This conference celebrates the 50th anniversary of the first publication of Saul Kripke’s masterpiece, Naming and Necessity, by showcasing new work on a range of topics on which it has had a lasting influence. These topics include, but are not limited to: the nature of names and natural kind terms; the failure of the description or cluster/description theories; the distinction between metaphysical necessity and epistemic apriority; empty names; the metaphysics of essence and origin; the nature of modality and possible worlds; conceivability and the epistemology of modality; the role of philosophical intuition; and the mind-body problem.
Dates: 12th and 13th December, from 9am to 5pm.
Venue: The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue, New York, New York.
Format: hybrid
Registration: for both online and in person attendance, please register by the 28th of November, 2022 at https://forms.gle/Jbr3uaFx1ZwRxJpZ7.
Speakers:
Organisers:
The COVID-19 pandemic is said to be a once-in-a-century incident, and it brought to us a sense of crisis at various levels. What is a crisis, though? Can any unnerving moment or period be called a crisis, or are there different dimensions of a crisis to which we need to be attentive? Is solidarity possible after experiencing a crisis like Covid-19? Can Buddhism make any contribution to facilitating solidarity? This presentation explores the meaning and nature of a crisis and our responses to it by drawing on modern Korean political thinker Pak Ch’iu’s (1909–1949) analysis of crisis and feminist-Buddhist thinker Kim Iryŏp’s (1896–1971) Buddhist philosophy. By doing so, this presentation considers what social, political, existential, and even religious meaning we can draw from our experience of crises, and what questions these insights present to us.
With responses from Karsten Struhl (John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY)
Presented by THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY
RSVP is required for dinner. If you would like to participate in our dinner, a $30 fee is required. Please contact Lucilla at lm3335@columbia.edu for further information.
Lectures:
Romina Birman, Paul Boghossian, Michael Devitt, Hartry Field, Melvin Fitting, Daniel Isaacson, Carl Posy, Robert Stalnaker
Reminiscences:
James Burgess, David Chalmers, Mircea Dumitru, Margaret Gilbert, Antonella Mallozzi, Oliver Marshall, Yiannis Moschovakis, Stephen Neale, Gary Ostertag, David Papineau, Graham Priest, Teresa Robertson Ishii, Nathan Salmon, Larry Tribe, lakovos Vasiliou, Timothy Williamson
For more information contact kripkecenter@gc.cuny.edu
After the stimulating discussion at the Conference on Philosophy in the Pandemic Generation, participants decided then and there to begin something bigger: The Society for Philosophers of the Pandemic Generation. This group is open to any and all who feel that the pandemic influenced them during their formative years of philosophical training.
The First Conference of the Society for Philosophers of the Pandemic Generation welcomes abstracts:
That explicitly engage with the role of pandemics, epidemics, and the unique challenges, academic or otherwise, of 2020-2023.
That are the result of a research project in philosophy conceived or written during, or affected by, said challenges.
That may be on a range of topics that need not be limited by content, this includes topics on the crossroads of philosophy and another discipline.
We encourage PhD students and early career researchers to submit an abstract, particularly those whose philosophical research overlaps with the timing of the pandemic. The objective of the conference is to provide a platform for graduate and postgraduate philosophers to present their work to peers, and to discuss experiences and research from the past three years. Ideas do not have to be finished or perfect; it can be work in progress. We also encourage undergraduate students of philosophy affected by the pandemic to submit research for a special showcase portion of the conference.
Formal requirements:
Abstracts should be suitable for a 30-minute presentation.
Abstracts should be written in English.
Abstracts for papers should be fully anonymised.
Abstracts should not exceed 500 words, including references.
Your abstract will be anonymously reviewed.
There is no registration fee for this conference. However, travel and stay costs cannot be reimbursed.
