The workshop, which is now in its 9th year, aims to foster exchange and collaboration among scholars, students, and anyone with an interest in Early Modern Philosophy. This year’s workshop will focus on the topic of “Freedom and Evil” in Early Modern Philosophy (roughly the period from 1600-1800).
We welcome submissions on the conference topic, which may be broadly construed to include the problem of free will, theodicy, political and social liberty, and evil practices and institutions. For consideration, please submit abstracts of 250-300 words to newyorkcityearlymodern@gmail.com no later than December 31, 2018.
Keynote speakers:
Organisers:
Meeting Cancellation: The CUNY Graduate Center will be closed on Monday, March 4th. Therefore, the Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will not be meeting. There is no meeting
I argue that racial injustice can make a subject’s news sources unreliable because of the effect of (1) racial prejudice and (2) society’s unjust structure on the news-gathering-and-disseminating processes a subject relies on. I assume that societies with entrenched racial injustice have widespread racial prejudices and that these societies are unjustly structured. I argue that racial injustice can undermine a subject’s capacity to be properly sensitive to her social conditions such that she is doxastically justified in her coverage-supported belief. In section one, I describe features of coverage-reliance ignorance, its relation to coverage-supported belief and white ignorance, its bad epistemic consequences and a case of coverage-reliance ignorance where a subject holds a true, but unjustified, belief. In section two, I argue that racial prejudice can make a news source less reliable because racial prejudice can make it less likely that news sources report on racial injustice related topics. In section three, I argue that a society’s unjust structure can make a news source less reliable because it can make it less likely that reports on racial-injustice-related topics reach subjects who lack information on these topics. In section four, I argue that racial injustice can undermine a subject’s capacity to be properly sensitive to her social conditions such that she is doxastically justified in her coverage-supported belief.
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. 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
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
What are laws of nature? The predominant view in contemporary philosophy of science is the Humean `best system account’ which holds that the laws of nature are merely descriptive, an efficient summary of contingent regularities that we find in the world. Using the concept of typicality, I will spell out a common anti-Humean intuition into a precise argument: A typical Humean world wouldn’t have any law-like regularities to begin with. Thus (I will argue), Humean metaphysics do not fit the objective order that we find in our universe.
There will be dinner after the talk. If you are interested, please send an email with `Dinner’ in the heading to nyphilsci@gmail.com (please note that all are welcome, but only the speaker’s dinner will be covered). If you have any other questions, please email isaac.wilhelm@rutgers.edu.
When we’re asked to give examples of philosophical questions, we’re likely to think of questions that are very, very old. Is the physical world all there is? How should I live? How do we know what we know? But some philosophical problems are quite new, made possible or urgent by new developments in science and culture. These are often the most exciting problems to think through.
On March 7th at 7:30 PM, Derek Skillings joins Brooklyn Public Philosophers to share his work on the philosophical consequences of the fact that we are holobionts – biological units composed of hosts and their associated swarms of microorganisms. If you’re interested in health, the problem of personal identity, the philosophy of biology in general, or the philosophical consequences of the fact that we’re made up of a bunch of little things which are themselves alive in particular, you’ll want to check this one out. Here’s the abstract:
“I, holobiont. Are you and your microbes a community or a single entity?”
You are a holobiont – a biological unit made up of a host and its associated microbiome (bacteria, protists, viruses and other microscopic entities). What consequences does this have for how we understand ourselves and other similar organisms? What are our spatial and temporal boundaries, and what does it mean to be a healthy holobiont? In this talk I will look at some alternatives for making sense of both holobiont individuality and “healthy holobiont/microbiome” talk. I will argue that existing accounts of human health are not appropriate for microbiomes, and that notions of ecosystem health face similar shortcomings. I will end by looking at some possibilities for understanding overall host health given the importance and ubiquity of microbiomes.
As usual, we meet at the Dweck Center at the Grand Army Plaza branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. Here’s the Facebook event! Tell everyone, please!
Russell proved over a century ago that a naive conception of structured propositions is inconsistent. Hodes (2015), Dorr (2016), and Goodman (2017) have recently reformulated Russell’s argument in the language of higher-order logic, and concluded from it that distinctions in reality cannot always reflect all the syntactic structure of the language in which we draw those distinctions. But they also float the idea that such distinctions might nevertheless have sentence-like structure, so long as this structure fails to neatly correspond to the syntactic structure of the sentences we use to draw those distinction. Perhaps, that is, the popular metaphor of facts being like sentences written in God’s “book of the world” is tenable after all. In this talk I’ll give a way of making this metaphor precise, and prove a new limitative result showing that, given natural assumptions, it too is inconsistent.
