The New York University Department of Philosophy will host the sixteenth in its series of conferences on issues in the history of modern philosophy on November 8 and 9, 2019. Each conference in the series examines the development of a central philosophical problem from early modern philosophy to the present, exploring the evolution of formulations of the problem and of approaches to resolving it. By examining the work of philosophers of the past both in historical context and in relation to contemporary philosophical thinking, the conferences allow philosophy’s past and present to illuminate one another.
Friday, November 8
9:00-10:00
Check-in and Continental Breakfast
10:00-12:00
Speaker: Michael Gill (University of Arizona), “Shaftesbury’s Claim That Beauty and Good Are One and the Same”
Commentator: Julia Driver (Washington University)
2:00-4:00
Speaker: Jacqueline Taylor (San Francisco University), “Hume on Humanity: Its Force and Authority”
Commentator: Rachel Cohon (University at Albany, SUNY)
4:00-4:30
Coffee Break
4:30-6:30
Speaker: Marcus Willascheck (Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main), “The Structure of Normative Space According to Kant“
Commentator: Janum Sethi (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)
6:30-7:30
Reception
Saturday, November 9
9:00-10:00
Continental Breakfast
10:00-12:00
Speaker: João Constâncio (Universidade Nova de Lisboa / Nova FCSH), “Nietzsche on Normativity: Reason in the Space of Culture and Taste”
Commentator: Ariela Tubert (University of Puget Sound)
2:00-4:00
Speaker: Hannah Ginsborg (University of California, Berkeley), “Rule-Following without Rules: Wittgenstein on Normativity in Social Practice”
Commentator: Gary Ebbs (Indiana University)
4:00-4:30
Coffee Break
4:30-6:30
Speaker: Stephen Darwall, (Yale University), “Normativity in Contemporary (and the History of) Ethics”
Commentator: Nomy Arpaly (Brown University)
6:30-7:30
Reception
- Nomy Arpaly
- Rachel Cohon
- João Constâncio
- Stephen Darwall
- Julia Driver
- Gary Ebbs
- Michael Gill
- Hannah Ginsborg
- Janum Sethi
- Jacqueline Taylor
- Ariela Tubert
- Marcus Willascheck
Deutsches Haus at NYU presents a reading of Karl Marx’s Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 (Princeton University Press, 2024) and a conversation with the book’s editor Paul North (Yale University) and translator Paul Reitter (Ohio State University), which will be moderated by Emily Apter (NYU). The first new English translation in fifty years – and the only one based on the last German edition revised by Marx himself – produces a critical edition of Capital for our time, one that faithfully preserves the vitality and directness of Marx’s German prose and renders his ideas newly relevant to modern readers.
Please RSVP for in-person attendance here.
About the book:
Karl Marx (1818–1883) was living in exile in England when he embarked on an ambitious, multivolume critique of the capitalist system of production. Though only the first volume saw publication in Marx’s lifetime, it would become one of the most consequential books in history. This magnificent new edition of Capital is a translation of Marx for the twenty-first century. It is the first translation into English to be based on the last German edition revised by Marx himself, the only version that can be called authoritative, and it features extensive commentary and annotations by Paul North and Paul Reitter that draw on the latest scholarship and provide invaluable perspective on the book and its complicated legacy. At once precise and boldly readable, this translation captures the momentous scale and sweep of Marx’s thought while recovering the elegance and humor of the original source.
For Marx, our global economic system is relentlessly driven by “value”—to produce it, capture it, trade it, and, most of all, to increase it. Lifespans are shortened under the demand for ever-greater value. Days are lengthened, work is intensified, and the division of labor deepens until it leaves two classes, owners and workers, in constant struggle for life and livelihood. In Capital, Marx reveals how value came to tyrannize our world, and how the history of capital is a chronicle of bloodshed, colonization, and enslavement.
About the participants:
Emily Apter (moderator) is Silver Professor of French and Comparative Literature at New York University. Her books include: Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse and the Impolitic (Verso, 2018); Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (2013); Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (co-edited with Barbara Cassin, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood) (2014); and The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006). The current project What is Just Translation? takes up questions of racial justice, reparative translation, and the limits of translation as a medial form.
Paul North writes and teaches in the tradition of critical theory, emphasizing Jewish thought, emancipatory strains in the history of philosophy, and European literatures. He has written books on the concept of distraction, on Franz Kafka, and on likeness in culture and thought. Currently he is co-editing an edition Marx’s Capital volume 1 with a new translation, which will appear from Princeton University Press in 2024 and writing a monograph entitled “The Standpoint of Marx’s Capital.” He co-edits the book series IDIOM: thinkingwritingtheory at Fordham University Press and co-directs the international exchange, Critical Theory in the Global South, in collaboration with faculty at the Universidad Metropolitana de Sciencias de la Educación in Santiago, Chile.
Paul Reitter earned his PhD at UC Berkeley and teaches in the German department at Ohio State University. He’s written many books, including a widely discussed history of crisis thinking in the academic humanities. His essays have appeared in Harper’s, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among other venues. His most recent translation, The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon, was shortlisted for a National Jewish Book Award.
Attendance information:
While NYU has ended COVID-19 related restrictions and policies, we continue to remind and recommend to members of the NYU community that they stay up-to-date on their boosters and stay home if they feel sick. Masks are always welcome.
Please RSVP for in-person attendance here.
“Karl Marx’s ‘Capital:’ An Evening with Paul North, Paul Reitter, and Emily Apter” is funded by the DAAD from funds of the German Federal Foreign Office (AA).