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A Lawyer, A Poet, and A Philosopher Walk into a Bar to talk about Truth in the City…

There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival ‘knowing’; and the more affects we allow to speak about a matter, the more eyes, different eyes, we know how to bring to bear on one and the same matter, that much more complete will our ‘concept’ of this matter, our ‘objectivity’ be.

Thus wrote Friedrich Nietzsche, and we at the Gotham Philosophical Society agree. We believe that to make sense of something, we need to see it from as many sides as possible.

That is why we are launching a new discussion series with the aim of contributing to the pursuit of New York’s objectivity. We will be taking on all manner of ideas, issues, and topics of significance to New Yorkers, and approaching them from legal, artistic, and philosophical perspectives. We believe that a philosophical understanding cut-off from our legal reality is irrelevant, and that laws uninspired by our poetic imagination are without soul.

So please join us as we kick-off this series with a look at the concept of truth, the concept that is central to human discourse. What is truth? How can we know it? And what can it mean to say, as so many have, that we are now living in a ‘post-truth’ world?  We’ll ask these questions and more.

Wednesday, January 17, 2018 at 8p.m. At Las Tapas Bar and Restaurant, 808 W 187th Street, New York, NY 10033. (Take the A Train) Admission is $15, which includes one complimentary tapa and drink.  Reservations are recommended (646.590.0142)

Shahabuddeen Ally is a practicing lawyer specializing in the field of family law. He also teaches law at Long Island University. He was formerly Assistant Corporation Counsel at the New York City Law Department, as well as Staff Attorney for the City of New York, Administration for Children’s Services. Shah was recently reelected as Chairperson of Manhattan Community Board 12.

Joseph S. Biehl, earned earned a B.A. in philosophy from St. John’s University and a Ph.D. from the Graduate School and University Center, CUNY.  He has written on ethics, meta-ethics, and politics. He has taught philosophy in New York and in Cork, Ireland, and is a member of the Governing Board and former co-director of the Felician Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs. He is the founder and executive director of the Gotham Philosophical Society and Young Philosophers of New York.

“Is Truth Dead?” asked Time Magazine last year. Since people clearly care about the truth, at least in mundane matters, truth is alive. If an airline agent tells you the flight to Dallas is leaving from Gate B16, you expect the flight to Dallas to be leaving from Gate B16, and complain sorely if it’s not.

But if the truth does still matter, why do we elect people who don’t seem to care what the truth is?

The answer to this question, argues philosopher Louise Antony, has partly to do with the structure of human knowledge, and partly to do with the structure of our society. We can’t do anything about the first matter, but we can do plenty about the second.

Louise Antony is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She is the author of numerous essays on the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and feminist theory. She is also a past president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association.

https://www.facebook.com/events/577253882608942/

Contrary to Damien Keown (2001), who worries that metaphysical and epistemological inquiry may distract from ethical investigation, Bronwyn Finnigan and Koji Tanaka (2008) argue such questions may provide grounding for practical application of a Buddhist ethical path. I follow this line of inquiry into Buddhist theories of truth in order to better understand right speech as conceived in the Early Buddhist Suttas. I focus on what the Abhaya Sutta explicitly instructs and what it leaves out regarding the types of words the Tathagata does not say or has a sense of the proper time for saying them. K. N. Jayatilleke (1963) and Mark Siderits (1979) provide convincing evidence that contrary to popular characterizations of the

 Buddhist theory of truth as pragmatic, Early Buddhist Suttas rest on some form of correspondence theory of truth. Siderits shows that at the very least, there is an uneasy tension between correspondence and pragmatic theories. I contrast their position with Francisca Cho and Richard K. Squier’s (2016) argument describing the Buddhist theory of truth as pragmatic based on the use of language and lies. I supplement Cho and Squier with Jonathan Silk’s (2008) work on truth and lies in Buddhist texts in order to argue that there may be an impasse on adjudicating Buddhist theories of truth.

With a response from:

Mark Siderits (Emeritus, Illinois State University)

The Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy (CSCP) is a University Seminar dedicated to the advancement of projects that draw on both western and non-western philosophy. The CSCP meets monthly on the campus of Columbia University and occasionally hosts conferences.

Please save the following dates for our upcoming talks:

March 30: Kin Cheung (Moravian College)

April 13: Lara Braitstein (McGill University)

May 11: David Cummiskey (Bates College)

Columbia Fall 2018 Colloquium Series

When we’re asked to give examples of philosophical questions, we’re likely to think of questions that are very, very old. Is the physical world all there is? How should I live? How do we know what we know? But some philosophical problems are quite new, made possible or urgent by new developments in science and culture. These are often the most exciting problems to think through.

On March 7th at 7:30 PM, Derek Skillings joins Brooklyn Public Philosophers to share his work on the philosophical consequences of the fact that we are holobionts – biological units composed of hosts and their associated swarms of microorganisms. If you’re interested in health, the problem of personal identity, the philosophy of biology in general, or the philosophical consequences of the fact that we’re made up of a bunch of little things which are themselves alive in particular, you’ll want to check this one out. Here’s the abstract:

“I, holobiont. Are you and your microbes a community or a single entity?”

