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.
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?
| 8:30 – 9 a.m. | Registration and coffee |
| 9 – 9:15 a.m. | Opening remarks: Shiloh Whitney, Conference Director |
| Session 1 – Organic Affectivity and Animality Moderator: Emilia Angelova, Concordia University |
|
| 9:15 – 10 a.m. | Hermanni Yli-Tepsa, University of Jyväskylä: “How to feel like our eyes: tracing the theme of instinctive affectivity in Phenomenology of Perception” |
| 10 – 10:45 a.m. | Sarah DiMaggio, Vanderbilt University: “Flesh and Blood: Reimagining Kinship” |
| 10:45 – 11 a.m. | Break |
| Session 2 – Passivity Moderator: Philip Walsh, Fordham University |
|
| 11 – 11:45 a.m. | David Morris, Concordia University: “The Transcendentality of Passivity: Affective Being and the Contingency of Phenomenology as Institution” |
| 11:45 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. | Rajiv Kaushik, Brock University “Merleau-Ponty on Passivity and the Limit of Philosophical Critique” |
| 12:30 – 2 p.m. | Lunch Break |
| Session 3 – Theorizing Emotion 1: Outside-in, Inside-Outside Moderator: Duane H. Davis, University of North Carolina at Asheville |
|
| 2 – 2:45 p.m. | Ed Casey, Stonybrook University: “Bringing Edge to Bear: Vindicating Merleau-Ponty’s Nascent Ideas on Emotion” |
| 2:45 – 3:30 p.m. | Ondřej Švec, Charles University Prague: “Acting out one’s emotion” |
| 3:30 – 3:45 p.m. | Break |
| Session 4 – Theorizing Emotion 2: Intersubjective Dimensions Moderator: April Flakne, New College of Florida |
|
| 3:45 – 4:30 p.m. | Jan Halák, Palacky University Olomouc: “On the diacritical value of expression with regard to emotion” |
| 4:30 – 5:15 p.m. | Corinne Lajoie, Penn State University: “The equilibrium of sense: Levels of embodiment and the (dis)orientations of love” Winner of the M. C. Dillon Award for best graduate essay |
| 5:15 – 5:45 p.m. | Snack Break (light refreshments provided) |
| Thursday Keynote Introduction: Shiloh Whitney, Fordham University |
|
| 5:45 – 7:15 p.m. | Alia Al-Saji, McGill University “The Affective Flesh of Colonial Duration” |
| 8:30 – 9 a.m. | Registration and coffee |
| Session 5 – Affective Pathologies and Empathy Moderator: Lisa Käll, Stockholm University |
|
| 9 – 9:45 a.m. | Ståle Finke, Norwegian University of Science and Technology Trondheim: “Structuring Affective Pathology: Merleau-Ponty and Psychoanalysis” |
| 9:45 – 10:30 a.m. | Catherine Fullarton, Emory University: “Empathy, Perspective, Parallax” |
| 10:30 – 10:45 a.m. | Break |
| Session 6 – Eating and Breathing Moderator: Ann Murphy, University of New Mexico |
|
| 10:45 – 11:30 a.m. | Whitney Ronshagen, Emory University: “Visceral Relations: On Eating, Affect, and Sharing the World” |
| 11:30 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. | Amie Leigh Zimmer, University of Oregon: “Rethinking Chronic Breathlessness Beyond Symptom and Syndrome” |
| 12:15 – 2 p.m. | Lunch Break (and graduate student Mentoring Session in Lowenstein 810) |
| Session 7 – Critical Phenomenologies 1: Work and Freedom Moderator: Whitney Howell, La Salle University |
|
| 2 – 2:45 p.m. | Talia Welsh, University of Tennessee Chattanooga: “Toward a Critical Phenomenology of Work and Its Discontents” |
| 2:45 – 3:30 p.m. | Laura McMahon, Eastern Michigan University: “The ‘Great Phantom’: Merleau-Ponty on Habitus, Freedom, and Political Transformation” |
| 3:30 – 3:45 p.m. | Break |
| Session 8 – Critical Phenomenologies 2: The “I Can” Moderator: Cheryl Emerson, SUNY Buffalo |
|
| 3:45 – 4:30 p.m. | Kym Maclaren, Ryerson University: “Criminalization and the Self-Constituting Dynamics of Distrust” |
