AY 2018 – 19 Workshop Schedule
September 25th – Avery Archer (GWU)
October 16th – Daniel Singer (Penn)
November 13th – Ariel Zylberman (SUNY Albany)
February 26th – Vita Emery (Fordham)
March 26th – Kathryn Tabb (Columbia)
April 23rd – Carol Hay (UMass Lowell)
The Epistemology and Ethics group is composed of faculty and graduate students at Fordham and other nearby universities. Papers are read in advance, so the majority of the time is devoted to questions and discussion.
Location: Plaza View Room, 12th Floor, Lowenstein Bldg., 113 West 60th Street. If interested in attending, email dheney[at]fordham[dot]edu.
AY 2018 – 19 Workshop Schedule
September 25th – Avery Archer (GWU)
October 16th – Daniel Singer (Penn)
November 13th – Ariel Zylberman (SUNY Albany)
February 26th – Vita Emery (Fordham)
March 26th – Kathryn Tabb (Columbia)
April 23rd – Carol Hay (UMass Lowell)
The Epistemology and Ethics group is composed of faculty and graduate students at Fordham and other nearby universities. Papers are read in advance, so the majority of the time is devoted to questions and discussion.
Location: Plaza View Room, 12th Floor, Lowenstein Bldg., 113 West 60th Street. If interested in attending, email dheney[at]fordham[dot]edu.
Conference Schedule
Friday May 10
- 1pm: Rachel Goodman (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)
Introductory Overview1:30pm: Jake Quilty-Dunn (University of Oxford)
On Elisabeth Camp’s “Putting Thoughts to Work”4:30pm: John Kulvicki (Darmouth College)
On Jacob Beck’s “Perception is Analog”
Saturday May 11
- 1pm: Jacob Beck (York University)
On Jake Quilty-Dunn’s “Perceptual Pluralism”4pm: Elisabeth Camp (Rutgers University)
On John Kulvicki’s “Modeling the Meanings of Pictures”
The Five Essential Readings for the Conference
The conference is predicated on the assumption that everyone in attendance will have read all five of these essays:
- John Haugeland, Representational Genera
- Elisabeth Camp, Putting Thoughts to Work
- Jacob Beck, Perception Is Analog
- Jake Quilty-Dunn, Perceptual Pluralism
- John Kulvicki, Modeling The Meanings of Pictures (excerpt)
Some Helpful Background Readings
Here are ten additional readings that help to fill in some of the background to the topics that will be discussed at the conference. Those new to these topics might start with the Kulvicki, Camp, and Giardino and Greenberg readings, and then move on to the others.
- John Kulvicki, Images in Mind
- Elisabeth Camp, Thinking With Maps
- Valeria Giardino and Gabriel Greenberg, Introduction: Varieties of Iconicity
- John Haugeland, Analog and Analog
- Fred Dretske, Sensation and Perception
- Jerry Fodor, Preconceptual Representation
- Michael Rescorla, Cognitive Maps and the Language of Thought
- Tyler Burge, Origins of Perception
- Tyler Burge, Steps Towards Origins of Propositional Thought
- Jacob Beck, The Generality Constraint and the Structure of Thought
- Whit Schonbein, Varieties of Analog and Digital Representation
If you have any questions about the conference, please contact Zed Adams at zed@newschool.edu.
As work on the nature of understanding has expanded in recent years, there has been increasing interest in the question of what might be distinctive about our understanding of other people, or humane understanding.
Our conference will explore this question, and consider how recent debates might be enriched by insights from areas such as epistemology, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of social science, the hermeneutical tradition, and the “verstehen” tradition in Continental philosophy.
Confirmed Speakers:
Olivia Bailey (Tulane)
Kristin Gjesdal (Temple)
Stephen R. Grimm (Fordham)
Kareem Khalifa (Middlebury)
Michael Strevens (NYU)
Karsten Stueber (Holy Cross)
Call for Abstracts:
3-4 spots on the program will be filled via a call for abstracts. Submitted abstracts should be no longer than 500 words, and should be emailed to sgrimm@fordham.edu by December 1, 2018. Meals at the conference will be covered, but scholars whose abstracts are selected will cover their own travel and lodging costs. Abstracts should try to engage with the following questions:
How does understanding people differ from other kinds of understanding, such as the understanding of concepts, language, or natural phenomena? Do these various types of understanding bring different cognitive resources to bear, or have different epistemic profiles?
Is there a deep unity among these types of understanding, or not?
What are the distinctive ways in which the study of literature or art or history enhance our understanding of other people?
What role does the reenactment of another’s perspective play in humane understanding? Is it merely a heuristic for discovering a person’s mental states (as Hempel seemed to think) or does it play a more epistemically robust role? Is reenactment of this sort indispensable to intentional-action explanation?
How does recent research on social cognition and mindreading bear on older debates about Verstehen?
How does the hermeneutical tradition shed light on these issues? Is it engaged with different questions, or does it pursue them from a distinctively different angle?
How do we adjudicate between competing interpretations of people’s actions?
What contribution does memory make to humane understanding?
