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!
John Dewey, in his resistance to foundational individualism, declares that individual autonomy so conceived is a fiction; for Dewey, it is association that is a fact. In his own language: “There is no sense in asking how individuals come to be associated. They exist and operate in association.” In a way that resonates with Confucian role ethics, the revolutionary Dewey particularizes the fact of associated living and valorizes it by developing a vision of the habitude of unique, defused, relationally-constituted human beings. That is, he develops a distinctive, if not idiosyncratic language of habits and “individuality” to describe the various modalities of association that enable human beings to add value to their activities and to transform mere relations into a communicating community.
In Confucian role ethics, Dewey’s contention that association is a fact is restated in a different vocabulary by appealing to specific roles rather than unique habitudes for stipulating the specific forms that association takes within lives lived in family and community—that is, the various roles we live as sons and teachers, grandmothers and neighbors. For Confucianism, not only are these roles descriptive of our associations, they are also prescriptive in the sense that roles in family and community are themselves normative, guiding us in the direction of appropriate conduct. Whereas for both Confucianism and Dewey, mere association is a given, flourishing families and communities are what we are able to make of our facticity as the highest human achievement.
The universe plausibly has an infinite future and an infinite past. Given unlimited time, every qualitative state that has ever occurred will occur again, infinitely many times. There will thus exist in the future persons arbitrarily similar to you, in any desired respects. A person sufficiently similar to you in the right respects will qualify as literally another incarnation of you. Some theories about the nature of persons rule this out; however, these theories also imply, given an infinite past, that your present existence is a probability-zero event. Hence, your present existence is evidence against such theories of persons.
Vegan reception to follow.
Speakers:
Cristina Alberini (NYU, Neural Science)
Heather Berlin (Mt. Sinai, Psychiatry)
Mark Solms (Cape Town, Neuropsychology)
Robert Stickgold (Harvard, Psychiatry)
Our next meeting will be on September 6 and we will go over Christian List’s survey article on Social Choice from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Presented by SWIP-Analytic
Scholars working under the broad umbrella of New Materialism have offered compelling reappraisals of the ways in which we know, interact with, and exist in the world. This scholarship also intersects with recent work on music and sound, which raises rich sets of questions regarding human agency, material, ethics, aesthetics, embodiment, and the subject/object dichotomy, among other issues.
We invite scholars working in the humanities, arts and sciences to submit proposals for papers and performances that engage with the themes of sound and new materialism, broadly construed. We welcome work that adopts historical, technological, analytical, philosophical, materialist, and creative vantage points, among others. Overall, this conference will direct these diverse disciplinary and methodological perspectives towards convergent and critical issues, creating new, interdisciplinary lines of enquiry and generating original research.
The one-day conference will consist of panels that comprise of papers with short reflections by a moderator, as well as an evening concert that includes opportunities for discussion. The concluding concert of work that engages with these themes from creative perspectives will afford attendees with an opportunity to consider and discuss issues concerning sound, material, and agency in a forum that contrasts with, but also complements, our events during the day. Conference participants are strongly encouraged to attend both the daytime and evening portions of the conference.
Proposals are called for:
Paper presentations of 20 minutes with 10 minutes of Q&A.
Artistic presentation of 20 minutes with 10 minutes of discussion
Submission: Proposals of no more than 500 words (300 words for artistic presentation) should be submitted as a PDF by August 14th 2019 to jc5036@columbia.edu
and include “NMAS Submission” in the subject line. If you’re applying for an artistic presentation please include three representative 2 minute audio/video examples. Please also include the title of your proposed paper and anonymize your submission. Include your name, affiliation, and contact information in the body of the email, and also nominate any audio/visual requirements for your paper or performance.
Upward mobility through the path of higher education has been an article of faith for generations of working-class, low-income, and immigrant college students. While we know this path usually entails financial sacrifices and hard work, very little attention has been paid to the deep personal compromises such students have to make as they enter worlds vastly different from their own. Measuring the true cost of higher education for those from disadvantaged backgrounds requires that we look at the ethical dilemmas of upward mobility—the broken ties with family and friends, the severed connections with former communities, and the loss of identity—faced by students as they strive to earn a successful place in society. Why are students from disadvantaged backgrounds disproportionately burdened with these costs? And how can institutions of higher education contend with them?
Brooklyn Public Philosophers is a forum for philosophers in the greater Brooklyn area to discuss their work with a general audience, hosted by the Brooklyn Public Library. Its goal is to raise awareness of the best work on philosophical questions of interest to Brooklynites, and to provide a civil space where Brooklynites can reason together about the philosophical questions that matter to them.
10/23 – Philosophy in the Library: Jennifer Morton on Education @ the Brooklyn Public Library’s Information Commons Lab // 7:30-9:00 PM
11/6 – Philosophy in the Library: Asia Ferrin on Mindfulness @ the Brooklyn Public Library’s Information Commons Lab // 7:30-9:00 PM
12/4 – Philosophy in the Library: Sebastian Purcell on Aztec Philosophy @ the Brooklyn Public Library’s Information Commons Lab // 7:30-9:00 PM
Dr.Joel Whitebook, Philosopher and Psychoanalyst will discuss his book Freud: An Intellectual Biography
As Hegel observed, the “Objective Spirit” never stands still — an observation that is especially true today. As a result, members of every generation have to return to the classics and reappropriate them for themselves. This is what Joel Whitebook has done in his recently published intellectual biography of Freud (Cambridge University Press) that we will be discussing in this workshop.
Cutting through the tired clichés of the “Freud Wars,” the author presents us with a radically new portrait of the founder of psychoanalysis. Because Whitebook is a philosopher as well as a psychoanalyst, he has been able to integrate many of the profound transformations that have taken place in psychoanalytic theory and practice, infant research, gender studies, philosophy, and critical theory since Ernest Jones and Peter Gay published their canonical studies in the last century. Whitebook thereby succeeds in creating an account of Freud’s achievement that speaks to our cultural situation.
Furthermore, in addition to presenting the unfolding of Freud’s thinking in the context of the developments in his personal life and in the society at large, Whitebook has also succeeded in bringing this iconic man to life in compelling fashion. Where Freud often tried to protect himself by hiding behind the forbidding mask of an authoritarian patriarch and unbending rationalist, we come to see him as the vulnerable, complex, and all-too-human person that he was.
Presented by The New School for Social Research and Philosophy Department and it is co-sponsored with the Ferenczi Center.
This one-day symposium looks at Hofstra Professor Kathleen Wallace’s new book, The Network Self: Relation, Process, and Personal Identity (Routledge, 2019). The book offers a systematic treatment of the notion of the self as constituted by social, cultural, political, and biological relations. The event will feature Diana Meyers, University of Connecticut; Vincent Colapietro, University of Rhode Island; and Amy Shuster, Dennison University, with a response from Professor Wallace.