Søren Kierkegaard and Science Fiction: How Love Can Help Us Navigate The Future
When people think about Søren Kierkegaard, what often comes to mind is his work Fear and Trembling, and its glorification of Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of Isaac. While artistic representations of this biblical narrative often portray it as a horrific act, and while theologians have struggled to reconcile this story with a vision of a just God, Kierkegaard unabashedly praises Abraham’s unquestioning faith. As a result, many people tend to see Kierkegaard as a proto-fascist, one who praises blind obedience above personal judgment, and who therefore sees zealotry as superior to a more reasoned approach to ethical life.
However, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Instead, what Kierkegaard is attempting to demonstrate is how love is “beyond” proof. That is, try as we might, we cannot prove our love to others, nor can they prove their love to us, because ultimately, recognizing love depends on our ability to receive it. For instance, we can think of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, and how, to so many, King’s call to “lovingly” break unjust laws appeared as an attack on the very fabric of society. Like Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, it seemed to be a sacrifice of everything they held dear. In this light, Kierkegaard argues that recognizing love not only depends on the presence of love, but also, on our ability to receive it. In other words, because love cannot be proven, we have to take it on faith.
Working through Kierkegaard’s complicated interpretation of the sacrifice narrative, we will get a better sense of the intricacies of the problem of “proving” love. However, beyond this, we will also see how popular culture has adopted these themes to deal with some of our current instabilities. Provoked by our own anxieties over a fast approaching future—a future that threatens to “sacrifice” many of the things that we hold most dear—science fiction has made use of distinctly Kierkegaardian themes to offer us a measure of comfort in an increasingly unstable world. While love might require a terrifying leap of faith, in works like Spike Jonze’s movie, Her, and the cult classic television show, Battlestar Galactica, we will see how love can also provide us much needed stability in a world (and in a future) that offers us so little.
9/16 – Nick Riggle
(Lafayette College)
10/14 – Jamie Aroosi
(Yeshiva University)
11/3 – Alice Crary
(The New School)
11/24 – Liz Camp
(Rutgers University)
8th Annual Conference of the American Association of Mexican Philosophers will take place at Columbia this spring (April 24-26). The Association is mainly a group of Mexican philosophers based in the United States. We hold a conference every year to discuss our work and get to know each other better, as well as the philosophical community of the hosting institution. The topics of the talks reflect the interests of each year’s presenters, and this year they go from the philosophy of mind & language, to the philosophy of physics, metaphysics, and metaethics.
CUNY PhD Students Adriana Renero and Javier Gómez-Lavín will present.
8th Annual Conference
Columbia University, New York
April 24-26, 2015
FRIDAY, APRIL 24
Room: 304 Hamilton
8:00 – 9:00 am Coffee & Bagels
9:00 – 10:15 am Jorge Pablo Oseguera Gamba (Florida State University) “Debunking Ethical Intuitionism” Commentator: Carlos Núñez (Stanford University)
10:35 – 11:50 pm Viorica Ramírez de Santiago (UNAM) “An alternative interpretation of Plato’s beard” Commentator: Azenet López (University of Miami)
12:00 – 2:10 pm Lunch
2:10 – 3:15 pm Elías Okón (UNAM) “Benefits of objective collapse models for cosmology and quantum gravity”
Commentator: Porter Williams (Columbia University)
3:45 – 5:00 pm Sofía Ortiz-Hinojosa (MIT) “Transformative Experiences and Imagination”
Commentator: Carla Merino (Arizona State University)
SATURDAY, APRIL 25
Room: 716 Philosophy Hall
9:00 – 10:00 am Coffee & Bagels
10:00 – 11:15 am Ricardo Mena (UNAM) “Vagueness”
Commentator: Martín Abreu (NYU)
11:45 – 1:00 pm Teresa Bruno (Syracuse University) “Externalism meets Alienation”
Commentator: Jesús Aguilar (Rochester Institute of Technology)
1:00 – 3:00 pm Lunch
3:00 – 4:15 pm Felipe de Brigard (Duke University) “Vivacity and the distinction between memory and imagination”
Commentator: Javier Gómez-Lavín (CUNY)
8:00 pm Dinner at a local restaurant
SUNDAY, APRIL 26
Room: 716 Philosophy Hall
9:00 – 10:00 am Coffee & Bagels
10:00 – 11:15 am Miguel Ángel Sebastián (UNAM) “A Naturalist Model of the Subjectivity of Experience”
Commentator: Sergio Gallegos (MSU Denver)
11:45 – 1:00 pm Adriana Renero (CUNY) “Introspection”
Commentator: Laura Pérez (Harvard University)
1:00 – 3:00 pm Lunch
3:00 – 4:15 pm Agustín Rayo (MIT) (co-authored with Adam Elga) “Fragmentation and Information Access”
Commentator: Nemira Gasiunas (Columbia University)
I know what you’re thinking. “Can’t summer just be over already? Are there going to be any great public philosophy events in Brooklyn soon? And are authentic romantic relationships even possible?”