You are a holobiont – a biological unit made up of a host and its associated microbiome (bacteria, protists, viruses and other microscopic entities). What consequences does this have for how we understand ourselves and other similar organisms? What are our spatial and temporal boundaries, and what does it mean to be a healthy holobiont? In this talk I will look at some alternatives for making sense of both holobiont individuality and “healthy holobiont/microbiome” talk. I will argue that existing accounts of human health are not appropriate for microbiomes, and that notions of ecosystem health face similar shortcomings. I will end by looking at some possibilities for understanding overall host health given the importance and ubiquity of microbiomes.

As usual, we meet at the Dweck Center at the Grand Army Plaza branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. Here’s the Facebook event! Tell everyone, please!

Convergence to the truth is viewed with some ambivalence in philosophy of science. On the one hand, methods of inquiry that lead to the truth in the limit are prized as marks of scientific rationality. But an agent who, by using some method, expects to always converge to the truth seems to fail a minimum standard of epistemic modesty. This point was recently brought home by Gordon Belot in his critique of Bayesian epistemology. In this paper I will study convergence to the truth theorems within the framework of Edward Nelson’s radically elementary probability theory. This theory provides an enriched conceptual framework for investigating convergence and gives rise to an appropriately modest from of Bayesianism.

The seminar is concerned with applying formal methods to fundamental issues, with an emphasis on probabilistic reasoning, decision theory and games. In this context “logic” is broadly interpreted as covering applications that involve formal representations. The topics of interest have been researched within a very broad spectrum of different disciplines, including philosophy (logic and epistemology), statistics, economics, and computer science. The seminar is intended to bring together scholars from different fields of research so as to illuminate problems of common interest from different perspectives. Throughout each academic year, meetings are regularly presented by the members of the seminar and distinguished guest speakers.

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02/08/2019 Faculty House, Columbia University
4:00 PM

03/22/2019 Faculty House, Columbia University
4:00 PM

04/19/2018 Faculty House, Columbia University
4:00 PM

A number of puzzles concerning how truth-ascriptions are grounded have recently been discovered by several theorists, following Fine (2010). Most previous commentators on these puzzles have taken them to shed light on the theory of ground. In this paper, I argue that they also shed light on the theory of truth. In particular, I argue that the notion of ground can be deployed to clearly articulate one strand of deflationary thinking about truth, according to which truth is “metaphysically lightweight.” I will propose a ground-theoretic explication of the (entirely bearable) lightness of truth, and then show how this broadly deflationary view yields a novel solution to the puzzles concerning how truth is grounded. So, if the proposal I sketch is on target, the theory of truth and the theory of ground interact fruitfully: we can apply the notion of ground to offer a clear explication of the deflationist claim that truth is “metaphysically lightweight” that both captures the motivations for that claim and solves the puzzles.

In public discourse, but also in political theory, the opinion prevails, that democracy is incompatible with aspirations of truth. Some assume, in the Hobbesian tradition, that civic peace requires that truth assertions be restricted to science and religion (normative positivism), whereas the political sphere is constituted by interests, bargaining and collective decisions based on interests, bargaining and rules of aggregation, be they implicit or explicit. In this perspective Collective Choice as preference aggregation is paradigmatic for the understanding of democracy. Postmodernist and neo-pragmatist thought dismisses truth, because it threatens solidarity and belonging. Libertarian political thought relies on market mechanisms reducing citizens to consumers and producers of material and immaterial goods like security and welfare. Accounts of deliberative democracy focus on reasoning in the public sphere but dismiss a realistic understanding of truth, because it is thought to threaten collective and individual self-determination.

In my talk I will argue that a realistic understanding of empirical and normative truth is compatible, even necessary, for an adequate understanding of democracy, that truth assertions do not threaten civic peace, that postmodernist relativity undermines democratic practice, that libertarian market-orientation is incompatible with the status of citizens in democracy and that even deliberative, but anti-realist, accounts of democracy do not allow for an adequate understanding of democracy. My argument is based on a Davidsonian, or pragmatist, understanding of truth, therefore one might say: it critizises normative positivism, postmodernism, libertarianism, and critical theory using pragmatist insights.

Julian Nida-Rümelin presently holds a chair for philosophy and political theory at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, is a member of the European Academy of Sciences, was president of the German Philosophical Association (DGphil) and state-minister for culture and media in the first government of Gerhard Schröder. The topics of his books include Democracy as Cooperation (1999); Democracy and Truth (2006), translated in Chinese and Italian, Philosophy and the form of Life (2009), Realism (2018) and A Theory of Practical Reason (2020, forthcoming, de Gruyter and PUP).

Generous support provided by the New York Institute of Philosophy.

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).