Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University), will give a lecture entitled “A New Look at an Old Text: De la grammatologie in the Eyes of its Translator, 40 Years Later”
Spivak is University Professor, and a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. B.A. English (First Class Honors), Presidency College, Calcutta, 1959. Ph.D. Comparative Literature, Cornell University, 1967. D. Litt, University of Toronto, 1999; D. Litt, University of London, 2003; D. Hum, Oberlin College, 2008; D. Honoris Causa, Universitat Roveri I Virgili, 2011; D. Honoris Causa, Rabindra Bharati, 2012; Kyoto Prize in Thought and Ethics, 2012; Padma Bhushan 2013; D.Honoris Causa, Univeridad Nacional de San Martin, 2013; D. Litt, University of St. Andrews, 2014; D. Honoris Causa, Paris VIII (2014), Presidency University (forthcoming).
Fields include: 19th- and 20th-century literature; politics of culture; feminism; Marx, Derrida; globalization. Books include: In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987; Routledge Classic 2002), Thinking Academic Freedom in Gendered Post-Coloniality (1993; 2d ed forthcoming), Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993; Routledge classic 2003), The Spivak Reader (1995), Imperatives to Re-Imagine the Planet / Imperative zur Neuerfindung des Planeten (ed. Willi Goetschel, 1999; 2d ed. forthcoming), Chotti Munda and His Arrow (translation with critical introduction of a novel by Mahasweta Devi, 2002), Death of a Discipline (2003), Other Asias (2005), An Aesthetic Education in the Age of Globalization (2012), Readings (2014), and Du Bois and the General Strike (forthcoming).
Hilde Lindemann, Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University, will give a talk entitled “Someone Else’s Words: When Patients and Families Can’t Be Heard”
ABSTRACT
There are many reasons why a patient might be unheard. I examine one that is pervasive, creates moral trouble in the clinic, and goes almost altogether unrecognized. It is the failure of uptake brought about by having to use someone else’s words. To explain, I begin with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s remark in the Philosophical Investigations: “To imagine a language means to imagine a life-form.” In this section, Wittgenstein develops the idea that speaking and understanding language is a part of, and specific to, a particular way of life. The words in the language mean what they do because of how they are used by those who inhabit that way of life; the inhabitants shape the language to serve their own purposes. I contend that the language specific to the life-form of the clinic does not always serve the patient’s purposes. It looks deceptively like the patient’s language, which is why the problem goes unnoticed, but it is actually what Wittgenstein would call a suburb of that language, and it’s an unfamiliar one at that., I describe the patient’s plight when the language of the clinic does not serve her needs, offer some case examples that make the problem more visible, and suggest a partial solution.
This event is sponsored by The New School for Social Research.
This seminar is a discussion of a pre-circulated paper. It can be found on the GIDEST site for attendees to read in advance.
Orit Halpern presents “The Architecture Machine: Demoing, the Demos, and the Rise of Ubiquitous Computing.”
Orit Halpern is Assistant Professor in History at The New School of Social Research and Eugene Lang College, and an affiliate in the Design Studies Graduate Program at Parsons, The New School for Design.
Her research centers on histories of digital media, cybernetics, cognition and neuroscience, architecture, planning, and design. Her recent book Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Duke, 2014) is a genealogy of big data and interactivity. Halpern’s published works and multimedia projects have appeared in numerous venues including the Journal of Visual Culture, Public Culture, BioSocieties, Configurations, and at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany. She has also published essays in numerous exhibition catalogues.
Halpern is currently working on exhibitions — http://furnishingthecloud.net/ — and has a number of future projects on histories of “smartness,” self-organization as a virtue and a democratic ideal, and the relationship between calculation, territory, and utopia throughout history.
This event is part of the bi-weekly GIDEST Seminars presented by the Graduate Institute of Design, Ethnography, & Social Thought at The New School.
Marcia Morgan (Muhlenberg College), The Affect of Dissident Language and Aesthetic Emancipation at the Margins: A Possible Dialogue Among Adorno, Kristeva, and West
[see the linked poster on the department webpage where it says: View this semester’s departmental lecture series.]
