Contact the Center for Ethics Education if interested in attending
Registration is free but required. Registration will open online in early October. All questions about the event should be sent to philo.modernconference@nyu.edu.
Friday, November 15
9:30–9:55 Check–in and Coffee
9:55 Welcome
10:00–12:00 Baruch Spinoza
Speaker: Kristin Primus (University of California, Berkeley)
“Spinoza and Our Eternal Mind”
Commentator: John Grey (Michigan State University)
12:00–2:00 Lunch Break
2:00–4:00 Margaret Cavendish
Speaker: Marcy Lascano (University of Kansas)
“‘There is nothing I Dread More than Death’: Cavendish on Death and the Afterlife”
Commentator: Deborah Boyle (College of Charleston)
4:00–4:30 Coffee Break
4:30–6:00 Immanuel Kant
Speaker: Andrew Chignell (Princeton University)
“Kant’s Theoretical Argument for a Future Life”
Commentator: Jochen Bojanowski (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
6:30–7:30 Reception
Saturday, November 16
9:30–10:00 Check–in and Coffee
10:00–12:00 Søren Kierkegaard
Speaker: Clare Carlisle (King’s College London)
“Close to Death: Kierkegaard on Im/mortality and Philosophy”
Commentator: John J. Davenport (Fordham University)
12:00–2:00 Lunch Break
2:00–4:00 Martin Heidegger
Speaker: Mark A. Wrathall (Oxford University)
“Heidegger and the Possibility of Death”
Commentator: Sean Kelly (Harvard University)
4:00–4:30 Coffee Break
4:30–6:30 Contemporary
Speaker: Michael Cholbi (University of Edinburgh)
“Immortal Lives and the Varieties of Agency”
Commentator: Ben Bradley (Syracuse University)
6:30–7:30 Reception
Don Garrett, Anja Jauernig, John Richardson,
Sponsored by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Philosophy.
I use the conceptual umbrella – A Caribbean Poetics of Forgetting – to think through the temporal and spatial aspects of world-making as it arises out of the Caribbean diaspora. The ‘forgetting’ in this ethics of forgetting is not a disavowal of multiple axes of violence that found this diaspora. Rather, I attempt to use an ethics of forgetting to name Caribbean practices of clearing that condition something like a Kierkegaardian leap of faith – into a future; toward the miracle work of making roots in blood-soil; and for the work of making a way out of fragmented history/ruptured time. In the main, this exploration is grounded in Dionne Brand’s poetic cartography (in Map to the Door of No Return), and Edouard Glissant’s twinned account of the oral and the opaque (in Poetics of Relation and Caribbean Discourse).
Bio: Kris F Sealey is Professor of Philosophy at Penn State University. She graduated from Spelman College in 2001 with a B.Sc. in Mathematics, and received both her M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from The University of Memphis. Dr. Sealey served as the book review editor of the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy from 2011 – 2022. From 2018 – 2021, she also directed PIKSI-Rock (Philosophy in an Inclusive Key Summer Institute), a summer immersion experience at Penn State for under-represented undergraduate students with an interest in pursuing a doctorate in philosophy. Dr. Sealey’s areas of research include Continental Philosophy, Critical Philosophy of Race, Caribbean Philosophy, and decolonial theory. Her first book, Moments of Disruption: Levinas, Sartre and the Question of Transcendence, was published in December 2013 with SUNY Press. Her second book, Creolizing the Nation, published in September 2020 with Northwestern University Press, was awarded the Guillén Batista book award by the Caribbean Philosophical Association in 2022.
exact location TBA.
Registration is free but required. Registration will open online in early April.
Friday, May 10
9:00–9:25 Check–in and Coffee
9:25 Welcome
9:30–11:30 Environment I
Speaker: Zachary Vereb (Mississippi University)
Commentator: Kimberly Brewer (Princeton University)
11:45–12:45 Animals I (Virtual)
Speaker: Nico Dario Mueller (University of Basel), Précis of Radical Kantianism for Animals
12:45–2:15 Lunch Break
2:15–4:15 Animals II
Speaker: Patrick Kain (Purdue University)
Commentator: Michelle Kosch (Cornell University)
4:15–4:30 Coffee Break
4:30–6:30 Environment II
Speaker: Angela Breitenbach (Cambridge University)
Commentator: Haley Brennan (New York University)
6:30–7:30 Reception
Saturday, May 11
9:30-10 Check–in and Coffee
10:00–12:00 Environment III
Speaker: Toby Svoboda (Colgate University)
Commentator: Desmond Hogan (Princeton University)
12:00–1:30 Lunch Break
1:30–3:30 Animals III
Speaker: Matthew Altman (Central Washington University)
Commentator: Anja Jauernig (New York University)
3:30–3:45 Coffee Break
3:45–5:45 Animals IV
Speaker: Helga Varden (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
Commentator: Andrew Chignell (Princeton University)
5:45–6:45 Reception
Andrew Chignell (Princeton) and Anja Jauernig (NYU)
Sponsors: NYU, Princeton University Center for Human Values