Well, I’m here to tell you: yes, yes, and maybe.
Coming up on Tuesday, 9/1 at 7:00 P.M., Skye Cleary (Columbia University), author of the recently published Existentialism and Romantic Love, joins Brooklyn Public Philosophers to share some of her work on the subject. Here’s a bit more about the talk, in Dr. Cleary’s own words:
Existentialism and Romantic Love
Romantic love suggests images of perfect happiness, harmony, understanding, and intimacy that make the lovers feel as if they are made for each other. The ideal is alluring but flawed, because romantic loving often involves conflicts and disappointments.
While every existential philosopher interprets being in the world differently, there is a common emphasis on concrete personal experience, freedom, authenticity, responsibility, individuality, awareness of death, and personal determination of values. It is therefore not surprising that they also consider the question of romantic loving.
This talk draws on the philosophies of Max Stirner, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir in order to examine the roots of disappointments and frustrations within our everyday ideas about romantic love, as well as possibilities for resolution and creating authentically meaningful relationships.
Tell your friends/students/countrymen! Bring a date!
As usual, we meet at the central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library (10 Grand Army Plaza), in the Info Commons lab.
See you there, I hope!
The pursuit of happiness is enshrined in the founding document of our nation as a fundamental and inalienable right. Yet nowhere is the method of this pursuit clearly defined. What, exactly, does it mean to be happy, and how can such happiness be sustained over the long-term? Can happiness be accurately gauged or measured? How does the paradoxical relationship between happiness and pleasure shape our quest to lead the good life? And what does modern science have to tell us about this universal yet elusive pursuit? Attorney and author Kim Azzarelli, historian Darrin McMahon, and social psychologist Barry Schwartz join forces to share their research and insight on happiness, pleasure, and the coveted good life.
*Reception to follow.
Featuring
Kim Azzarelli, JD
Adjunct Professor at Cornell Law School and Founding Partner of Seneca Point Global
Author of “Fast Forward: How Women Can Achieve Power and Purpose”
Darrin McMahon, PhD
Professor of History at Dartmouth College
Author of “Happiness: A History”
Barry Schwartz, PhD
Dorwin Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action at Swarthmore College
Author of “The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less”
Moderator
Steve Paulson
Executive Producer, Wisconsin Public Radio’s nationally-syndicated program To the Best of Our Knowledge
Registration — Individual Lecture Prices
| Member | $5 |
| Member (Student / Postdoc / Resident / Fellow) | $5 |
| Nonmember | $15 |
| Nonmember (Student / Postdoc / Resident / Fellow) | $7 |
The Redemption of Feeling: The Religious Existentialists
Traditional philosophizing has generally depended upon logic or reason as its primary or sole access to truth. Subjective experiences such as feelings or emotions have typically been viewed as secondary, at best, accompanying reason, or, at worse, clouding or misleading reason. This conference attempts to revisit how the movement of existentialism—and more specifically, the religious existentialists—have contributed to a rethinking of the role of subjective experience for the philosophical enterprise in contrast to the rationalist and idealist traditions. This rethinking of our subjective experience is what we are characterizing as the redemption of feeling. As such, this includes anything and everything that can be thought of as outside of a rationalistic approach such as feelings, emotions, moods, intuitions, etc.
The redemption of feeling, then, can be thought of as a rethinking of subjective experience as a whole, and its role in our philosophical enterprise, which may include a re-evaluation of the non-rational approaches to reality introduced above (emotions, moods, intuition, etc.) Expanding our understanding of philosophical thought to include these subjective experiences opens the door for the possibility of a mode of philosophizing that does not reject human experience as philosophically significant, thus reframing the significance of feelings in general for philosophical inquiry. We are interested in papers that creatively explore the importance of feeling within philosophy, but in particular, how the religious existentialists have contributed to such a re-valuation of feeling.
Preference will be given to papers generally related to the following topics:
· Kierkegaard’s, Marcel’s, Levinas’ (or any other religious existentialist) contribution to our understanding of feeling
· What role can feeling/emotions have in relation to our faith or relation to God? (note: by feelings we do not mean just the emotions)
· What cognitive importance do feelings have for any particular existentialist?
· What role do feelings have in moral/ethical questions or behaviors?
· What might be the role of feelings/emotions, if any, with respect to our knowledge of God?
· A discussion on the range of human experience, or feelings
· How do any two religious existentialist relate to one another on this issue?
· A discussion on lesser known religious existentialists, such as Ebner, Berdyaev, etc. will also be given preference
We are especially interested in papers on the following thinkers:
Soren Kierkegaard, Gabriel Marcel, Karl Jaspers, Emmanuel Levinas, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Ferdinand Ebner, Nikolai Berdyaev, Miguel de Unamuno, Lev Shestov, and Simone Weil
Conference website: http://www.redemptionoffeeling.wordpress.com
Is Valentine’s Day an opportunity for meaningful celebrations of love, or is it merely a chocolate-covered con? As lovers, should we resist being seduced into spending billions of dollars annually on red roses and teddies (be they bears or lingerie)? Or should we surrender to the superficial satisfactions they represent? Be there as Skye Cleary takes us on an existential look at the hype and the possibilities for authentic loving. And bring someone you love.