| 4:30 – 5:15 p.m. | Joel Reynolds, University of Massachusetts Lowell and Lauren Guilmette, Elon University: “Rethinking the Ableism of Affect Theory with Merleau-Ponty” |
| 5:15 – 5:45 p.m. | Snack Break (light refreshments provided) |
| Friday Keynote Introduction: Shiloh Whitney, Fordham University |
|
| 5:45 – 7:15 p.m. | Matthew Ratcliffe, York University “Towards a Phenomenology of Grief: Insights from Merleau-Ponty” |
| 8:30 – 9 a.m. | Registration and coffee |
| Session 9 – Feeling Beyond Humanism Moderator: Wayne Froman, George Mason University |
|
| 9 – 9:45 a.m. | Marie-Eve, Morin, University of Alberta. “Merleau-Ponty’s ‘cautious anthropomorphism’” |
| 9:45 – 10:30 a.m. | Jay Worthy, University of Alberta: “Feelings of Adversity: Towards a Critical Humanism” |
| 10:30 – 10:45 a.m. | Break |
| Session 10 – Art and Affect Moderator: Stephen Watson, Notre Dame |
|
| 10:45 – 11:30 a.m. | Veronique Foti, Pennsylvania State University. “Body, Animality, and Cosmos in the Art of Kiki Smith” |
| 11:30 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. | Rebecca Longtin, State University of New York New Paltz: “From Stone to Flesh: Affect and the Poetic Ambiguity of the Body” |
| 12:15 – 2:15 p.m. | Lunch Break (and Business Lunch at Rosa Mexicano, 61 Columbus Ave) |
| Session 11 – Voice and Silence Moderator: Gail Weiss, George Washington University |
|
| 2:15 – 3 p.m. | Susan, Bredlau, Emory University. “Losing One’s Voice: Merleau-Ponty and the Lived Space of Conversation” |
| 3 – 3:45 p.m. | Martina, Ferrari, University of Oregon. “The Laboring of Deep Silence: ‘Conceptless Opening(s),’ the Suspension of the Familiar, and the Dismemberment of the Ego” |
| 3:45 – 4 p.m. | Break |
| Session 12 – Affectivity and Language Moderator: Galen Johnson, University of Rhode Island |
|
| 4 – 4:45 p.m. | Silvana de Souza Ramos, University of São Paulo. “Merleau-Ponty and the Prose of Dora’s World” |
| 4:45 – 5:30 p.m. | Katie Emery Brown, University of California Berkeley. “Queer Silence in Merleau-Ponty’s Gesture” |
| Banquet | |
| 7 – 10 p.m. | At Salam, 104 W 13th St. |
Over the last decades, the humanities have come under pressure from the scientific worldview. To many, it seems as if the humanities provide us at best with less-than-objective knowledge claims. Arguably, there are at least two overall reasons for this. On the one hand, the scientific worldview tends to associate objectivity with the kind of knowledge-acquisition, explanation, and justification characteristic of the natural sciences. On the other hand, the humanities themselves have contributed to the impression that they might be less relevant than the natural sciences to epistemic progress due to internal problems having to do with the very concept(s) of knowledge, reality and objectivity.
New Realism is a term for a whole series of current trends in philosophy that has important consequences for our understanding of knowledge in general. In particular, it reshapes our account of the human being qua source and object of knowledge claims. In this context, New Realism draws on a crucial indispensability thesis: we simply cannot eliminate the standpoint from which humans gather information about human and non-human reality alike from our account of reality itself. In light of this thesis, it turns out that the humanities are fully-fledged contributions to objective knowledge about reality – a fact we cannot ignore without succumbing to illusion. Against this background, the talk concludes that the so-called “scientific worldview” is untenable: it is built upon a denial of knowledge we actually possess, and so, by not being scientific enough, it fails to respect its own premises.
