In Plato’s Republic, Socrates argues that justice is good not only for its consequences but also in and of itself. Challenged by Glaucon and Adeimantus, who suggest that all human interactions are inherently competitive and that being unjust could help you get the better in these conflicts, Socrates establishes that justice is good because it is harmony in the city and in the soul. If justice is a kind of health of the soul, then surely it is better to be just than unjust. This claim might ameliorate the concerns of Glaucon and Adeimantus, but I will argue that Plato does more than address the vision of justice brought forth by Socrates’ interlocutors. Particularly through the contrasts among the different kinds of lives that are either described or depicted in the Republic, Plato points his readers toward a conception of justice that reveals it as the ground of mutuality, reciprocity, dialogue and friendship. In fact, the Republic reveals justice to be necessary to the philosophical life and, hence, to the best kind of life.
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
Presented by Metro Area Philosophers of Science
Spring 2020 Schedule:
Anthony Aguirre (UCSC) – “Entropy in long-lived genuinely closed quantum systems”
6:30-8:30pm Tuesday Feb 4; NYU Philosophy Department (5 Washington Place), 3rd floor seminar room.
David Papineau (King’s College London & CUNY) – “The Nature of Representation”
4:30-6:30pm Tuesday March 3; CUNY Graduate Center (365 5th Ave, NYC), room 5307.
Jim Holt (Author of Why Does the World Exist?) – “Here, Now, Photon: Why Newton was closer to EM than Maudlin is”
4:30-6:30pm Tuesday April 7; CUNY Graduate Center (365 5th Ave, NYC), room 5307.
Deborah Mayo (Virginia Tech)
4:30-6:30pm Tuesday April 28; CUNY Graduate Center (365 5th Ave, NYC), room 5307.
Naked Statistical Evidence and Verdictive Justice
This event will feature a thought-provoking panel discussion with sexual and reproductive justice experts on the value of the sexual and reproductive justice framework and how it can be applied to diverse stakeholders, settings, and contexts. Panelists will also highlight examples from around the world of momentum towards sexual and reproductive justice.
Event Information
Free and open to the public; registration is required for both in-person and online attendance. For additional information, please visit the event webpage. Please email Malia Maier at mm5352@cumc.columbia.edu with any questions. All in-person attendees must follow Columbia’s COVID-19 policies.
Hosted by the Global Health Justice and Governance Program at Columbia University.
The importance of incorporating value pluralism into a theory of justice is recognized in many conceptualizations of justice. This pluralism is often seen as a reason to attend to a range of perspectives, perspectives which can function as a source of information in determining which principles should guide justice. However, philosophy’s ability to properly attend to different perspectives has received extensive attention in the criticisms of various non-ideal theorists, who argue that ideal-theoretical philosophy runs the risk of excluding important aspects of actual social problems. Taking these criticisms on board, this paper builds on non-ideal theory by arguing for a Wittgensteinian family resemblance approach to justice. I will explain how this linguistic practice-embedded understanding of justice can be a helpful tool for non-ideal theory, as it can give us insight into why, in various similar but different cases, the notion of justice is seen as applicable. In light of this approach, I will suggest a reorientation of the pluralist demand towards an empirical starting point.
Individuals support forms of domination with varying levels of understanding that they are doing so. In many cases, those very structures of domination distort our conceptions of them through mechanisms such as motivated reasoning, implicit bias, affected ignorance, false consciousness, and belief polarization. These various epistemic distortions, in turn, cause social conflict, notably by promoting political polarization. Those worried by social conflict have spent a great deal of energy decrying the increasingly polarized contexts in which we live. However, epistemic distortions in our sociopolitical beliefs also misrepresent, maintain systems of domination and prevent human needs from being met.
This workshop aims to go beyond pronouncements such as ‘we are polarized’ or that ‘partisanship is on the rise,’ and begin to think through epistemic distortions at the individual and intersubjective levels, the role of criticism and critique in facilitating belief and social change, and the idea of reconciliation, by asking questions such as:
- In what ways are individual beliefs about domination/social structures epistemically distorted?
- What explains why social beliefs are epistemically distorted?
- What are the normative upshots of epistemic distortion for social relationships like allyship, comradeship, and friendship?
- Ought polarization be remedied? Which epistemic resources and theoretical frameworks avail themselves of emancipatory potential?
Convenors
Ege Yumuşak is a philosopher, specializing in epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and social & political philosophy. She received a PhD in Philosophy from Harvard University in 2022. Her research examines political disagreement—its material foundations, psychological and social manifestations, and epistemic properties. She is currently writing a series of articles on the nature and significance of clashes of perspective in social life.
Nicolas Côté is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Toronto. His research is mainly in normative ethics and social choice theory, but they also dabble in applied ethics and issues of practical rationality. Côté’s doctoral dissertation work focuses on the measurement of freedom, especially on axiomatic approaches to the measurement question, and on how deontic concerns for protecting individual rights interact with welfarist concerns for improving the general welfare. Côté’s current research focuses on the ethics of decision-making under radical uncertainty.
Invited speakers:
Sabina Vaccarino Bremner; Daniela Dover; Cain Shelley
Invited commentators
TBA
Facts about the increasing collective human influence on biological systems, from local ecosystems to planetary-level Earth systems, support the proposal that we now live in the Anthropocene. What do such facts imply, if anything, about norms and values guiding land management and conservation practices going forward? Do facts about anthropogenic drivers that can result in undesirable and irreversible changes to ecological and Earth systems license further intentional interventions and underwrite calls for “planetary management”? What would appropriate respect for wildness look like on a human-dominated planet? If human influence on environmental systems pushes them over thresholds into radically new states, are received Western or Indigenous ideologies sufficient to guide an appropriate response? How should we think about responding to such radical environmental change? How, if at all, should environmental ethics adapt to the Anthropocene?