Calendar

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.

Propositional dynamic logic (PDL) is a framework for reasoning about nondeterministic program executions (or, more generally, nondeterministic actions). In this setting, nondeterminism is taken as a primitive: a program is nondeterministic iff it has multiple possible outcomes. But what is the sense of “possibility” at play here? This talk explores an epistemic interpretation: working in an enriched logical setting, we represent nondeterminism as a relationship between a program and an agent deriving from the agent’s (in)ability to adequately measure the dynamics of the program execution. More precisely, using topology to capture the observational powers of an agent, we define the nondeterministic outcomes of a given program execution to be those outcomes that the agent is unable to rule out in advance. In this framework, determinism coincides exactly with continuity: that is, determinism is continuity in the observation topology. This allows us to embed PDL into (dynamic) topological (subset space) logic, laying the groundwork for a deeper investigation into the epistemology (and topology) of nondeterminism.

The seminar is concerned with applying formal methods to fundamental issues, with an emphasis on probabilistic reasoning, decision theory and games. In this context “logic” is broadly interpreted as covering applications that involve formal representations. The topics of interest have been researched within a very broad spectrum of different disciplines, including philosophy (logic and epistemology), statistics, economics, and computer science. The seminar is intended to bring together scholars from different fields of research so as to illuminate problems of common interest from different perspectives. Throughout each academic year, meetings are regularly presented by the members of the seminar and distinguished guest speakers.

details tba

02/08/2019 Faculty House, Columbia University
4:00 PM

03/29/2019 Faculty House, Columbia University
4:00 PM

04/19/2018 Faculty House, Columbia University
4:00 PM

This essay tries to develop a “black radical Kantianism” – that is, a Kantianism informed by the black experience in modernity. After looking briefly at socialist and feminist appropriations of Kant, I argue that an analogous black radical appropriation should draw on the distinctive social ontology and view of the state associated with the black radical tradition. In ethics, this would mean working with a (color-conscious rather than colorblind) social ontology of white persons and black sub-persons and then asking what respect for oneself and others would require under those circumstances. In political philosophy, it would mean framing the state as a Rassenstaat (a racial state) and then asking what measures of corrective justice would be necessary to bring about the ideal Rechtsstaat.

Response by César Cabezas Gamarra.

Presented by the German Idealism Workshop

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

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.

In Sanskrit epistemology, philosophers are preoccupied with the notion of pramā. A pramā, roughly, is a mental event of learning or knowledge-acquisition. Call any such mental event a knowledge-event. In A Confection of Refutation (Khaṇḍanakhaṇḍakhādya), the 12th century philosopher and poet Śrīharṣa argued that knowledge-events are indefinable. Any satisfactory (and therefore non-circular) definition of knowledge-events will have to include an anti-luck condition that doesn’t appeal back to the notion of learning or knowledge-acquisition itself. But there is no such anti-luck condition. What is novel about Śrīharṣa’s argument is that it is motivated by his commitment to a certain “knowledge first” approach to epistemology: the view that knowledge-events are epistemically prior to other non-factive mental states and events. On this view, when we are trying to determine whether an agent has undergone a knowledge-event, we don’t initially ascribe to them some other non-factive mental event, and then check if that event meets some further conditions (like truth or reliability) necessary for it to count as a knowledge-event; rather, we treat certain mental events by default as knowledge-events until a defeater comes along.  Surprisingly, Śrīharṣa argues that this kind of “knowledge first” epistemology should give us reason to doubt whether our ordinary attributions of knowledge-events are reliably tracking any sui generis psychological kind. In this talk, I reconstruct Śrīharṣa’s position.

With responses from Rosanna Picascia (Swarthmore College)

RSVP is required for dinner. Dinner will take place at a nearby restaurant. Please contact Lucilla at lm3335@columbia.edu for further information.