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?
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
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.
“Being dragged into the orbit of Webster’s mind is like entering the Magic Mountain: you go in as a visitor, and stay as a patient”
– Tom Mcarthy, author of Remainder and Satin Island
“Jamieson Webster’s new work reflects upon that aspect of hysteria—or conversion disorder—that has eluded the attention of most commentators: the indifference of the subject at the very moment that the symptom is most clearly enacted. This point of departure allows Webster to think about what the body contains but also what traverses the body at a level that is prior to speech, that is perhaps the condition of speech itself. This incisive and unsettling meditation gives us a form of psychoanalytic writing that tracks the transference as bodily transformation and impasse. It is written in and for our times, when the courage and difficulty of the slow labor of psychoanalysis provides a perspective that eludes the certitudes of dogma and the exhilarations of false promises. Webster’s book asks us to stay within the domain of difficult exchange where what registers and shifts at the level of the body lets us know more about what we can expect of life and what our own living carries of the lives of others. Beautifully written, theoretically brave, and disturbing in all the best ways”.
– Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature and Critical Theory, University of California, Berkeley
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/conversion-disorder/9780231184083
From the book:
Conversion disorder—a psychiatric term that names the enigmatic transformation of psychic energy into bodily manifestations—offers a way to rethink the present. With so many people suffering from unexplained bodily symptoms; with so many seeking recourse to pharmacological treatments or bodily modification; with young men and women seemingly willing to direct violence toward anybody, including themselves—a radical disordering in culture insists on the level of the body.
Part memoir, part clinical case, part theoretical investigation, this book searches for the body. Is it a psychopathological entity; a crossroads for the cultural, political, and biological in the form of care; or the foundation of psychoanalytic work on the question of sexuality? Jamieson Webster traces conversion’s shifting meanings—in religious, economic, and even chemical processes—revisiting the work of thinkers as diverse as Benjamin, Foucault, Agamben, and Lacan. She provides an intimate account of her own conversion from patient to psychoanalyst, as well as her continuing struggle to apprehend the complexities of the patient’s body. When listening to dreams, symptoms, worries, or sexual impasses, the body becomes a defining trope that belies a vulnerable and urgent wish for transformation. Conversion Disorder names what is singular about the entanglement of the fractured body and the social world in order to imagine what kind of cure is possible.
Presented by The New School for Social Research and Philosophy Department and it is co-sponsored with the Ferenczi Center.
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
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:
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