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!
Paul Kottman, Associate Professor of Literary Studies, gives a lecture entitled “Love as Human Freedom”.
Rather than see love as a natural form of affection, or as a reflection of reigning ideologies, this lecture presents love as a practice that changes over time, through which new social realities are brought into being. Love brings about, and helps us to explain, immense social-historical shifts—from the rise of feminism and the emergence of bourgeois family life, to the struggles for abortion rights and birth control and the erosion of a gender-based division of labor. Drawing on Hegel, via interpretations of literary works, Kottman argues that love generates and explains expanded possibilities for freely lived lives, and is a fundamental way that we make sense of temporal change, especially the inevitability of death and the propagation of life.
About the speaker:
Paul Kottman is the author of Tragic Conditions in Shakespeare (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), A Politics of the Scene (Stanford University Press, 2008) and is the editor of Philosophers on Shakespeare (Stanford University Press, 2009), and The Insistence of Art: Aesthetic Philosophy and Early Modernity (Fordham UP, forthcoming). His next book is tentatively entitled Love as Human Freedom. He is also the editor of a new book series at Stanford University Press, called Square One: First-Order Questions in the Humanities.
Sponsored by the Department of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research.
Crafting Ancient Identities: Mythological and Philosophical Approaches to the Self and Society in Antiquity
Tenth Annual Graduate Conference in Classics
Friday, March 31, 2017
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Keynote Speaker: Professor Kathryn Morgan, UCLA
In Greek and Roman antiquity, mythology and philosophy helped individuals understand their world and define their place in society. From the supernatural exploits in Homer to the etiological accounts of Ovid, mythology humanized natural phenomena and preserved cultural history. Philosophy, meanwhile, reflects an effort to systematize knowledge and answer questions about our place in the world. Both mythological narratives and philosophic thought participated in the crafting of ancient identities, whether as individuals, communities, or nations. The Romans, for example, turned to mythology to identify themselves as the descendants of Aeneas, just as the Athenian philosophers attempted to define what it meant to be a citizen.
The PhD/MA Program in Classics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York invites graduate students in Classics or related fields to submit abstracts of papers that explore how mythology and philosophy contribute to the development of identity in the Greco-Roman world.
Possible paper topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Etiological myths
- Autochthony and migration stories
- Philosophic schools and communities
- Philosophical poetry and the Presocratics
- Reception and transformation of myth in antiquity
- Hero cults and religious communities
- The role of myth in philosophical discourse
Please send an anonymous abstract of approximately 300 words as an email attachment to cunyclassicsconference@gmail.com by January 16, 2017. Please include, in the body of the email, your name, university affiliation, and the title of the presentation. Speakers will have 15 minutes to present. Selected applicants will be notified in early February. Submissions and questions will be received by conference co-organizers Federico Di Pasqua and Thomas Moody.
Even though ancient philosophy and rhetoric have many overlapping interests (education, persuasion, politics, etc.), their relationship has long been a contentious subject, especially among ancient philosophers. Contemporary scholarship on the topic is equally divided: philosophers tend to approach the topic primarily through the works of Plato and Aristotle and regard rhetoric (and rhetorical compositions) as a second-rate notion/discipline which has little interest in shedding light on philosophically relevant questions about human nature and society, whereas classicists research oratorical compositions to get a better understanding of Greek prose style, historical details and context, but often shy away from philosophical questions that the texts might hint at. This workshop aims to bring together scholars working on ancient rhetoric and argumentative techniques on the one hand, and scholars working on ancient philosophy, on the other in order to open up a space for a constructive engagement with philosophy/rhetoric, one which might enrich our understanding of ancient texts as well as the context in which they were produced.
Confirmed speakers: Jamie Dow (Leeds), Richard Hunter (Cambridge), Joel Mann (St Norbert), Jessica Moss (NYU), Usha Nathan (Columbia), James Porter (Berkeley), Edward Schiappa (MIT), Nancy Worman (Barnard). All papers will be followed by a response and general discussion.
Attending the workshop is free, but in order to have an idea of numbers it would be greatly appreciated if those interested in participating in the event would email the organizers, Laura Viidebaum and Toomas Lott.
This Workshop is generously sponsored by the Department of Philosophy (NYU), Department of Classics (NYU) and NYU Center for Ancient Studies.
