Mar
25
Fri
Cognitive Science of Religion in Philosophy: An Interdisciplinary Workshop @ Zoom, possibly in person
Mar 25 – Mar 26 all-day

Location TBA

May
20
Fri
Rutgers Religious Epistemology Conference @ Zoom, possibly in person
May 20 – May 21 all-day

Contact Toby Bollig

TBA
Location TBD

Sep
30
Fri
Evil in Modern Thought at Twenty Workshop @ Hageman Hall - New Brunswick Theological Seminary
Sep 30 – Oct 2 all-day

Susan Neiman develops in Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (2002, Princeton: Princeton University Press) a watershed perspective on the longstanding problem of evil, the perniciously difficult to satisfy “need to find order within those appearances so unbearable that they threaten reason’s ability to go on.” The book thereby also presents a radically new perspective on traditional debates within metaphysics. On the occasion of its twentieth anniversary, we gather to celebrate her accomplishment and to advance the research program it reflects. Participants will include, in addition to Neiman herself: Annalise Acorn, Frederick Beiser, Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, Omri Boehm, Dan Brudney, Caroline Bynum, Lorraine Daston, Michael Della Rocca, Wendy Doniger, Wolfram Ellenberger, John Faithful Hamer, Carey Harrison, Patricia Kitcher, Philip Kitcher, Christia Mercer, Cornel West, Allen Wood, and James Wood.

Oct
13
Thu
A Philosophical Conference in Honor of Peter van Inwagen’s 80th Birthday @ Seminar Room (524B)
Oct 13 – Oct 15 all-day

Distinguished Guest:
Peter van Inwagen (University of Notre Dame)

Speakers:
Aaron Segal (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Alex Rosenberg (Duke University)
Anna Marmodoro (Durham University & Oxford University)
Barry Loewer (Rutgers University)
Brian Leftow (Rutgers University)
David Builes (Princeton University)
Dean Zimmerman (Rutgers University)
Ernest Sosa (Rutgers University)
John Hawthorne (University of Southern California & Australian Catholic University)
Laurie Paul (Yale University)
Ted Sider (Rutgers University)
Trenton Merricks (University of Virginia)

The tentative schedule can be found here.

This event is sponsored by the Rutgers Center for the Philosophy of Religion and the Department of Philosophy

Registration

To register, please inform Esther Goh (esther.goh@rutgers.edu) that you plan to attend.

Note: Space is limited, and non-Rutgers attendees must provide proof of vaccination (you can email this to Esther or show us on the day itself) or a negative PCR test.

Travelling to Rutgers (Plane & Train)

The closest airport is EWR (Newark Liberty International Airport). When you are at Newark Airport, just follow the signs to the monorail “airtrain”. The airtrain will take you to the NJ transit train stop, and then you can take the NJ Transit train (Northeast Corridor Line) to New Brunswick station (It costs $14; takes approx. 45mins).

Another two nearby airports are JFK (John F. Kennedy International Airport) and LGA (LaGuardia Airport). Both are in New York. It takes 1hr+ by taxi or 2hr+ by public transport to come to Rutgers.

Hotels

The closest hotels are “Hyatt Regency New Brunswick” (6mins walk from train station) and “The Heldrich Hotel and Conference Center” (8mins walk from train station). You can also check out “Rutgers University Inn and Conference Center” which is further away.

The best rates for the Hyatt can often be found on hotels.com.

Questions

For any inquiries, please contact Esther Goh at esther.goh@rutgers.edu.
(If you are a guest speaker, please contact Frederick Choo at frederick.choo@rutgers.edu for inquiries instead.)

Mar
3
Fri
Philosophy of Crisis and a Question of Solidarity. Jin Y. Park (American) @ Faculty House, Columbia U
Mar 3 @ 5:30 pm – 7:30 pm

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.

