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
The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will be meeting on Mondays from 4:15 to 6:15 in room 7314 of the Graduate Center, CUNY (365 5th Avenue). The (provisional) schedule is as follows:
Feb 4. Melvin Fitting, CUNY
Feb 11. Benjamin Neeser, Geneva
Feb 18. GC CLOSED. NO MEETING
Feb 25. Achille Varzi, Columbia
Mar 4. Eric Bayruns Garcia, CUNY
Mar 11. Jeremy Goodman, USC
Mar 18. Romina Padro, CUNY
Mar 25. Kit Fine, NYU
Apr 1. Elena Ficara, Paderborn
Apr 8. Chris Scambler, NYU
Apr 15. Jenn McDonald, CUNY
Apr 22. GC CLOSED. NO MEETING
Apr 29. Tommy Kivatinos, CUNY
May 6. Daniel Durante, Natal
May 13. Martina Botti, Columbia
May 20. Vincent Peluce, CUNY
Motivated by considerations from relativity theory, philosophers have recently contended that talk about an object’s existence in time should not be taken as fundamental, but rather analysed in the language of a formal theory of location in spacetime. This suggestion has important consequences for the debate about persistence: how do ordinary objects exist at different times? It has triggered a program of recovery whereby the main views from the classical debate, previously expressed using the language of temporal mereology, have been redefined in a locational framework. In this paper, I extend this program to the stage theory of persistence, the view according to which objects are instantaneous three-dimensional stages which exist at different times by virtue of having counterparts at these times. I offer a new characterization of the view, the first in a purely locational language, and argue that this locational approach helps dissolve confusions about the view.
The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will be meeting on Mondays from 4:15 to 6:15 in room TBD of the Graduate Center, CUNY (365 5th Avenue). The (provisional) schedule is as follows:
Feb 4. Melvin Fitting, CUNY
Feb 11. Benjamin Neeser, Geneva
Feb 18. GC CLOSED. NO MEETING
Feb 25. Achille Varzi, Columbia
Mar 4. Eric Bayruns Garcia, CUNY
Mar 11. Romina Padro, CUNY
Mar 18. Jeremy Goodman, USC
Mar 25. Kit Fine, NYU
Apr 1. Elena Ficara, Paderborn
Apr 8. Chris Scambler, NYU
Apr 15. Jenn McDonald, CUNY
Apr 22. GC CLOSED. NO MEETING
Apr 29. Tommy Kivatinos, CUNY
May 6. Daniel Durante, Natal
May 13. Martina Botti, Columbia
May 20. Vincent Peluce, CUNY
Each colloquium is held on Wednesday at 4:15 P.M. All colloquia will take place at the Graduate Center in rooms 9204/9205 except as otherwise noted. Please call (212) 817-8615 for further information.
Download an interactive PDF version of the schedule here.
February 6 • Jerrold Katz Memorial Lecture
Ned Block (New York University)
“Perception is Non-Propositional, Non-Conceptual and Iconic”
February 13
Francesco Pupa (Nassau Community College)
“Determiners are Phrases”
February 20
Robert Rupert (University of Colorado, Boulder)
“There Is No Personal Level: On the Virtues of a Psychology Flattened from Above”
February 27
Reed Winegar (Fordham University)
“Kant on Infinity”
March 6 • Marx Wartofsky Memorial Lecture
David Schweickart (Loyola University Chicago)
TBD
March 13
Manolo Martinez (University of Barcelona)
“A Rate-Distortion Theory of Concepts”
March 20
Vanessa DeHarven (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
“The Distinctness of the Three Distinct Goods in Republic II”
March 27
Eli Friedlander (University of Tel Aviv)
“The Intuitive Intellect from Kant to Goethe”
April 3 • Prospectives’ Day
CUNY GC Faculty Panel
April 10
Daniel Harris (CUNY Hunter College)
“Indirect Communication”
April 17 • Logic Panel
- Romina Padro (CUNY Graduate Center)
“The Adoption Problem in Logic” - Saul Kripke (CUNY Graduate Center)
“The Adoption Problem and the Quinean Conception of Logic” - Michael Devitt (CUNY Graduate Center)
“The Adoption Problem: A Quinean Picture”
April 24 — No Colloquium (Spring Recess)
May 1
Arindam Chakrabarti (SUNY Stony Brook)
“Some Problems Concerning Touch, Touching and the Self-Aware Body”
May 8
Briana Toole (CUNY Baruch College)
“The Not-So-Rational Racist: Articulating a New Epistemic Duty”
Wilfrid Sellars (1912-1989) is well-known for his “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (EPM) in which he criticizes empiricist theories of knowledge acquisition. Empiricism, he argues there, relies on what he calls “the Myth of the Given.” The Myth of the Given is often understood as a dilemma for epistemological foundationalism. However, Sellars also remarks that not even Kant and Hegel (“that great foe of immediacy” EPM §1) were entirely free of “the entire framework of givenness”). This suggests that the Myth of the Given is not limited to the epistemological foundationalism of pre-critical dogmatic metaphysics. I shall argue (following James O’Shea) that the Myth of the Given is primarily a problem about how we should account for our cognitive awareness of the categorial structure of experience. I shall then argue that Sellars should be interpreted as arguing for a non-semantic mind-world relation, which he calls “picturing”, to explain how the Myth of the Given should be overcome.
