The Department of Politics at The New School for Social Research is sponsoring its 8th Annual graduate student conference on the concept, history, practices and implications of radical democracy.
This year, we invite abstracts and panel proposals that deal with the questions of feminist and radical democratic theory.
The last couple of years gave rise to new democratic movements. This new stage of grassroots democratic protests in countries such as US, Brazil, Argentina, Spain or Poland has been centered around feminist issues including sexual harassment, abortion law, domestic violence, and gender inequality. The Women’s March against Trump and International Women’s Strike present only two examples of the recent and global feminist wave. Why does the current wave of political mobilization in the US, Argentina, or Brazil have a feminist face? How does it differ from earlier democratic movements, including the movements of Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter? What distinguishes this new wave from other feminist struggles from the past? Finally, what issues, reactions, and obstacles do contemporary feminists face in various places around the world? Our conference aims to address this set of questions.
We welcome papers that engage with the concept of feminism and its meaning, discuss the role of feminist and gender issues within the democratic tradition, as well as elaborate on the history of feminist politics. We particularly invite papers that propose a critical analysis of contemporary feminisms, elucidating their issues, dangers, and political potential.
Proposals should not be limited to this list, on the contrary, we encourage interdisciplinary papers and panels utilizing or critiquing the concepts of feminism and radical democracy from the point of view of post- anti- or de-colonialism, queer theory, indigenous studies, disability studies, or critical race theory
Please submit your paper or panel abstracts by March 8, 2019, to radicaldemocracy@newschool.edu.
http://www.radicaldemocracy.org/
https://philevents.org/event/show/70334
The REC is a pre-read conference. The papers will be made available on April 15.
Friday, May 3, 2019
1:30 – 3:15 pm
Alex Byrne (MIT)
Chair: TBD
Coffee Break
3:45 – 5:30 pm
Susanna Rinard (Harvard)
Chair: TBD
Dinner
7:30 – 9:15 pm
Jonathan Kvanvig (Washington University St Louis)
Chair: TBD
Reception 9:30 – 11:00 PM
Saturday, May 4, 2019
9:30 – 11:15 am
Anil Gupta (University of Pittsburgh)
Chair: TBD
Coffee Break
11:45 – 1:30 pm Winner of the Young Epistemologist Prize
TBD
Chair: TBD
Lunch
2:45 – 4:30 pm
Maria Lasonen-Aarnio (University of Helsinki)
Chair: TBD
Discussants
Heather Battaly (University of Connecticut)
John Bengson (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Annalisa Coliva (University of California Irvine)
Thomas Kelly (Princeton)
Participants
Chris Copan, Andy Egan, Megan Feeney, Peter Klein, Matthew McGrath, Susanna Schellenberg, Ernie Sosa
The REC is a pre-read conference, so papers are to be read in advance. There is no registration fee for the conference, but please notify Megan Feeney, the conference manager, if you plan to attend by sending an email to rutgersepistemologyconference@gmail.com. If you wish to participate in the meals, please send a check made out to “Rutgers University” to Megan Feeney by April 15 ($80 if you are a faculty member or a postdoc; $60 if you are a graduate student or an undergraduate): Megan Feeney; Rutgers Epistemology Conference; 106 Somerset St, 5th Floor; New Brunswick, NJ 08901.
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:
According to a pervasive and widespread literature, we came, whether we want it or not, to surround our existences with all sorts of narratives: retrospective interpretations of what came before us and how we were born, anticipative stories about what is to come and what we should expect, and, most of all, restless attempts to describe what our present is made of so that we know how to make sense of it. First-person narratives occupy a central position amongst these varieties of narratives, as they give each of us a chance to provide meaning to our lives and achieve some kind of self-understanding.
Taking a resolutely opposite stance, Sartre (in)famously declared through the voice of the main character of his novel La Nausée that stories cannot but betray the lives they claim to describe, and necessarily fail to be faithful to the very experiencing of life that constitutes its specific grain and texture. In which sense is this failure a failure? In which sense must we consider it a failure, if narratives are the privileged device we use to make sense of existences in general, and ours in particular? Wouldn’t it be both tragic and ironical, from that perspective, that we live our lives in a way that remains impervious to our attempts to bring some meaning over our existence, and that first-person narratives should be regarded as fundamentally inadequate to account for life as we live it?
This paper will address these questions in light of the definition of ‘tragic irony’ that Richard Moran draws from his interpretation of Sartre, understanding tragedy as a clash between forms of significance displayed by incompatible perspectives. We will examine in particular the problem raised by first-person narratives, which conflate the seemingly incompatible perspectives of the narrator and of the character of the story. I will argue that Moran’s view fails to show in which sense the failure of first-person narratives are also, according to Sartre, the condition of their success, and that the irony of life might rely first and foremost on its ability to succeed even when and where it fails. After all, isn’t it the most ironical of it all that Sartre, notwithstanding his harsh critique of the fundamental inadequacy of life narratives, ended his literary career with the publication of his most acclaimed autobiography?
Bio:
Pierre-Jean Renaudie is Assistant Professor of philosophy (phenomenology and contemporary German philosophy) at the University of Lyon. He is the author of a book on Husserl’s theory of knowledge (Husserl et les categories. Langage, pensée et perception, Paris, Vrin, 2015), co-edited a book on phenomenology of matter (Phénoménologies de la matière, with C.V. Spaak, Paris, CNRS Editions, 2020) and published many articles, in French and in English, on the phenomenological tradition and its connection with contemporary issues in philosophy of mind. He is a member of the Institut de recherches philosophiques de Lyon (IRPHIL) and an associate member of the Husserl Archives in Paris.
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
Rutgers Workshop on Chinese Philosophy (RWCP) was launched in 2012. Co-directed by Tao Jiang, Dean Zimmerman and Stephen Angle, RWCP is designed to build a bridge between Chinese philosophy and Western analytic philosophy and to promote critical engagement and constructive dialogue between the two sides, with the hope of bringing the study of Chinese philosophy into the mainstream of philosophical discourse within the Western academy. It is run every other year, usually in late spring.
5th Rutgers Workshop on Chinese Philosophy: Chinese Philosophy and Virtue Epistemology
The 5th RWCP will be held on Friday, April 17, 2020. In this one-day workshop, six scholars of Chinese philosophy will engage two leading virtue epistemologists, Ernest Sosa and Linda Zagzebski. The program and papers will be available in the spring of 2020, one month before the workshop. RSVP will become available at that time as well, and it is required for attendance. Please stay tuned.
FAQs
1. Where can I park?
Details will be provided as we get closer to the day of the workshop.
2. How can I get to the event on public transportation?
Take the NJ Transit Northeast Corridor Line to New Brunswick (njtransit.com). Make sure the train stops at New Brunswick as some might skip it during rush hours.
Co-sponsored by Rutgers Global-China Office and the Confucius Institute.