Friday, November 7, 2014 at 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm
Wolff Conference Room, Albert and Vera List Academic Center 6 East 16th Street, New York, NY 10011, Room D1103
Please join authors Steven Shaviro and Alexander Galloway for a conversation marking the publication of two new books, Shaviro’s The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism and Galloway’s Laruelle: Against the Digital both published this month in the “Posthumanities” book series at the University of Minnesota Press.
Moderated by Eugene Thacker.
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Steven Shaviro is DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University. His many books include Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics (MIT, 2009).
Alexander R. Galloway is professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. He is author or co-author of several books, most recently The Interface Effect (Polity, 2012).
Eugene Thacker is professor of Media at the New School. He is the author or co-author of several books, including In the Dust of This Planet (Zero, 2012).
Presented by the Liberal Studies Program of the New School for Social Research & the School of Media Studies, New School for Public Engagement.
Eric Pommier (Pontifical Catholic University of Chile),author of Ontologie de la vie et éthique de la responsabilité selon Hans Jonas, Vrin, Paris 2013, will give a talk entitled: “Life and Anthropology: A Discussion between Kantian Criticism and Jonasian Ontology”
Abstract:
Critical anthropology can be seen as the common ground of investigation of Kant and Jonas. However I would like to show that it is because Kant does not see the true root of our finitude that Jonas criticizes him. As human finitude is due to the finitude of life, morals and epistemology have to be founded in an ontology of life that reveals its true mode of being. Jonas’s critique of Kant does not mean however that we have to forget the theoretical and practical lessons of criticism. On the contrary, it deals with the necessity to justify in a radical way our limitations thanks to an ontological thought, which does not fall into dogmatism. Then Jonas’s philosophy would be an attempt to found Kantian criticism on a bio-ontological basis.
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.
Pierre Bouretz (L’École des hautes etudes en sciences sociales), Maimonides as Philosopher: Esotericism versus “Popular Philosophy”
[see the linked poster on the department webpage where it says: View this semester’s departmental lecture series.]
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.
Conference Schedule
Friday May 10
- 1pm: Rachel Goodman (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)
Introductory Overview1:30pm: Jake Quilty-Dunn (University of Oxford)
On Elisabeth Camp’s “Putting Thoughts to Work”4:30pm: John Kulvicki (Darmouth College)
On Jacob Beck’s “Perception is Analog”
Saturday May 11
- 1pm: Jacob Beck (York University)
On Jake Quilty-Dunn’s “Perceptual Pluralism”4pm: Elisabeth Camp (Rutgers University)
On John Kulvicki’s “Modeling the Meanings of Pictures”
The Five Essential Readings for the Conference
The conference is predicated on the assumption that everyone in attendance will have read all five of these essays:
- John Haugeland, Representational Genera
- Elisabeth Camp, Putting Thoughts to Work
- Jacob Beck, Perception Is Analog
- Jake Quilty-Dunn, Perceptual Pluralism
- John Kulvicki, Modeling The Meanings of Pictures (excerpt)
Some Helpful Background Readings
Here are ten additional readings that help to fill in some of the background to the topics that will be discussed at the conference. Those new to these topics might start with the Kulvicki, Camp, and Giardino and Greenberg readings, and then move on to the others.
- John Kulvicki, Images in Mind
- Elisabeth Camp, Thinking With Maps
- Valeria Giardino and Gabriel Greenberg, Introduction: Varieties of Iconicity
- John Haugeland, Analog and Analog
- Fred Dretske, Sensation and Perception
- Jerry Fodor, Preconceptual Representation
- Michael Rescorla, Cognitive Maps and the Language of Thought
- Tyler Burge, Origins of Perception
- Tyler Burge, Steps Towards Origins of Propositional Thought
- Jacob Beck, The Generality Constraint and the Structure of Thought
- Whit Schonbein, Varieties of Analog and Digital Representation
If you have any questions about the conference, please contact Zed Adams at zed@newschool.edu.
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).