The deadline for submissions is
15 August 2023 to: pandemicgenerationphilosophy@gmail.com
The conference will be held:
September 1 and 2, the CUNY Graduate Center
Organizers:
V Alexis Peluce
Liam D. Ryan
Keynote: Harry Brighouse (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Pedagogy Workshop Leader: TBA
Location: The Graduate Center, CUNY—New York, New York
Abstracts & Workshop Applications due: July 31st 2023
Responses: August 31st 2023
Organizers: Michael Greer (CUNY), Maria Salazar (CUNY)
Contact email: gscope.committee@gmail.com
The committee for the Graduate Student Conference on Philosophy of Education (GSCOPE) invites abstracts for papers on the topic of Higher Education, Democracy, and Controversy. The theme of the conference & post-conference pedagogy workshop reflects the difficulty in creating and maintaining respectful discourse in higher-education classrooms, especially surrounding controversial empirical, moral, and political issues. Some argue that this is an equity issue. Undergraduate students who come from rural and/or underprivileged areas are more likely to experience alienation on campus, sometimes because they have never been exposed to certain “politically correct” language or ideas, and sometimes simply because they lack the financial and social capital that their peers have. It seems crucial (and follows from democratic and civic values) to foster safe learning environments for all students, especially those students who are more likely to feel alienated on college campuses and in elite spaces. At the same time, some argue that the aim of higher education is purely epistemological, and not civic or democratic. Proponents of this view might hold that free speech and academic freedom must be properly protected for higher education to perform its proper social function: education. What is the appropriate relationship between higher education, knowledge-production, teaching, free speech, and democracy? How can higher education instructors and professors be effective teachers in the light of these relationships?
Papers must pertain to higher educationbut maybe about anything from interpersonal classroom dynamicstoinstitutional policies to campus controversy. We are particularly interested in papers that explore the following topics:
- Philosophical issues around teaching controversy
- Navigating different identities in the classroom and on campus
- Free speech and controversial issues in classrooms and on campus
- Differential roles of various higher education actors when it comes to protecting free speech (administration, tenured professors, students, residential life)
- Training (or lack thereof) of graduate students to be teachers and the impact of this on teaching in our current political moment
- Theright relationship(s) between democracy, knowledge,free speech, and higher education
- The role of controversy in democracy
- The relationship between controversy and equality
- Teaching as an equity issue – how education might foster or impede different kinds of equity (class equity, racial equity, urban/rural equity, gender equity)
- Disagreement in classrooms
- Epistemological issues around disagreement and understanding
- Trust in classrooms
- Pedagogical tools to cope with disagreement in classrooms
- Philosophical views on coming to understanding from different social locations, epistemic commitments, and material circumstances
We especially welcome contributions that:
- Think about universities outside of the “top 50” and the “top 500” — we want our conversation to reflect issues found across the entire spectrum of international higher ed institutions
- Engage with CUNY-specific issues and offer CUNY-specific solutions
Abstracts should:
– Outline the paper’s principal argument(s).
– Give a good sense of the paper’s philosophical and/or empirical contributions and methods.
– Be anonymized.
Proposal Guidelines:
Please submit abstracts of up to 500 words by midnight EST on Monday, July 31, 2023.
PDF or DOC.X by email to gscope.committee@gmail.com
Post-Conference Pedagogy Workshop
The theme of our conference Higher Education, Democracy, and Controversy is relevant to graduate student educators, who are routinely under-trained and under-equipped to engage with real-life problems they may encounter in the classroom. The lack of training for higher education teachers is a growing iue in philosophy of education.
This workshop attends to this issue by facilitating a space for graduate student educators to reflect on how to foster good teaching environments for controversial issues, and be good interlocutors with each other on controversial issues. The workshop will also touch on promoting equity in classrooms. We will provide workshop participants with a certificate of completion.
https://philevents.org/event/show/112546
Democracy is often presented as the sine qua non of politics today. Yet our own democratic political orders across the West consistently fail to deliver the desiderata they promise to provide. Does this failure arise in part from the theoretical insufficiency of conventional diagnoses of democracy’s challenges and ills? As the primaries for the 2024 U.S. presidential election open, we invite participants to consider critically the status of democracy with an eye toward the concerns that have defined Telos over its 55-year history.