About the speaker:
Markus Gabriel holds the chair in epistemology, modern and contemporary philosophy at the University of Bonn. He is the director of the International Center for Philosophy and the multidisciplinary Center for Science and Thought. With Jocelyn Benoist he also directs Bonn-Paris Center for Research on New Realisms. His work focuses on contemporary philosophy, in particular epistemology and ontology, in an attempt to spell out the consequences of various trends in philosophy in a conversation with the humanities. Currently, he is working on a book called Fictions which deals with topics at the intersection of philosophy, literary studies and sociology.
The NYU Department of German and Deutsches Haus at NYU present “Objectivity and the Humanities – Prospects for a New Realism,” a talk by Professor Markus Gabriel.
Attendance information:
Events at Deutsches Haus are free of charge. If you would like to attend this event, please send us an email to deutscheshaus.rsvp@nyu.edu. Space at Deutsches Haus is limited; please arrive ten minutes prior to the event. Thank you!
“Objectivity and the Humanities – Prospects for a New Realism” is a DAAD-supported event.
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:
Advance Registration Required; RSVP details coming soon
La Maison Française is pleased to host the second symposium of Arts and Pragmatism. Join us for two days of fascinating talks and encounters at the intersection of philosophy and artistic practice under the direction of Sandra Laugier and Yann Toma.
with the support of Panthéon Sorbonne University, Politique scientifique program, Global Works and Society, Liberal Studies, and La Maison Française at New York University.
Full program details to follow.
*We are so excited to welcome the general public back to most events at La Maison Francaise of NYU. Instructions for attending events in-person will be confirmed shortly before each event. Please note that NYU requires all visitors to provide official proof (in English) that they are fully vaccinated and boosted against COVID-19. Additional details to follow.
Our friends from Université de Paris Panthéon-Sorbonne return for a third installment of their symposium Arts & Pragmatism: From Ordinary Aesthetics to Post Creation.
This day-long symposium will be chaired by Yann Toma and Sandra Laugier. From the organizers:
We have noticed it during the two previous symposia of our program: the pragmatist philosophy and in particular Dewey defends the idea that aesthetics must not only be considered as the search for truths about art and its creations but also as what concerns the experience of the persons with an artwork (a sensitive and active experience). The reception would thus be the dynamic experience of an incarnated observer, acting, feeling in his senses and his affects what is the work and what it makes him feel.
The political stake of the pragmatist aesthetics is to make sure that the strong aesthetic experiences remain open and accessible to the largest public and become even a «matter of ordinary conversation». It is then a matter of thinking about shared experience as a transmission of values, an important phenomenon for the moral, political, “educational” reflection of adults» (Cavell 1979, 1981, Shusterman, Laugier 2019, 2023, Gerrits 2020). Thus, this question of pragmatism addresses societal issues that concern all audiences, not just from a broadcast/transmission perspective. By focusing on experience and agency, this way of approaching pragmatism involves the cultural audience in a broad way to the point where it engages mediums such as television and in general digital cultures.
The concept of Post-Creation, insofar as it plays a form of exteriority to an original Creation, has all its place in a world where the strong aesthetic experiences remain open and accessible to a wider public. It is a question of placing the creation beyond what is biased, in the heart of a form of Third State of the artistic act in charge of a heuristic and critical potential, towards a form extracted from the zone of influence of the world of the art as such. The idea of Post-Creation tends towards the universal that would be the fact of conceiving the creation beyond any not institutionalized academism. We will see how a possible emulation between the ordinary aesthetic and the shared experience of the Post-Creation is articulated and played, where the experience of the creation produces knowledge and transforms what is out of the specific field of perception of the art in so many new acting and reflexive spaces. In that, the influence of the artistic creation on whole sections of the society, domains of perception until now inaccessible, becomes a stake of opening which results from the transformation of a form of ordinary aesthetics in a Post-Creation freed from the aesthetic channels of the contemporary art.