Mar
17
Fri
Rutgers Analytic Theology Seminar @ Seminar Room 524B
Mar 17 – Mar 18 all-day

Contact Frederick Choo, fredrick.choo@rutgers.edu

Mar
24
Fri
Visual Philosophy Conference @ B500
Mar 24 all-day

This conference aims to initiate dialogues between philosophy and the arts. Philosophers and thinkers/ scholars across disciplines of humanities and social sciences will meet with artists and scholars from a wide variety of visual and visual artistic disciplines, including painting, photography, and literature, as well as travel, dance, and fashion. Rather than taking art as a mere object of philosophical study, this conference will explore the manifold confluences and intersections of philosophy and art, exploring how each can become the object of the other and how the boundary between the philosophical and the artistic can be sharpened or blurred. The motive is specifically to explore the “visual” and “movement” element in art of, and in everyday life and theorize it – both philosophically and critically.

Co-sponsored by: Office of Deans: New School for Social Research and School of Art & Design History & Theory; University Student Senate and Graduate Faculty Student Senate

Schedule and Location

The conference will meet on The New School campus in New York City.

On March 24th, we will meet in room B500 at 65 W 11 Street.

On March 25th, we will meet in Starr Foundation Hall UL105 at University Center (63 Fifth Avenue).

Following is the schedule for both days, (please see the website for details on panels and speakers):

11:00 am Panel 1 Speaker presentations.

12:00 pm Panel 1 roundtable and audience Q&A.

1:15 pm Lunch break.

2:15 pm Panel 2 Speaker presentations.

3:15 pm Panel 2 roundtable and audience Q&A.

4:30 pm Evening reception with free food and drinks for attendees!

Mar
25
Sat
Visual Philosophy Conference @ Starr Foundation Hall UL105 at University Center
Mar 25 all-day

This conference aims to initiate dialogues between philosophy and the arts. Philosophers and thinkers/ scholars across disciplines of humanities and social sciences will meet with artists and scholars from a wide variety of visual and visual artistic disciplines, including painting, photography, and literature, as well as travel, dance, and fashion. Rather than taking art as a mere object of philosophical study, this conference will explore the manifold confluences and intersections of philosophy and art, exploring how each can become the object of the other and how the boundary between the philosophical and the artistic can be sharpened or blurred. The motive is specifically to explore the “visual” and “movement” element in art of, and in everyday life and theorize it – both philosophically and critically.

Co-sponsored by: Office of Deans: New School for Social Research and School of Art & Design History & Theory; University Student Senate and Graduate Faculty Student Senate

Schedule and Location

The conference will meet on The New School campus in New York City.

On March 24th, we will meet in room B500 at 65 W 11 Street.

On March 25th, we will meet in Starr Foundation Hall UL105 at University Center (63 Fifth Avenue).

Following is the schedule for both days, (please see the website for details on panels and speakers):

11:00 am Panel 1 Speaker presentations.

12:00 pm Panel 1 roundtable and audience Q&A.

1:15 pm Lunch break.

2:15 pm Panel 2 Speaker presentations.

3:15 pm Panel 2 roundtable and audience Q&A.

4:30 pm Evening reception with free food and drinks for attendees!

Mar
29
Wed
The Paris School of Jewish Thought: An Intellectual, Philosophical, and Spiritual Renewal in the Wake of the Holocaust @ Maison Française East Gallery
Mar 29 @ 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm
In France, during the decades that followed World War II and the Shoah, an impressive attempt was made to rebuild Jewish life and thought, and to invent new ways of being Jewish in the post-Holocaust secular world. Known as the Paris School of Jewish Thought, this collective enterprise gathered an incredible variety of Jewish scholars, rabbis, philosophers, scientists, and writers, both religious and secular, from a wide range of backgrounds. This talk sheds light on the major role played by these thinkers who addressed political, philosophical, and spiritual challenges that remain relevant today.
Sophie Nordmann teaches Philosophy, Ethics, and Jewish Thought in the Department of Religious Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris (PSL University). A specialist of modern and contemporary Jewish thought, her early work focused on Judeo-German Philosophy in 20th century Europe (H. Cohen, F. Rosenzweig, M. Buber) and its extension in the United States and Israel.  Among her current projects, Dr. Nordmann studies how post WWII France became a laboratory for Jewish thinkers who undertook to rethink the modern Jewish condition after the Shoah.
This talk is co-presented by the Columbia Maison Française and the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, and sponsored by the Knapp Family Foundation.
Apr
3
Mon
Arts & Pragmatism: From Ordinary Aesthetics to Post-Creation @ La Maison Française
Apr 3 all-day