In 1804 Schelling diagnosed our impending “annihilation of nature” due to our conceptual detachment from and consequent economic exploitation of our natural world. His critique of Modernity’s Cartesian Idealisms, effected through his inversion of the Kantian categories, results in a philosophical project whose relevance to our ongoing climate crisis is difficult to overstate.
Bruce Matthews
Bard College/BHSEC, professor of philosophy, research in German Idealism and Romanticism, with a focus on life and thought of F.W.J. Schelling, whose recent work revolves around Schelling’s critique of modernity with its anticipation of, as he wrote in 1804, ‘the annihilation of nature,’ and its relevance to the Anthropocene.
“Schelling in the Anthropocene: A New Mythology of Nature,” (Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy, 2015), “Schelling: A Brief Biographical Sketch of the Odysseus of German Idealism,” in The Palgrave Handbook to German Idealism (2014), and “The New Mythology: Between Romanticism and Humanism,” in The Relevance of Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Books include the forthcoming intellectual biography, Schelling: Heretic of Modernity (2018), Schelling’s Organic Form of Philosophy: Life as the Schema of Freedom (SUNY 2011).
Presented by the Philosophy Department at The New School for Social Research
There is a broad consensus that Aristotle introduced the concept of matter in order to develop a consistent account of substantial change. However, it is disputed which role matter fulfills in substantial change. According to the traditional interpretation, matter persists while taking on or losing a substantial form. According to a rival interpretation, matter does not persist in substantial change; instead, it is an entity from which a new substance can emerge and which ceases to exist in this process. In my view, both interpretations are problematic in the light of Aristotle’s broader ontological project and are at odds with the way Aristotle describes the substantial generation of living beings. On the basis of Aristotle’s biological theory, I will suggest that Aristotelian matter is a continuant in substantial generation, but does not satisfy the common criteria for persistence that apply to individual substances.
Anna Schriefl
Anna Schriefl is Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin (assistant professor) at the University of Bonn, and currently a visiting scholar at the New School. She has published a book about Plato’s criticism of money and wealth, and most recently an introduction into Stoicism (both in German).
Selected speakers:
The workshop, which is now in its 10th 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 “Mind, Body, Passion” in Early Modern Philosophy (roughly the period from 1600-1800).
We welcome submissions on the conference topic, which may be broadly construed to include mind-body identity, mind-body interaction, embodiment, philosophy of emotion, aesthetics, etc. For consideration, please submit abstracts of 250-300 words to newyorkcityearlymodern@gmail.com no later than December 31, 2019.
Keynote speakers:
Organisers:
Western metaphysics is based on the opposition between reality and appearance. This construction essentially rests on a visual model, or more exactly on some staging of what visual experience is.
I am going to question the basis of this metaphysics, by taking into account the reality of appearances and reflecting on their various uses, in particular artistic ones. This path will be taken in the first place by shifting the focus of philosophical analysis from visual to acoustic models. Thus, I will envisage a realism of echoes, as opposed to the metaphysics of shadows.
Biography:
Jocelyn Benoist, born in 1968, is Professor at the university Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, where he teaches Contemporary Philosophy, and currently a member of the ‘Institut Universitaire de France’. He has dedicated his early work to phenomenology and the bridges between phenomenology and early Analytic philosophy. For some time he was the Director of the Husserl Archive of Paris at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. Then, he developed a personal investigation into the meaning of realism in philosophy. He has published many books, including recently: Toward a Contextual Realism, H.U.P., 2021, and Von der Phänomenologie zum Realismus, Mohr Siebeck, 2022.
Join us for a series of keynote presentations as part of the 2023 Institute for Philosophy and New Humanities: Mind-Dependent Artifacts: Artifact-Dependent Minds.
Artifacts are a primary object of study in the humanities. They are products and, thus, manifestations of human thought, action, and self-determination without which they cannot be understood. At the same time, human mindedness depends on artifacts, and as well as other objects – a dependence that is manifest in the form of artifacts. Human mindedness and the reality of artifacts are therefore intertwined in complex ways.
Our Fall institute meeting 2023 Institute will consider ways in which human mindedness and the reality of artifacts are dialectically intertwined. Of special interest will be automatically or mechanically produced artifacts, and AI systems as artifacts that are neither inert causal models of human thinking nor independently minded entities. The ontology of such products thus needs to be calibrated in light of their contribution to the deep diversity of the mutual dependence of mindedness and artifacts. Some questions our seminar will address include: How do AI-research and AI-systems structure and restructure the historical, diverse articulation of human mindedness? How does our understanding of these and other artifacts shape our self-conception at the most fundamental level?
We will explore these issues in the ontology, epistemology, and humanistic study of AI and other artifacts together with distinguished keynote speakers:
Monday, September 11, 4pm
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht: UNFOLDING A FUZZY FUTURE? Dimensions for Thinking about “Singularity”
Tuesday, September 12, 10am
Cameron Buckner: Understanding Progress in AI Using Empiricist Philosophy of Mind
Wednesday, September 13, 3pm
Kanta Dihal
Wednesday, September 13, 5pm
David Chalmers: Forum Humanum Lecture
Thursday, September 14, 4pm
Nandi Theunissen: Rethinking Regress Arguments for the Value of Humanity
Friday, September 15, 4pm
Kalindi Vora