The 2017 Departmental Faculty Lecture will be delivered by Prof. Giorgio Pini on September 12 at 4:30 pm in Flom Auditorium of the Walsh Family Library. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Philosophers have employed two different varieties of felt necessity to explain central aspects of agency in addiction and love, respectively. In the case of addiction, the relevant felt need is often described in terms of an appetite, whereas love is characterized by necessities arising from a particular kind of caring. On Dr. Wonderly’s view, the extant literature offers an instructive, but incomplete picture of the roles of felt necessity in addiction and love. Dr. Wonderly argues that a third form of felt necessity – attachment necessity – often better captures central aspects of agency in love and addiction. Recognizing the role of attachment necessity will not only illuminate how felt necessity can impact the value of certain relationships, but it will also allow us to discern important features of addiction and love that remain obscured on extant approaches.
Monique Wonderly is the Harold T. Shapiro Postdoctoral Research Associate in Bioethics. She is primarily interested in puzzles at the intersection of ethics and the nature of emotions. She has published in the areas of applied ethics, philosophy of emotion, and history of philosophy. Her current research focuses on emotional attachment – and in particular, on questions concerning moral agency and ethical treatment that arise when considering certain attachment-related pathologies, including psychopathy and (some forms of) addiction. For more, visit here.
Reception to follow.
Love
is patient, it is kind, it is cruel, it is blind, it hurts, it heals, it is a sickness, it is the drug, it is like oxygen, it is all you need, it stinks, it is supreme, it is eternal, it fades, it is the answer, it is life.
Join us for a symposium on that which makes us human.
Thursday, February 15, 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)
Leo Glickman is a partner in Stoll, Glickman & Bellina, LLP. He has devoted his professional life of over two decades to holding the powerful accountable and obtaining justice for the underserved. As a civil rights litigator, he has successfully represented hundreds of people whose rights have been abused by police and correction officers. He has also upheld the rights of protestors, successfully litigating settlements for high-profile Occupy Wall Street participants.
Jane LeCroy is a poet, performance artist and educator who fronts the band The Icebergs and was a part of Sister Spit, the famed west coast women’s poetry troupe. Since 1997 Jane has been publishing student work and teaching writing, literature and performance to all ages through artist-in-the-schools organizations such as Teachers & Writers Collaborative and DreamYard, and as adjunct faculty at the university level. Her poetry book, Names was published by Booklyn as part of the award winning ABC chapbook series, purchased by the Library of Congress along with her braid! Signature Play, her multimedia book from Three Rooms Press, features a poem that was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
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.
In a famous passage from Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Sextus Empiricus presents four different accounts of the conditional in increasing strength. Contemporary analogues have been identified (subject to various degrees of controversy) for the first three, but the last, which even fails to satisfy A>A, has proved elusive. In this talk, I discuss ways of modeling this heterodox conditional. Taking a cue from Sextus, I regard the characteristic feature of this conditional as one of proper (conceptual) containment and approach it using the framework of containment logic. Different implementations of this approach are discussed and evaluated both for their historical and technical merits. In the course of the talk, I will discuss (among other things) the relationship between Sextus’ third and fourth accounts, how Kripke semantics can be and has been used to deepen our understanding of various ancient conditionals, and how ancient notions of containment might yield interesting new (old) perspectives on contemporary containment logic.
Saul Kripke Center, Young Scholars Series: Yale Weiss, “Sextus Empiricus’ Fourth Conditional and Containment Logic”
One of the central questions facing human beings is how we should respond to the humanity of others. Since the enlightenment, secular Western ethics has gravitated towards two kinds of answer: we should care for others’ well-being, or we should respect them as autonomous agents. Largely neglected is an answer we can find the religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Buddhism: we should love all. Analytic philosophers have started to pay more attention to love. But unlike those working within religious traditions, for whom an ideal of love for all serves as the central, organizing ideal in ethics, most of these philosophers see love as confined to the domain of intimate relationships between friends, family, romantic partners and the like. This paper argues that an ideal of love for all, of agape, can be understood apart from its more typical religious contexts and moreover provides a unified and illuminating account of the the nature and grounds of morality. Against challenges to the idea that love for all is possible, I offer a novel account of what it would be to love all. I go on to argue that while it is possible to love all, most of us should not, as doing so would rule out the possibility of loving particular friends and families. Instead, we should approximate love for all. I argue that the minimal approximation of love for all is, surprisingly, respect, deriving the basic, structural features of deontological ethics (including anti-welfarism and anti-aggregation) from my account of love for all.
Reception to follow.