Our friends from Université de Paris Panthéon-Sorbonne return for a third installment of their symposium Arts & Pragmatism: From Ordinary Aesthetics to Post Creation. 

This day-long symposium will be chaired by Yann Toma and Sandra Laugier. From the organizers:

We have noticed it during the two previous symposia of our program: the pragmatist philosophy and in particular Dewey defends the idea that aesthetics must not only be considered as the search for truths about art and its creations but also as what concerns the experience of the persons with an artwork (a sensitive and active experience). The reception would thus be the dynamic experience of an incarnated observer, acting, feeling in his senses and his affects what is the work and what it makes him feel.

The political stake of the pragmatist aesthetics is to make sure that the strong aesthetic experiences remain open and accessible to the largest public and become even a «matter of ordinary conversation». It is then a matter of thinking about shared experience as a transmission of values, an important phenomenon for the moral, political, “educational” reflection of adults» (Cavell 1979, 1981, Shusterman, Laugier 2019, 2023, Gerrits 2020). Thus, this question of pragmatism addresses societal issues that concern all audiences, not just from a broadcast/transmission perspective. By focusing on experience and agency, this way of approaching pragmatism involves the cultural audience in a broad way to the point where it engages mediums such as television and in general digital cultures.

The concept of Post-Creation, insofar as it plays a form of exteriority to an original Creation, has all its place in a world where the strong aesthetic experiences remain open and accessible to a wider public. It is a question of placing the creation beyond what is biased, in the heart of a form of Third State of the artistic act in charge of a heuristic and critical potential, towards a form extracted from the zone of influence of the world of the art as such. The idea of Post-Creation tends towards the universal that would be the fact of conceiving the creation beyond any not institutionalized academism. We will see how a possible emulation between the ordinary aesthetic and the shared experience of the Post-Creation is articulated and played, where the experience of the creation produces knowledge and transforms what is out of the specific field of perception of the art in so many new acting and reflexive spaces. In that, the influence of the artistic creation on whole sections of the society, domains of perception until now inaccessible, becomes a stake of opening which results from the transformation of a form of ordinary aesthetics in a Post-Creation freed from the aesthetic channels of the contemporary art.

Read the statement in French

Program:

10:30AM : Opening Yann Toma, Sandra Laugier and François Noudelmann

11:00AM – 1:00PM : Panel I Pragmatism and the Project of an Ordinary Aesthetics

Chair : Yann Toma

Andrew Brandel (Penn State University) From the Aesthetics of the Everyday Life to Ordinary Aesthetics.

Barbara Formis (Panthéon-Sorbonne University) Doings and redoings of the Identical.

Sandra Laugier (Panthéon-Sorbonne) Ordinary Creation and Shared Culture.

Emmanuel Kattan (Columbia University) What happens when nothing happens: Chantal Akerman, Francis Ponge, Marisa Merz and the emergence of time.

 

1:00PM – 3:00PM : Lunch Break

 

3:00PM – 6:00PM : Panel II Pragmatism, Post-Creation

Chair : Sandra Laugier

Yann Toma (Artist/Panthéon-Sorbonne University) Post-Creation, a new way of making creation

The example of L’Or bleu.

Jung Hee Choi (artist and author of «Manifest Unmanifest»)    Dream House.

Dan Thomas (United Nations Global Compact), The importance of Art and Perception in the Diplomatic Way.

Warren Neidich (Artist and Founding Director Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art) The Brain Without Organs and the Ecocene.

This event is organized with the support of Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Politique scientifique program, and La Maison Française at New York University