Alexander Nehamas (Department of Philosophy, Humanities, and Comparative Literature, Princeton University), will give a lecture entitled “Nietzsche, Intention, and Action”
Beginning from Nietzsche’s thought that “in order to become what one is one must not have the faintest idea what one is,” Nehamas will try to articulate his understanding of intention and action.
From the abstract: “A large swath of human behavior cannot possibly be explained if we assume, as is common both in everyday talk and in philosophy today, that an intention is a mental state that precedes, causes, and rationalizes our actions. Most interesting behavior, beyond lifting an arm or turning on a light—behavior encapsulated in ”becoming what one is” and most clearly observable in the production and interpretation of works of art—requires that intention, whatever exactly it is, comes into being along with the actions with which it is connected. That has important consequences for the interpretation of both Nietzsche and human action more generally.”
This Essentialism Which is Not One
Topic areas
- Continental Philosophy
- Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality
- Social and Political Philosophy
Details
Taking its title from Naomi Schor’s text with the same name, this conference reformulates the question that Schor posed 20 years ago concerning feminist debates around the writing of Luce Irigaray: is essentialism in contemporary critical thought still anathema? How can we think about essentialism today alongside and across different disciplines that might both nourish and contest one-another such as philosophy, feminist thought, queer theory, critical race studies, and biology? Have past outright rejections of essentialism undercut political agendas, by denying shared connections that might motivate collectivity? What can we say about essentialist, anti-essentialist, and more contemporary anti-anti-essentialist (or strategic essentialist) stances?
The 2016 Philosophy Graduate Student Conference at The New School for Social Research seeks to explore these questions, and we invite all of you to engage with us in thinking about them. We welcome non-traditional presentations, including works of arts or creative writing as well as traditional philosophical papers. Papers should be roughly 3000 words. Performances should be no more than 20 minutes in length. Any accommodations you may need must be specified in your submission.
Potential topics include considerations of essentialism with respect to: social constructivism, gender/sexuality, nature/animals, race, trans feminisms, femininity, identity, technology, disability, queer theory, revolution/political transformations. Please send all submissions formatted for blind review to essentialism2016@gmail.com on or before December 1.
We look forward to hearing from you!
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.]
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).
Recently, Rebecca Kukla – among others – has argued that consent language is too narrow to adequately capture the ethical obligations and failures arising in the context of sex. Instead, she offers more nuanced scripts for the kinds of communication that occur throughout sex, not just at the beginning. I agree with Kukla that consent language is too narrow; however, I argue that she overlooks the fact that intimate personal communication requires an emotional attunement to context precisely because it cannot be fully scripted. To demonstrate this I turn to Cavell’s category of the passionate utterance which gestures at this dynamic dimension of performatives, but doesn’t deliver a detailed account. In this paper I will expand on Cavell’s idea of the passionate exchange in order to shed light on the active interpretive role of the audience, and how it contributes to performative success.