Program:
10:30AM : Opening Yann Toma, Sandra Laugier and François Noudelmann
11:00AM – 1:00PM : Panel I Pragmatism and the Project of an Ordinary Aesthetics
Chair : Yann Toma
Andrew Brandel (Penn State University) From the Aesthetics of the Everyday Life to Ordinary Aesthetics.
Barbara Formis (Panthéon-Sorbonne University) Doings and redoings of the Identical.
Sandra Laugier (Panthéon-Sorbonne) Ordinary Creation and Shared Culture.
Emmanuel Kattan (Columbia University) What happens when nothing happens: Chantal Akerman, Francis Ponge, Marisa Merz and the emergence of time.
1:00PM – 3:00PM : Lunch Break
3:00PM – 6:00PM : Panel II Pragmatism, Post-Creation
Chair : Sandra Laugier
Yann Toma (Artist/Panthéon-Sorbonne University) Post-Creation, a new way of making creation
The example of L’Or bleu.
Jung Hee Choi (artist and author of «Manifest Unmanifest») Dream House.
Dan Thomas (United Nations Global Compact), The importance of Art and Perception in the Diplomatic Way.
Warren Neidich (Artist and Founding Director Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art) The Brain Without Organs and the Ecocene.
This event is organized with the support of Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Politique scientifique program, and La Maison Française at New York University
Richard J. Bernstein first encountered John Dewey’s pragmatist naturalism as a graduate student at Yale University, where “Dewey’s naturalistic vision of the relation of experience and nature—how human beings as natural creatures are related to the rest of nature—spoke deeply to me.” This early enthusiasm for Dewey’s naturalistic vision never left him. During the final years of his long life, Bernstein finished two books that return to issues of pragmatist naturalism.
· His Pragmatic Naturalism: John Dewey’s Living Legacy (2020), traces differing versions of Deweyan naturalism in the works of contemporary philosophers, including Robert Brandom, John McDowell, Richard Rorty, Wilfrid Sellars, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Philip Kitcher, Bjorn Ramberg, David Macarthur, Steven Levine, Mark Johnson, Robert Sinclair, Huw Price, and Joseph Rouse.
· In his final book, The Vicissitudes of Nature (2022), Bernstein clarifies his own pragmatist naturalism in relation to the thinking of earlier modern philosophers: Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.
This conference will critically assess and expand the legacy of Bernstein’s final pragmatic naturalism as expressed in these two books. Accepted papers will be collected for publication.
The New York Pragmatist Forum
Paper topics may include:
● Bernstein’s discussion of Dewey’s thinking in relation to contemporary philosophers’ formulations of naturalism in Pragmatic Naturalism: John Dewey’s Living Legacy.
● Bernstein’s interpretation of an earlier thinker’s understanding of naturalism or nature in The Vicissitudes of Nature (Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, or Freud).
● A larger theme or problem that brings one of these Bernstein’s texts into conversation with philosophical naturalism, either particular expressions or conceptual issues.
● The consequences of one or both of these texts for questions of naturalism in relation to wider social and political questions, e.g., democracy, praxis, critique.
Abstracts: Please submit an abstract of no more than 500 words to tara@newschool.edu.
Submission Deadline: May 22, 2023
NYPF Conference Committee:
Sergio Gallegos, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
Judith Green, Fordham University
Brendan Hogan, New York University
Tara Mastrelli, New School for Social Research
David Woods, New York University
The New York Institute of Philosophy announces a panel:
“Philosophical Foundations of Reparations”
Speakers:
- Daniel Fryer (University of Michigan)
- Erin Kelly (Tufts)
- Christopher Lewis (Harvard)
The panel will be moderated by Juliana Bidadanure (NYU).
Information:
The talk will be Friday December 6th from 3:30-5:30pm.
Location: TBD
This panel is a part of the ongoing Project on the Philosophy of Race and Racism.
Registration is free but required for non-NYU attendees. A registration link will be shared via email with our department mailing lists a few weeks before the event. Please contact Jack Mikuszewski at jhm378@nyu.edu if you did not receive a registration link.