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
Working Papers in Ethics and Moral Psychology is a speaker series conducted under the auspices of the Icahn School of Medicine Bioethics Program. It is a working group where speakers are invited to present well-developed, as yet unpublished work. The focus of the group is interdisciplinary, with an emphasis on topics in ethics, bioethics, neuroethics, and moral psychology. The meetings begin with a brief presentation by the invited speaker and the remaining time is devoted to a discussion of the paper. The speakers will make their papers available in advance of their presentation to those who sign up for the Working Papers mailing list.
Upcoming Speakers:
11 Oct: Jordan Mackenzie, NYU
8 Nov: Susana Nuccetelli, St. Cloud State
13 Dec: Michael Brownstein, John Jay
14 Mar: Kyle Ferguson, CUNY
18 Apr: Jeff Sebo, NYU
23 May: Johann Frick, Princeton
What does a philosopher look like? Inevitably, our mental pictures are shaped by the dominant imagery of the white male marble busts of Greco-Roman antiquity—Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca—and their modern European heirs—Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Mill. Even today Western philosophy is largely male and overwhelmingly white—about 97 percent in the U.S., close to 100 percent in Europe. Diversifying the field requires expanding our corporeal imaginary of its practitioners. This conference, timed to honor Professor Anita Allen-Castellitto (Penn), the first black female President in the 100-year-plus history of the American Philosophical Association, aims to showcase the work of a traditionally under-represented population, challenging these preconceptions. Allen and fifteen other black women will speak on their research across a wide variety of philosophical topics.
ORGANIZED BY:
Charles W. Mills & Linda Martín Alcoff
LIST OF SPEAKERS
Anita Allen-Castellitto, University of Pennsylvania
Kathryn Belle, Penn State University
Emmalon Davis, New School for Social Research
Nathifa Greene, Gettysburg College
Devonya Havis, Canisius College
Janine Jones, University of North Carolina Greensboro
Axelle Karera, Wesleyan University
Michele Moody-Adams, Columbia University
Mickaella Perina, University of Massachusetts Boston
Camisha Russell, University of Oregon
Jackie Scott, Loyola University Chicago
Kris Sealey, Fairfield University
Jameliah Shorter-Bourhanou, Georgia College, College of the Holy Cross
Anika Simpson, Morgan State University
Briana Toole, CUNY Baruch College
Yolonda Wilson, Howard University
Stay tuned for schedule details!
Hosted by: The Center for the Humanities and the PhD Program in Philosophy at the The Graduate Center, CUNY.
Co-sponsored by: The American Philosophical Association Committee on the Status of Black Philosophers, and the Advanced Research Collaborative at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
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Free and open to the public, but please register for Friday, March 15th here:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/black-women-philosophers-conference-day-1-march-15th-2019-registration-56225763773
Please register for Saturday, March 16th here:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/black-women-philosophers-conference-day-2-march-16th-2019-registration-56225886139
The venue is wheel-chair accessible.
To download a PDF version of the flyer, click here.
There’s the question of what there is, and then there’s the question of what ultimately exists. Many contend that, once we have this distinction clearly in mind, we can see that there is no sensible debate to be had about whether there are such things as properties or tables or numbers, and that the only ontological question worth debating is whether such things are ultimate (in one or another sense). I argue that this is a mistake. Taking debates about ordinary objects as a case study, I show that the arguments that animate these debates bear directly on the question of which objects there are and cannot plausibly be recast as arguments about what’s ultimate. I also address the objection that, because they are trivially answerable, questions about what there is cannot be a proper subject of ontological debate.
Reception to follow.
Two ways of giving an epistemic justification of basic logical principles will be introduced, intuition-based accounts and concept or meaning constitution-based accounts. We will briefly consider different versions of these views and argue that they face parallel dilemmas. While ‘robust’ accounts are subject to what I call the ‘adoption problem,’ ‘weak’ accounts fail to ground our basic inferential dispositions. Either way, intuitions and meaning-constituting rules turn out to be irrelevant. A more general moral for the epistemology of logic and its priorities will be drawn from the discussion.
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