The Philosophy Department of The New School for Social Research invites you to a conference in honor of the life and work of Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy Yirmiyahu Yovel.
The conference will be on March 29th and 30th in the Wolff Conference Room, D1103, 6 E 16th Street.
Celebrating Yirmiyahu Yovel
Friday, March 29th
Chair: Richard J. Bernstein
9 AM – 11 AM: Agnes Heller “The Other Within”
11 AM – 1 PM: Jay Bernstein “Yovel and Hegel’s Phenomenology
Lunch
2 PM – 4 PM: James Dodd “The Historical Antinomy”
4PM – 6PM: Jonathan Yovel “Normativity as a Poetic Quality”
Saturday, March 30th
Chari: Dmitri Nikulin
9 AM – 11 AM: Joel Whitebook “Immanence, Finitude, and Emancipation: A Psychoanalytic Perspective”
11 AM – 1 PM: Omri Boehm “Immanence, Knowledge, and Immortality: Spinoza’s Ethics as an Inversion of the Biblical Fall”
Lunch
2 PM – 4 PM: Chiara Bottici “Marrano of Reason”
4 PM – 6 PM: Eli Friedlander “On the Different Ways to the Highest Good”
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.
ERIK OLIN WRIGHT spent the last years of his life thinking about ways to challenge and transform capitalist societies. He distilled his thinking in a book, How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21st Century (Verso, 2019). The symposium is designed to launch a debate about the strengths and weaknesses of Wright’s approach. We seek to both honor our colleague’s memory and assure that his ideas become part of current discussions of socialism and socialist strategy. The event will consist of three panels during the day and an evening session that will include tributes to Wright and a keynote by his friend, Ira Katznelson.
This event is co-sponsored by the Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies at The New School for Social Research, and the journal, Politics & Society.
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
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
The 9th annual Radical Democracy conference, sponsored by the Department of Politics at The New School for Social Research, will convene theorists and practitioners around the theme of Radical Ecologies. In the year that “climate strike” was named word of the year by Collins Dictionary, we seek to explore what opportunities for democratic resistance can be found in a multiplicity of ecologies. The conference will provide a platform for dialogue on the urgent question of our future in a post-climate change world.
Against the backdrop of increasingly visible and devastating climate disasters, resurgent environmental movements are embracing divergent visions and methods of struggle to realize change. As such, it is timely to ask, What makes an ecology radical? A multitude of intersecting traditions have sought to answer this question. An eco-feminist might approach this through the lens of social reproduction. An eco-socialist might frame radical ecology in terms of a mode of production beyond capitalism that can sustain and replenish nature. Indigenous perspectives can draw on centuries of resistance to extractive colonial capitalism. The conference will consider how a radical ecological praxis can be pursued within this plurality of histories, cosmologies and schools of thought, and, crucially, examine what we can learn from the work of activists on the frontline. We therefore call on both scholars and activists to engage in a fruitful dialogue on the still unsettled relationship between politics and the environment.
We seek abstracts and panel proposals that grapple with this issue across a broad range of perspectives and disciplines, including, but by no means limited to:
- environmental social movements past, present and future;
- indigenous, subaltern, decolonial and posthuman perspectives and strategies of resistance;
- the urgency of converging ecological crises, and strategic possibilities and limitations of confronting it within existing political systems;
- the theoretical and ontological underpinnings of environmentalism in the global North, and critiques thereof;
- networks of alliance across geographical space, disciplinary boundaries, and patterns and institutions of oppression;
- materialist analyses of winners and losers in the clean energy transition and ecological sustainability movement;
- questions of future(s) and intergenerational ethics;
- meditations on the relations between aesthetics, activism, and the nonhuman.
The conference will take place over two days, the structure of which will include graduate-student panels, an indigenous activist-scholar roundtable, and a keynote address.
For individual paper proposals, please submit a one-page abstract (max. 300 words) that includes institutional affiliation, academic level and contact information. Complete panel proposals with up to four papers are strongly encouraged.
Please submit your paper or panel abstracts by February 1st, 2020, to radicaldemocracy@newschool.edu. Selected participants will be notified March 1st, 2020. Full conference papers are due by April 5, 2020.
https://philevents.org/event/show/78134
The Long Island Philosophical Society is seeking submissions for its Spring 2020 conference which will be held Saturday, April 18th 2020 on the attractive campus of Molloy College, located in Rockville Centre, NY.
The Long Island Philosophical Society has been a dynamic forum for the exchange of ideas since 1964. LIPS is an internationally recognized organization that is a valuable philosophical resource for the Greater New York area. Its conferences have drawn scholars from over 30 states and from the international community, including Brazil, Canada, Ukraine, Israel, and Egypt.
Papers can be on any topic of philosophical interest. Presentations are limited to 25-30 minutes, to be followed by a 10-15 minute discussion period. Both professional philosophers (full-time, part-time, unaffiliated) and graduate students are welcome to submit. Paper submissions are also welcome from those in different disciplines who have an interest in philosophical issues.
The submission deadline is Friday, March 13, 2020.
Please submit papers, including contact information and affiliation (if any) to Dr. Glenn Statile at StatileG@stjohns.eduor Dr. Leslie Aarons at laarons@lipsociety.org.