The main advantage of democracy over other political forms is that, by allowing broader participation in decision-making, it prevents domination of the many by the few. In theory, it also fosters decision-making that is comparatively effective and meaningful by allowing views and information from the many to be communicated efficiently to political leaders, while also holding the latter to account for their actions. At the same time, a major difficulty of democracy is that the rule by the many requires some procedure for translating a multitude of opinions into unified decisions and action. In addition, precisely by exercising its majority will, the many can trammel the integrity of the individual—the key threat that liberalism seeks to hold at bay.
These advantages—and, especially, these challenges—have produced two competing visions of democracy in the contemporary West. Their division reflects differences about the politics of representation and decision-making. On one hand, liberals view democracy as the following of appropriate procedures for channeling the opinions of the multitude through the election of representatives. On the other hand, populists might disregard such procedural restrictions to arrive at outcomes that are acclaimed by the people directly.
While both sides nod to the importance of the popular will, both are in fact willing to denigrate it. The liberal camp reacts in horror when democratic elections result in the election of populists, who are said to lack proper governing expertise, as in the 2016 victory of Donald Trump. The populist camp charges conspiracy when electoral results fail to reflect their own conception of the people’s will, as in Trump’s reaction to his 2020 ouster. Depending on which camp is describing the times, the false mediator of popular will is either the demagogue or the bureaucrat—Telos has long opposed both.
Different narratives, in turn, have taken hold about democracy’s present challenges. From the point of view of the liberal proceduralist critique of demagogues, the means of moving from a multiplicity of opinions to a unified decision inevitably involves discourse within a public sphere. This discourse depends on a common understanding of historical facts, as well as a public sphere that allows different perspectives to face each other in debate. In our contemporary world, however, the breakdown of previous limits to accessing the public sphere has led to an inability to arrive at a consensus on the difference between fact and fiction, as well as an increasing tendency of citizens to exist within a social media echo chamber of their own views, undermining the common ground that a public sphere presupposes.
At the same time, public debate necessarily implicates values and identities that have an ultimately mythic basis that cannot be rationally determined. People’s opinions, moreover, are invariably shaped by leaders as much as the people shape what leaders ought to do. Experts lament how this representational dynamic undermines the procedures that govern and channel the representation of the popular will. Yet the narrative aspect of representation is an ineradicable element of the way in which the popular will coalesces. The process of narrativized representation will never be an entirely rational one, and the prominence of media personalities such as Reagan, Trump, and Zelensky as politicians underlines the futility of attempting to rid the public sphere of drama and spectacle.
For the populist, by contrast, the primary threat to democracy lies in bureaucracy. In his 2016 end run around the political establishment, Trump’s electoral success was driven by a broader critique of the administrative state’s undermining of democratic process. The rise of the managerial bureaucratic state that was set in motion by the development of the welfare state in the twentieth century has created a class divide between managers and managed that has shifted decision-making power over the conditions of everyday life away from individuals and toward government and corporate bureaucracies. Because more and more of our economic and social welfare is under the direct influence of the state, the resultant bloated administrative state has now become prey to a frenzy of lobbyists, who further distance the people from political decision-making. The protections of minority rights that constitute the liberal aspect of today’s democracies have turned communities into special interests that lobby administrators to pass on privileges to favored groups. The result has been a growing restriction of freedom of expression in the public sphere and an eroding of a unifying basis for constructing a political order now dominated by the collusion of bureaucracy with corporations.
While the liberal critique of demagoguery resorts to more government controls that exacerbate the expansion of bureaucracy, the populist critique of bureaucracy has attempted to dismantle government without considering how to establish mechanisms that would take over the functions that bureaucracies have coopted. Focusing on opposition to government, the populist perspective often lacks any sense of alternative institutional structures that could remedy the administration and commodification of everyday life.
Both sides have contributed to a polarization of views that threatens the underlying consensus necessary for democratic politics. The political gridlock that has ensued from their diverging diagnoses has meant that our political orders consistently fail to deliver peace, prosperity, and accountable government. Moreover, regardless of the rhetoric or credentials of those in power, democracy today seems always to leave us with broadly the same basic policies, despite some of them being deeply unpopular.
