The REC is a pre-read conference. The papers will be made available on April 15.
Friday, May 3, 2019
1:30 – 3:15 pm
Alex Byrne (MIT)
Chair: TBD
Coffee Break
3:45 – 5:30 pm
Susanna Rinard (Harvard)
Chair: TBD
Dinner
7:30 – 9:15 pm
Jonathan Kvanvig (Washington University St Louis)
Chair: TBD
Reception 9:30 – 11:00 PM
Saturday, May 4, 2019
9:30 – 11:15 am
Anil Gupta (University of Pittsburgh)
Chair: TBD
Coffee Break
11:45 – 1:30 pm Winner of the Young Epistemologist Prize
TBD
Chair: TBD
Lunch
2:45 – 4:30 pm
Maria Lasonen-Aarnio (University of Helsinki)
Chair: TBD
Discussants
Heather Battaly (University of Connecticut)
John Bengson (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Annalisa Coliva (University of California Irvine)
Thomas Kelly (Princeton)
Participants
Chris Copan, Andy Egan, Megan Feeney, Peter Klein, Matthew McGrath, Susanna Schellenberg, Ernie Sosa
The REC is a pre-read conference, so papers are to be read in advance. There is no registration fee for the conference, but please notify Megan Feeney, the conference manager, if you plan to attend by sending an email to rutgersepistemologyconference@gmail.com. If you wish to participate in the meals, please send a check made out to “Rutgers University” to Megan Feeney by April 15 ($80 if you are a faculty member or a postdoc; $60 if you are a graduate student or an undergraduate): Megan Feeney; Rutgers Epistemology Conference; 106 Somerset St, 5th Floor; New Brunswick, NJ 08901.
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.
Critique is an assertion of values pitted against a state of affairs. To say that things should not be the way they are–to respond to questions such as ‘Why do I think this political or economic arrangement is wrong (and why should I care?)?’ implies an ethical stance. Critique thus draws together fact and value, domains that a long tradition of moral thought has argued exist on distinct planes. For there are dimensions of political life that are incomprehensible without this conjunction between ethical motivations and social realities. But if they are to have political consequences, such questions cannot be confined to private introspection. Scale matters. This talk looks at the articulation between everyday interactions and social movements to show the interplay among the first, second, and third person stances that characterize ethical life. Drawing ethnographic examples from American feminism and Vietnamese Marxism, it considers some of the ways in which ethical intuitions emerge, consolidate, and change, and argues that objectifications and the reflexivity they facilitate help give ethical life a social history.
I defend a contextual reconstruction of Nietzsche’s philosophical project. My contextualist reconstruction contrasts with the rationalist reconstruction predominant in contemporary Anglo-American scholarship. After discussing the differences between the two approaches, I show how the rationalist reconstruction has distorted our understanding of Nietzsche in at least two respects. First, in trying to extract theories from Nietzsche’s corpus that will be attractive to contemporary philosophers, it has caused scholars largely to neglect the nature, structure, and argument of Nietzsche’s published works. Here, I make my case by focusing on common misunderstandings of Nietzsche’s free spirit works. Second, it has caused scholars to tame Nietzsche’s project by dismissing Thus Spoke Zarathustra as mere poetry and distancing Nietzsche from controversial ideas such as the will to power and the eternal recurrence. In contrast, I argue that by reading Nietzsche as a naturalist through the lens of a historical influence like Schopenhauer, rather than anachronistically through Quine, we can begin to make sense of these essential features of his project. I close with some remarks about why a contextual reconstruction may not only be truer to Nietzsche, but also more philosophically satisfying than the rationally reconstructed Nietzsche currently on offer.
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 Politics department at the New School for Social Research will host its 1st Graduate Conference in Political Theory on March 6-7th, 2020.
We are launching this event to provide graduate students in the history of political thought, political theory and political philosophy an opportunity to present and receive feedback on their work. A total of six (6) papers will be accepted and each of them will receive substantial comments from a New School graduate student, to be followed by a general discussion. We welcome submissions from all traditions, but we are particularly interested in providing a venue for those students working on critical approaches. We would also like to encourage applications from under-represented groups in the field.
We are delighted to announce that Professor Robyn Marasco (Hunter College, City University of New York) will deliver the inaugural keynote address.
Submissions for the conference are due by December 10th, 2019. Papers should not exceed 8,000 words (excluding footnotes and bibliography) and should be sent in PDF format with the help of the electronic form provided below. Papers should be formatted for blind review with no identifying information. Abstracts will not be accepted. A Google account is needed in order to sign-in to the submission form; if you don’t have one, please email us. Papers will be reviewed over the winter break and notifications will be sent out early January 2020.
For any questions, please contact NSSRconferencepoliticaltheory@gmail.com
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfqJWRPS5DBI-zlmS4-3m-FpZA3suckmInHSIlvayKoibzQYg/viewform
https://philevents.org/event/show/77746
Luca Corti (University of Padua) – March 6
Amy Allen (Penn State) – March 27
Andreja Novakovic (UC Berkeley) – April 3
Alberto Siani (University of Pisa) – May 8