By doing so Sellars shows how to avoid both the Given and idealism, thus overcoming a long-standing opposition within the history of philosophy since Kant. This argument is also relevant for the divide between “left-wing Sellarsians” (Rorty, McDowell, Brandom, Williams) and “right-wing Sellarsians” (Churchland, Dennett, Millikan); the left-wing Sellarsians developed the criticism of the Myth of the Given and the right-wing Sellarsians developed picturing into an account of animal cognition. On my interpretation, this divide itself is unfortunate because it leads us to overlook a fundamental coherence to Sellars’s views.
Spring 2019
2/15: Andrew Lee, Philosophy, New York University
2/22: William Robinson, Philosophy, Iowa State University
3/1: Wesley Sauret, Philosophy, University of Bayreuth
3/8: Jean-Paul Noel, Center for Neural Science, New York University
3/15: Santiago Echeverri, Philosophy, New York University
3/22: TBA
3/29: TBA
4/5: No Cognitive Science talk: CUNY Graduate-Student Conference https://2019cunyphilosophyconference.weebly.com/
4/12: TBA
4/19, 4/26: No talks; Spring Break
5/3: TBA
Additional information at:
http://bit.ly/cscitalks or e-mail David Rosenthal <davidrosenthal1@gmail.com>
Each colloquium is held on Wednesday at 4:15 P.M. All colloquia will take place at the Graduate Center in rooms 9204/9205 except as otherwise noted. Please call (212) 817-8615 for further information.
Download an interactive PDF version of the schedule here.
February 6 • Jerrold Katz Memorial Lecture
Ned Block (New York University)
“Perception is Non-Propositional, Non-Conceptual and Iconic”
February 13
Francesco Pupa (Nassau Community College)
“Determiners are Phrases”
February 20
Robert Rupert (University of Colorado, Boulder)
“There Is No Personal Level: On the Virtues of a Psychology Flattened from Above”
February 27
Reed Winegar (Fordham University)
“Kant on Infinity”
March 6 • Marx Wartofsky Memorial Lecture
David Schweickart (Loyola University Chicago)
TBD
March 13
Manolo Martinez (University of Barcelona)
“A Rate-Distortion Theory of Concepts”
March 20
Vanessa DeHarven (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
“The Distinctness of the Three Distinct Goods in Republic II”
March 27
Eli Friedlander (University of Tel Aviv)
“The Intuitive Intellect from Kant to Goethe”
April 3 • Prospectives’ Day
CUNY GC Faculty Panel
April 10
Daniel Harris (CUNY Hunter College)
“Indirect Communication”
April 17 • Logic Panel
- Romina Padro (CUNY Graduate Center)
“The Adoption Problem in Logic” - Saul Kripke (CUNY Graduate Center)
“The Adoption Problem and the Quinean Conception of Logic” - Michael Devitt (CUNY Graduate Center)
“The Adoption Problem: A Quinean Picture”
April 24 — No Colloquium (Spring Recess)
May 1
Arindam Chakrabarti (SUNY Stony Brook)
“Some Problems Concerning Touch, Touching and the Self-Aware Body”
May 8
Briana Toole (CUNY Baruch College)
“The Not-So-Rational Racist: Articulating a New Epistemic Duty”
What do the worlds of global finance and nationalist populism have in common? How can we understand the rise of today’s ‘new fascisms’ through the prism of financialization? This one-day workshop brings together scholars from across disciplines to debate these key questions for our understanding of contemporary capitalism. The workshop is part of Public Seminar’s Imaginal Politics initiative and is organised jointly with the Department of Social Science, University College London. The workshop will include three panel discussions and will close with a talk by Judith Butler on ‘Anti-gender ideology and the new fascism’.
10-11.45am – Panel 1 (Wolff Conference Room, D1103)
12.-1.30pm -Panel 2 (Wolff Conference Room, D1103)
Chiara Bottici ( The New School)
4.30-6pm – Closing plenary & discussion (UL104, University Center)
‘The New Fascism of the Anti-Gender Ideology Movement’
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
Spring 2019
2/15: Andrew Lee, Philosophy, New York University
2/22: William Robinson, Philosophy, Iowa State University
3/1: Wesley Sauret, Philosophy, University of Bayreuth
3/8: Jean-Paul Noel, Center for Neural Science, New York University
3/15: Santiago Echeverri, Philosophy, New York University
3/22: TBA
3/29: TBA
4/5: No Cognitive Science talk: CUNY Graduate-Student Conference https://2019cunyphilosophyconference.weebly.com/
4/12: TBA
4/19, 4/26: No talks; Spring Break
5/3: TBA
Additional information at:
http://bit.ly/cscitalks or e-mail David Rosenthal <davidrosenthal1@gmail.com>