We invite those who are interested in presenting at the 2024 Telos Conference to consider critically the status of democracy today by addressing one or more of the following questions:
Democratic Values
- Does democracy have a value of its own independent of its practical consequences?
- What kinds of basic agreements on principles are necessary to maintain a democracy?
- Is there a limit to diversity in a democracy?
- To what extent is polarization itself a threat to democracy?
- What is the relationship between democracy and liberalism?
Democracy and the Administrative State
- To what extent is the consistent reality of all self-styled “democracies” of the world today a form of managerial governance that resists change from below?
- What role is left in an age of managerialism for the popular will?
- Might the appropriate response to managerialism not be more democracy, both at the level of the state but also inside corporate and workplace structures, e.g., through workers’ self-management?
Democracy and the Public Sphere
- What is the role of representation in a democracy, and how do today’s representational processes threaten democratic decision-making?
- How have social media and artificial intelligence changed the way in which democratic processes function, and what changes to these processes might be necessary in the future to accommodate these new technological developments?
- To what extent and in what ways does the public sphere function in today’s democracies? What kinds of limitations are necessary to guarantee the functioning of the public sphere as a space for democratic debate and decision-making?
Democracy and Religion
- What role is there for religion in today’s democracies?
- To what extent does either secularization or religion pose a threat to democracy?
Democracy and Authoritarianism
- What is the relationship between democracy and authoritarianism? Do the current ills of democracy promote a global shift toward authoritarian government?
- What are the key components of democracy that differentiate it from authoritarianism? Where do countries such as Hungary, Turkey, India, and Russia fall on the continuum from democracy to authoritarianism?
Abstract Submissions
Whatever specific questions you address, we invite you to present your analysis with an eye toward the long-standing concerns of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute and thereby to help develop a trenchant, independent view of democracy that can inform both critique and practical action within our present historical moment. Please submit a short c.v. and an abstract of up to 250 words by October 15, 2023, to telosnyc2024@telosinstitute.net and place “The 2024 Telos Conference” in the email’s subject line. Please direct questions to Professor Mark G. E. Kelly, Western Sydney University, M.Kelly@westernsydney.edu.au.
Conference Location
The conference will take place at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute in New York City from Friday, March 22, to Saturday, March 23, 2024.
The graduate students and faculty of Columbia University and New York University invite graduate students* to submit papers to present at the 24th Annual Columbia-NYU Graduate Conference in Philosophy, to be held March 30th, 2024!
The keynote speaker for this event will be Robert Brandom (University of Pittsburgh).
The conference will take place in person at Columbia University.
This conference is a generalist conference. Any topic suitable for presentation for a general philosophical audience is welcome!
Requirements for submission. Papers submitted should be:
(1) 3,000 to 5,000 words in length, suitable for a presentation of 30 to 40 minutes.
(2) Prepared for blind review, in PDF format.
(3) Accompanied with a separate cover sheet with the author’s name, home institution, contact information, topic area(s) of the paper, and an abstract of approximately 300 words.
Submissions should be sent to forms.gle/tVo3jhHUY2LyyeUD7. The deadline is 01/15/2024. Decisions will be sent out by 02/12/2024.
For any further information or inquiries, please contact columbianyu.philgradconference@gmail.com.
*Submissions from graduate students at NYU and Columbia will not be considered for acceptance.
The Saul Kripke Center is pleased to announce that James Walsh (Assistant Professor, Philosophy, NYU) will deliver a talk on Friday, May 10th, 2024, from 4:15 to 6:15 pm at the CUNY Graduate Center (Room 9207). The talk is free and open to all.
Title: Modal definability and Kripke’s theory of truth
Abstract: In Outline of a Theory of Truth, Kripke introduces some of the central concepts of the logical study of truth and paradox. He informally defines some of these–such as groundedness and paradoxicality–using modal locutions. We introduce a modal language for regimenting Kripke’s informal definitions and characterize the modally definable sets. Though groundedness and paradoxicality are expressible in the modal language, we prove that intrinsicality–which Kripke emphasizes but does not define modally–is not.
