake” became possible for Chinese scholars—although in the new millennium there have been some strong tendencies to advocate the superiority of Chinese philosophy. In this lecture, Professor Xu Youyu will examine a number of thinkers that illustrate the development of the reception of Western philosophy in China.

Xu Youyu is a Professor of Western Philosophy at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing and is one of China’s leading spokesmen for constitutional democracy. He has been a visiting scholar at Harvard and Oxford Universities served as the Olaf Palme Visiting Professor in Sweden. He is an author and editor of twenty books in Chinese, from the Copernican Revolution in Philosophy and Bertrand Russell in 1994 to A Study of Contemporary Western Political Philosophy in 2008. He is also the translator of Wittgenstein’s Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, which he has translated from the original German. He set forth his views of the Cultural Revolution in Rebels of All Stripes—A Study of Red Guard Mentalities in the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1999) and in his own autobiography of the period, Eventful Years. His outspoken defense of liberalism, in works such as Discourse of Freedom (1999), Facing History (2000), and Unremitting Spiritual Pursuit (2002) have won him a wide following in China and established a sharp contrast to the so-called “New Left” and officially-sponsored ideology. He won the Olof Palme Prize in 2014.

Todd May is Class of 1941 Memorial Professor of the Humanities at Clemson University.  He is the author of fourteen books of philosophy, most recently A Fragile Life and A Significant Life, both from University of Chicago Press.

Abstract:

Ineffability is in the air these days, and has been for some time. In many areas of Continental philosophy, it is the very ethos in which thought is conducted. I argue that the realm of the normative, at least, is deeply linguistic. In contrast to the attempt of some thinkers to remove the normative from the conceptual or the linguistic, I try to show that it is central to normativity to have a linguistic reference, a reference rooted precisely in the sense of conceptual categories that so concern thinkers of the ineffable.

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.

A number of philosophers working on Buddhist traditions have recently explored similarities between the cultivated experience of not-self, and the clinical experience of depersonalization. In this talk, I will offer some reflections on this theme. But my primary aim will be to push a similar kind of exploratory project one step further. Drawing on tools from cognitive and computational neuroscience, as well as insights from Yogācāra Buddhist philosophy, I will explore some of the most significant similarities and differences between anomalous experiences evoked by meditation, and anomalous experiences that are commonly labeled as hallucinations. I will then argue that understanding how such experiences are produced offers a powerful framework for thinking about the socially and historically situated nature of everyday experience.

John Dewey, in his resistance to foundational individualism, declares that individual autonomy so conceived is a fiction; for Dewey, it is association that is a fact. In his own language: “There is no sense in asking how individuals come to be associated. They exist and operate in association.” In a way that resonates with Confucian role ethics, the revolutionary Dewey particularizes the fact of associated living and valorizes it by developing a vision of the habitude of unique, defused, relationally-constituted human beings. That is, he develops a distinctive, if not idiosyncratic language of habits and “individuality” to describe the various modalities of association that enable human beings to add value to their activities and to transform mere relations into a communicating community.

In Confucian role ethics, Dewey’s contention that association is a fact is restated in a different vocabulary by appealing to specific roles rather than unique habitudes for stipulating the specific forms that association takes within lives lived in family and community—that is, the various roles we live as sons and teachers, grandmothers and neighbors. For Confucianism, not only are these roles descriptive of our associations, they are also prescriptive in the sense that roles in family and community are themselves normative, guiding us in the direction of appropriate conduct. Whereas for both Confucianism and Dewey, mere association is a given, flourishing families and communities are what we are able to make of our facticity as the highest human achievement.