Jason Stanley, Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, gives a lecture entitled “Non-Ideal Philosophy of Language”
Science requires idealizations. Physicists, for example, often work with ideal models of reality that abstract from the existence of friction. The theory of meaning, both in philosophy and linguistics, is no different. Virtually all work in the theory of meaning presupposes an idealized model, which Stanley calls the standard model, in which various idealizations have been made to focus on attention on the putatively most central aspects of linguistic communication. In this talk, part of co-authored work with the linguist David Beaver, Stanley isolates five idealizations that are made by the vast majority of work in the theory of meaning, and argues that these idealizations are scientifically problematic and politically flawed. Stanley uses the critique of the standard model to sketch a new program for the theory of meaning, one that places at the center of inquiry into linguistic communication precisely the features of communication that the idealizations of the standard model seem to almost deliberately occlude.
About the speaker:
Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. Before coming to Yale in 2013, he was Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers University. He has also been a Professor at the University of Michigan (2000-2004) and Cornell University (1995-2000). His PhD was earned in 1995 at the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT (Robert Stalnaker, chair), and he received his BA from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1990.
Professor Stanley has published four books, two in epistemology, one in philosophy of language and semantics, and one in social and political philosophy. His first book was Knowledge and Practical Interests published in 2005 by Oxford University Press. It was the winner of the 2007 American Philosophical Association book prize. Professor Stanley’s second book, Language in Context, also OUP, was published in 2007. This is a collection of his papers in semantics published between 2000 and 2007 on the topic of linguistic communication and context. His third book, Know How, was published in 2011, also with OUP. Professor Stanley’s fourth book, How Propaganda Works, was published by Princeton University Press in May, 2015. It was the winner of the 2016 PROSE award for the subject area of philosophy.
http://www.aesop.com/usa/the-fabulist/jason-stanley/
Sponsored by the Department of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research.
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.
The paper draws on the first sentence of Nicomachean Ethics I, but goes beyond interpretation in putting forward a new version of the Guise of the Good (GG). This proposal is Aristotelian in spirit, but defended on philosophical grounds. GG theorists tend to see their views as broadly speaking Aristotelian. And yet they address particular actions in isolation: agents, the thought goes, are motivated to perform a given action by seeing the action or its outcome as good. The paper argues that the GG is most compelling if we distinguish between three levels: the motivation of small-scale actions, the motivation of mid-scale actions or pursuits, and the desire to have one’s life go well. The paper analyzes the relation between small-, mid-, and large-scale motivation in terms of Guidance, Substance, and Motivational Dependence. In its Aristotelian version, the argument continues, the GG belongs to the theory of the human good.
Katja Maria Vogt, Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. She specializes in ancient philosophy, ethics, and normative epistemology. In her books and papers, she focuses on questions that figure both in ancient and in contemporary discussions: What are values? What kind of values are knowledge and truth? What does it mean to want one’s life to go well?
Presented by The New School for Social Research (NSSR) Philosophy Department.
We often make our thoughts clear to ourselves in the process of putting them into words. In this lecture I introduce a new puzzle about this process—one that’s reminiscent of the famous paradox about inquiry in Plato’s Meno. The puzzle is that, on the one hand, coming to know what we’re thinking seems to require finding words that would express our thought; yet, on the other hand, finding such words seems to require already knowing what we’re thinking.
I consider and reject two possible solutions to this puzzle. The first solution denies that language contributes to our knowledge of our thoughts. The second solution denies that we have a fully formed thought that we try to articulate in the first place. The failure of these solutions points to a positive account of the role of language in the pursuit of self-knowledge, on which language mediates between two different “formats” or modes of thought. Among the broader implications of this account is a richer conception of the aims and methods of philosophy.
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.
There is a broad consensus that Aristotle introduced the concept of matter in order to develop a consistent account of substantial change. However, it is disputed which role matter fulfills in substantial change. According to the traditional interpretation, matter persists while taking on or losing a substantial form. According to a rival interpretation, matter does not persist in substantial change; instead, it is an entity from which a new substance can emerge and which ceases to exist in this process. In my view, both interpretations are problematic in the light of Aristotle’s broader ontological project and are at odds with the way Aristotle describes the substantial generation of living beings. On the basis of Aristotle’s biological theory, I will suggest that Aristotelian matter is a continuant in substantial generation, but does not satisfy the common criteria for persistence that apply to individual substances.
Anna Schriefl
Anna Schriefl is Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin (assistant professor) at the University of Bonn, and currently a visiting scholar at the New School. She has published a book about Plato’s criticism of money and wealth, and most recently an introduction into Stoicism (both in German).