The philosophy of art, as practiced in the western world, has tended to have two divided homes: in analytic philosophy and continental philosophy. Within the analytic tradition, the philosophy of art has recently undergone a revival with the emphasis on perception. This has more closely aligned art theory to science and questions of biology as well as to issues within psychology. The continental tradition has traditionally drawn upon phenomenology’s first-person experience with its ties to embodied perception as well as the social and historical concerns of the social aspect of art. In the realm itself of visual art, the state of (so-called) post-post modernism has resulted in both the dissolution of belief in progress and even, according to some art critics, a lamentable stagnation. But many philosophers of the last century, beginning with Walter Benjamin, Adorno, Nelson Goodman, etc., have suggested that art needs to be thought of within its social, pragmatic, or epistemological functions, suggesting perhaps a need to think of art outside the confines of modernism’s stylistic revolutions and formalist issues. Relatedly, the pluralism within science could be accessed as model for this enterprise. Multiple views on a phenomenon are required due to the complexity of the enterprise, and the practice of both making art and of perceiving it might be in that category. This conference seeks to bring these strands, the analytical and the continental ones, together and evaluate how to move forward with art theory in an age of globalization.
We welcome submissions on these possible questions:
1. Should we value a diversity of perspectives in art theory? If so, what is the value? If not, why not?
2. Are there aspects of art that we presume to be universal that are, in fact, culturally situated?
3. How should different ways of experiencing art be characterized?
4. What is the epistemological function of art?
5. How does the monetary role in art affect both the artist and the perceiver of art?
6. How do the mechanics of seeing (e.g., gist perception, peripheral vision, etc.) affect how we experience art?
7. How does the practice of making art relate to the first-person experience?
8. What role does Husserl’s “bracketing” have in the viewing or making of art?
9. Are there specific non-western traditions that provide a better explanatory solution for the role of art than have the competing paradigms of continental and analytic?
We welcome your participation and look forward to your contributions. Papers should not extend over 45 minutes. Q & A are 15 minutes.
To submit anonymized abstract BY JULY 15, 2024: papers: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe5c9bmoBYb3hCAb0YWWfzV0BLWbhig2PD5VeKU358VA3RKGw/viewform?usp=sf_link
We are pleased to announce that the 2024 meeting of the Northeast Conference on Chinese Thought (NECCT) will be held on November 2-3 at Baruch College, City University of New York. This annual meeting is an opportunity for scholars of Chinese thought (broadly construed) from across the northeast US (also somewhat broadly construed) to gather and share their research. As we are interested in generating interdisciplinary discussions, we welcome work of any disciplinary/methodological orientation that bears on Chinese thought.
- When: Saturday, November 2-Sunday, November 3, 2024
- Where: Baruch College, CUNY, New York, NY
- Format: Approximately fifteen thirty-minute slots. We ask that presenters plan for a twenty-minute presentation and allow for a ten-minute Q&A.
- Meals, Travel, and Accommodations: Presenters will be provided with lunch and dinner at the conference. Presenters are expected to pay for their own travel and accommodations.
- Submissions: Please email your paper proposals by July 31st to nell.evans@baruch.cuny.edu with the subject line “NECCT 2024 Submission”. The paper proposal should be a one-page document with a title and abstract. It should be anonymized for review. We expect to have the schedule finalized by August 15th.
We are grateful for the generous financial support of CUNY Graduate Center and the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch College.
Please direct any questions about the conference to Hagop Sarkissian (hagop.sarkissian@baruch.cuny.edu) or Wenqing Zhao (zhaowenqing711@gmail.com).
We look forward to hearing from you!
NECCT Organizing Committee:
Stephen Angle (Wesleyan University)
Mick Hunter (Yale University)
Andrew Lambert (CUNY College of Staten Island)
Ellen Neskar (Sarah Lawrence College)
Thomas Radice (Southern Connecticut State University)
Hagop Sarkissian (CUNY Graduate Center/Baruch College CUNY)
Christopher Yang (Brown University)
Wenqing Zhao (Baruch College, CUNY)