Join us for an evening of accessible philosophical thought and erudite fun. Former pro skater and USD philosophy professor Nick Riggle’s debut title, On Being Awesome: A Unified Theory of How Not to Suck draws on pop culture, politics, history, and sports to to illuminate the ethics and culture of awesomeness and pinpoint its origins in America. Philosopher Aaron James (UC Irvine), a longtime globetrotting surfer and author of the bestselling Assholes: A Theory, returns with Surfing with Sartre: An Aquatic Inquiry Into a Life of Meaning, using the experience and the ethos of surfing to explore key concepts in philosophy. Join Nick and Aaron in conversation followed by a reception and book signing.
Hanna Pickard (Princeton)
Title: “Addiction and the Self”
4:10 PM – 6:00 PM, Philosophy Hall 716
Reception to follow
Fall 2017 Series
James Kreines (Claremont McKenna College)
Reception to follow
Thursday, October 19th, 2017
Josh Knobe (Yale University)
Title: “Norms and Normality”
4:10 PM – 6:00 PM, Philosophy Hall 716
Reception to follow
Thursday, November 16, 2017
Andrew Arlig (Brooklyn College)
Title: “On the Priority of the Part”
4:10 PM – 6:00 PM, Philosophy Hall 716
Reception to follow
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.
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”
Young and innocent. Innocent until proven guilty. Is the loss (or theft) of innocence a crime? Or is innocence among the mature a vice? Do the innocent make good citizens? Can innocence lost ever be regained? How are our different conceptions of innocence related? Join us in this communal investigation and help us understand.
Thursday, March 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.
The 21st Annual CUNY Graduate Philosophy Conference will take place on March 23rd, 2018 at the CUNY Graduate Center (365 5th Avenue). This year’s theme is “Self and Other”, broadly construed. The program below features Dr. Akeel Bilgrami (Columbia) and Dr. Daniel Kolak (William Paterson University) as keynote speakers. Eight graduate students from departments across the U.S. and abroad will give 30-minute talks spanning a broad array of philosophical research areas.
Click the links to download PDFs of the the conference flyer and schedule of talks.
Time / Title / Speaker / Affiliation
8:30-9 AM / BREAKFAST
9-9:30 AM / Embedded Love: What it Means for / Love to Structure Your Will / Hunter Gentry / University of Houston
9:30-10 AM / Animal Intimacy: Intra-Species connectivity and care in the Touch / Stephanie Mieko Struble / Western Connecticut State University
10-10:30 AM / BREAK
10:30-11AM / Foundations of Loyalty: Transcending Self and Other / Sara Pope / Fordham University
11-11:30 AM / Self as Other: On the Interpretation of Mirror Self-Recognition / Pengbo Liu / University of Massachusetts
11:30 AM -12:30 PM / LUNCH
12:30-1:30 PM / Keynote
Inquiry and Academic Freedom: Philosophical Reflections on Current Controversies on Campuses
Akeel Bilgrami
Columbia University
1:30-1:45 PM / BREAK
1:45-2:15 PM / Other Minds in Other Traditions: The Problem of Other Minds in Plantinga and Heidegger / Ben Koons / Oxford University, Oriel College
2:15-2:45 PM / The intrinsic epistemic value of primitive introspection / Anna Giustina / Institut Jean Nicod/Ecole Normale Supérieure/PSL Research University
2:45-3 PM / BREAK
3-3:30 PM / Who Do You Speak For? And How? The Management of Identities in Online Abuse / Michael Barnes / Georgetown University
3:30-4 PM / Hospitality and the Political Economy of Care / Lisa M. Madura / Vanderbilt University
4-4:30 PM / BREAK
4:30-5.30 PM / Keynote
Open Individualism: the Five Ways
Daniel Kolak
William Paterson University
5:30 PM / RECEPTION
Fordham University Graduate Conference
The Fordham Philosophical Society invites current graduate students to submit abstracts for presentation at its upcoming conference. Our topic this year is identity and we welcome submissions from all philosophical fields and interests. Some possible areas of exploration include: logical identity, the politics of identity, identity and difference, identity and narrative, personal identity, and other themes related to the critical study of identity.
The Fordham Philosophical Society is a consciously pluralistic organization and welcomes submissions from all philosophical perspectives including, but not limited to, Ancient Philosophy, Medieval Philosophy, Modern Philosophy, Pragmatism, Analytic Philosophy, Process Philosophy, Neo-Thomism, Critical Theory, Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, and Postmodern Philosophy.
Submission Deadline: December 4, 2017
Submissions should be in the form of maximum 300 word abstracts for a paper of 3000 words with a presentation of 30 minutes. To facilitate blind review, do not include any identifying information in the abstract, but instead include your name, institutional affiliation, and phone contact in the body of your email.
All submissions and questions should be emailed to fordhamgradconference@gmail.com.
An original collection of lauded philosopher Galen Strawson’s writings on the self and consciousness, naturalism and pan-psychism.
Galen Strawson might be described as the Montaigne of modern philosophers, endlessly curious, enormously erudite, unafraid of strange, difficult, and provocative propositions, and able to describe them clearly–in other words, he is a true essayist. Strawson also shares with Montaigne a particular fascination with the elastic and elusive nature of the self and of consciousness. Of the essays collected here, “A Fallacy of Our Age” (an inspiration for Vendela Vida’s novel Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name) takes issue with the commencement-address cliche that life is a story. Strawson questions whether it is desirable or even meaningful to think about life that way. “The Sense of the Self” offers an alternative account, in part personal, of how a distinct sense of self is not at all incompatible with a sense of the self as discontinuous, leading Strawson to a position that he sees as in some ways Buddhist. “Real Naturalism” argues that a fully naturalist account of consciousness supports a belief in the immanence of consciousness in nature as a whole (also known as panpsychism), while in the final essay Strawson offers a vivid account of coming of age in the 1960s.
Drawing on literature and life as much as on philosophy, this is a book that prompts both argument and wonder.
Galen Strawson is a writer and professor of philosophy. He has published seven books of philosophy and is currently the President’s Chair in Philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin.
The CUNY Graduate Center Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) and the Philosophy Program present a talk and book panel on:
RACIAL JUSTICE
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 3 (Rooms 9204-5)
4:15-5:00 PHILOSOPHY COLLOQUIUM LECTURE:
“Racial Justice”: Charles W. Mills, Philosophy, CUNY Graduate Center
5:00-5:05 Break
5:05-5:45 BOOK PANEL on Charles W. Mills’s 2017 book, Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism
Frank M. Kirkland (CUNY Hunter College & the Grad Center)
John Pittman (CUNY John Jay College)
5:45-6:30 Q & A
6:30-7:30 BOOK PARTY—Philosophy common room, 7113 (food and drink)