Calendar

Tentative Schedule PDF, with all the philosophies. Fair warning: it’s 122 139 pages long.

Registration is $50 more after 20 December.

 2019 Meeting Registration Rates

How is the ancient exhortation to “know thyself” related to consolation, virtue, and the study of nature? How did the commitment to self-knowledge shift over the centuries in writings by Islamic, Jewish, Christian, and early modern natural philosophers? How did medieval women contribute to modern notions of self, self-knowledge, and knowledge of nature? This conference explores the meditative “reflective methodology” from its ancient roots, through medieval Christian, Muslim, and Jewish traditions to the so-called “new” methodologies of early modern science. Speakers include Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Pierre Force, Clémence Boulouque, Christia Mercer, and Pamela Smith.

Points of focus will be: (1) the relation between the ancient imperative to “know thyself” and medieval concerns to reflect on one’s self as a means to find ultimate truths; (2) the meditative genre as it developed from Augustine’s Confessions through Christian and Islamic spiritual exercises to late medieval Christian meditations and early modern kabbalist writings; (3) the continuity between medieval meditations and the reflective methodology of early modern science; and (4) the meditative genre’s afterlife in Freud, Foucault, Arendt, and contemporary science.

Conference co-sponsored by the Center for New Narratives in Philosophy, the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, the Departments of Philosophy, French, English and Comparative Literature and the Maison Française

To download a PDF about this event click here.

Liberal democratic values seem embattled as never before in the United States, and around the world. The time is right for a serious and wide-ranging exploration of the prospects for liberal democracies in a context that acknowledges the historical and contemporary tensions between democracy and liberal values, both in theory and in practice. This conference convenes a varied group of scholars, journalists, policy expert and veteran public servants, we hope to stage a real meeting of the minds, not the usual partisan sniping that occurs at most academic events – and we are trying to be as inclusive as possible, by inviting thoughtful representatives from the left, right, and center.

Though liberalism and democracy have become intertwined in some contemporary societies, they have evolved along quite distinct paths historically. Democracy is an ancient idea, liberalism a very modern one. Greek democracy was not liberal, nor was the revolutionary democracy championed by the sans-culottes in the French Revolution. To this day, there are many avowedly democratic movements and regimes, both on the left and the right, that explicitly reject liberal values. Moreover, even in liberal democratic societies, there are important tensions between the two traditions.

In this conference, we will examine the prospects for liberal democracies against the backdrop of the historical and contemporary tensions between democracy and liberalism.

Featured speakers and participants

James Miller

Helen Rosenblatt

Robert Boyers

Paul Cartledge

EJ Dionne Jr

Bill Galston

Dipayan Ghosh

Jeffrey Issac

James Kloppenberg

Bill Kristol

Yuval Levin

Marc Plattner

Aziz Rana

Rogers Smith

Michael Tomasky

T Chatterton Williams

Ben Fountain

Fedricho Finchelstein

Jennifer Roberts

Paul Krugman

Teresa Ghilarducci

T. Alexander Aleinikoff

Jessica Pissano

Deva Woodly

Natasha Lennard

Astra Taylor

Ira Katrznelson

Josh Begley

9:15 – 9:30 Coffee & Opening Remarks

9:30 – 10:50 Anna Katsman: Freighted Love

11:00 – 12:20 Federica Gregoratto: Eros and Freedom Today

12:20 – 1:30 Lunch Break

1:30 – 2:50 Sara Macdonald: The Art of Friendship: Hegel and Plato

3:00 – 4:20 Gal Katz, “Love’s Rage Is Shame”: Hegel on Sex

4:20 – 4:45 Break

4:45 – 6.05 Paul Kottman: Love as Human Freedom

New York German Idealism Workshop

A joint undertaking of the philosophy departments of Columbia University & the New School for Social Research presents:

MATTERS OF LOVE: A CONFERENCE