Friday, February 12, 2016 at 6pm at The Cornelia Street Café, located at 29 Cornelia Street, New York, NY 10014 (near Sixth Avenue and West 4th St.). Admission is $9, which includes the price of one drink. Reservations are recommended (212. 989.9319).
Skye Cleary, PhD is a philosopher and author of Existentialism and Romantic Love (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). She lectures at Columbia University, Barnard College, the City University of New York, and the New York Public Library. Skye is a co-founder of the Manhattan Love Salon, an advisory board member of Strategy of Mind, an associate editor of the American Philosophical Association’s blog, and a certified fellow with the American Philosophical Practitioners Association. Skye has written for The Huffington Post, ABC Radio National, YourTango and others.
In a recent dialogue with Sara Ahmed published in Sexualities, Judith Butler had the opportunity to reflect on the reception of Gender Trouble among academic philosophers at the time of its original publication. Describing herself as having attempted to write a book on the “philosophical foundations of gender,” Butler recalls how, in the name of disciplinary purity, philosophy departments at the time dismissed the writings of what would come to be called “queer theory” as non-philosophical. Following Butler, one might say that throughout its history queer theory has been disavowed in both the practice and institutions of philosophy—not unlike the non-normative bodies, genders and sexualities for which it has sought to account, queer theory has often been said to be incoherent, illegible and unintelligible. Nevertheless, as Butler observes, this disavowal also had at least one fortuitous consequence: many queer theorists, having been trained in departments of philosophy or philosophical traditions, but denied the institutional recognition of the titles “philosopher” and “philosophy,” were forced to develop interdisciplinary forms of solidarity, fashioning intellectual identities and traditions of thought that would have been otherwise impossible. Faced with what Butler describes as a kind of “disciplinary power or cruelty in academic life,” one might say that queer theory was forged from the fire of this ambivalent relation-without-relation to what has been called “philosophy.”
Given this state of affairs, while it might be and often has been tempting to disengage queer theorizing from philosophy altogether, the premise of this conference is that what distinguishes queer theory as a tradition for thinking non-normative sex and gender is the implicit claim that queer people have a certain right to philosophy, and that to insist on this right is to insist on the critique and transformation of the practice and institutions of philosophy. In this spirit, the organizers of this conference hope to facilitate a series of conversations surrounding the following questions: What philosophical traditions and resources have made queer theorizing possible? What sorts of blindnesses have characterized the philosophical foundations of queer theory? What new forms of solidarity might be forged among queer theory and other bodies of knowledge on the margins of philosophy (transgender studies, disability studies, the philosophy of race, etc.) What, if anything, should queer people expect from philosophy? Is it possible today (and if so, what does it mean) to be a queer philosopher?
In posing these questions, we hope to not only encourage the submission of papers that will further scholarly reflection on those traditions of philosophy germane to queer theory, but also to provide a space for students, activists, and scholars to critically reflect on the academic institutions in which they (do or do not) find themselves. Needless to say, submissions are encouraged from a diverse array of disciplinary and institutional affiliations.
==========
We invite the submission of papers no longer than 3,000 words prepared for a 20-25 minute presentation. Papers should be submitted as .pdf files and formatted for blind review. Please include as a separate document a cover letter including your name, paper title, institution and contact information.
Submissions should be sent to futuresofqueertheory@gmail.com by January 31, 2017
Possible Topics:
Queer phenomenology
The ethics of queer theory
Queer theory and the philosophy of race
Queer theory and intersectional feminism
Deconstruction and queer theory
Speech act theory and queer theory
Queer theory and disability studies
Queer thought and Black Lives Matter
The teaching of queer theory
The status of queers in philosophy
De-subjugated knowledge
Queer theory outside academia
The place of experience in queer theory
Philosophy, science, and queer theory
Queer theory in relation to postcolonial and decolonial theory
Queer theory and transgender studies
Queer theory and Marxism
Queer theory and French Feminism
Keynote speakers:
The Speculative Ethics Forum is a one day workshop-style event in which we’ll consider the most challenging matters of ethics. Ethical approaches of all sorts are welcomed–analytic, continental, ancient, medieval, Asian, and so on. Most papers are invited. However, there are two slots open for submissions. Any paper in ethical theory will be considered for acceptance. Bold and speculative inquiries are preferred to papers that primarily defend ground already gained or papers that are primarily scholarly. Our aim, in short, is to have a single day concentrated on expanding the horizons of ethics.
Our Invited Speakers Are:
Katja Vogt (Columbia University)
James Dodd (New School for Social Research)
Leo Zaibert (Union College)
Justin Clarke-Doane (Columbia University)
Organisers:
Register
November 17, 2017, 11:45pm EST
speculative.ethics.forum [at the host] gmail.com
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.