Working Papers in Ethics and Moral Psychology is a speaker series conducted under the auspices of the Icahn School of Medicine Bioethics Program. It is a working group where speakers are invited to present well-developed, as yet unpublished work. The focus of the group is interdisciplinary, with an emphasis on topics in ethics, bioethics, neuroethics, and moral psychology. The meetings begin with a brief presentation by the invited speaker and the remaining time is devoted to a discussion of the paper. The speakers will make their papers available in advance of their presentation to those who sign up for the Working Papers mailing list.
Upcoming Speakers:
11 Oct: Jordan Mackenzie, NYU
8 Nov: Susana Nuccetelli, St. Cloud State
13 Dec: Michael Brownstein, John Jay
14 Mar: Kyle Ferguson, CUNY
18 Apr: Jeff Sebo, NYU
23 May: Johann Frick, Princeton
Working Papers in Ethics and Moral Psychology is a speaker series conducted under the auspices of the Icahn School of Medicine Bioethics Program. It is a working group where speakers are invited to present well-developed, as yet unpublished work. The focus of the group is interdisciplinary, with an emphasis on topics in ethics, bioethics, neuroethics, and moral psychology. The meetings begin with a brief presentation by the invited speaker and the remaining time is devoted to a discussion of the paper. The speakers will make their papers available in advance of their presentation to those who sign up for the Working Papers mailing list.
Upcoming Speakers:
11 Oct: Jordan Mackenzie, NYU
8 Nov: Susana Nuccetelli, St. Cloud State
13 Dec: Michael Brownstein, John Jay
14 Mar: Kyle Ferguson, CUNY
18 Apr: Jeff Sebo, NYU
23 May: Johann Frick, Princeton
Working Papers in Ethics and Moral Psychology is a speaker series conducted under the auspices of the Icahn School of Medicine Bioethics Program. It is a working group where speakers are invited to present well-developed, as yet unpublished work. The focus of the group is interdisciplinary, with an emphasis on topics in ethics, bioethics, neuroethics, and moral psychology. The meetings begin with a brief presentation by the invited speaker and the remaining time is devoted to a discussion of the paper. The speakers will make their papers available in advance of their presentation to those who sign up for the Working Papers mailing list.
Upcoming Speakers:
11 Oct: Jordan Mackenzie, NYU
8 Nov: Susana Nuccetelli, St. Cloud State
13 Dec: Michael Brownstein, John Jay
14 Mar: Kyle Ferguson, CUNY
18 Apr: Jeff Sebo, NYU
23 May: Johann Frick, Princeton
In Plato’s Republic, Socrates argues that justice is good not only for its consequences but also in and of itself. Challenged by Glaucon and Adeimantus, who suggest that all human interactions are inherently competitive and that being unjust could help you get the better in these conflicts, Socrates establishes that justice is good because it is harmony in the city and in the soul. If justice is a kind of health of the soul, then surely it is better to be just than unjust. This claim might ameliorate the concerns of Glaucon and Adeimantus, but I will argue that Plato does more than address the vision of justice brought forth by Socrates’ interlocutors. Particularly through the contrasts among the different kinds of lives that are either described or depicted in the Republic, Plato points his readers toward a conception of justice that reveals it as the ground of mutuality, reciprocity, dialogue and friendship. In fact, the Republic reveals justice to be necessary to the philosophical life and, hence, to the best kind of life.
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.
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).
“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