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”
The graduate students and faculty of the Columbia and NYU Philosophy Departments invite graduate submissions in any area of philosophy for a conference to be held on Saturday, April 13th, 2019 at New York University.
Submission Guidelines
Please send submission as attachments in .doc or .pdf format to columbianyu.philgradconference@gmail.com by February 3rd, 2018 (Notification by February 17th, 2019).
Papers must meet the following requirements:
- All papers must be between 3,000 and 5,000 words in length, suitable for a presentation of 30-40 minutes to a general philosophical audience.
- Submit papers with a separate cover sheet in .doc or .pdf format that includes the following information: name, home institution, contact details, area of paper (e.g. metaphysics, meta-ethics, philosophy of mind, etc.) and an abstract of no longer than 300 words.
- Papers must be submitted by email in blind-review format.
The philosophical traditions of India offer contemporary researchers an unparalleled and mostly untapped resource for fresh thinking about attention, its relations to mind and world. From Nyāya manas-theory to the extensive Buddhist theories about attention’s relationship with consciousness, and from precise taxonomies of the varieties of attention to discussions about the norms governing attention, epistemic, moral, and practical, the wealth and sophistication of Indian analysis is astounding. Our workshop will look at the ways in which Indian, including Buddhist, philosophical theory can enrich contemporary discussion, and there will be presentations by a world-class panel of speakers.
We hope too that this workshop will serve as a catalyst to Indian philosophical studies in the New York area. The workshop is open to everyone, free and without registration, and the program is here.
April 25, 2019|DAY 1
8:45 am – 9:00 am
Coffee & Welcome (Jonardon Ganeri NYU)
9:00 am – 10:45 am
Panel 1. Attending to Oneself
Chair: Nic Bommarito (Buffalo)
9:00 am – 9:50 am
Sharon Street (NYU, via video conferencing)
“On Recognizing Oneself in Others: A Meditation-Based Response to Mackie’s Argument from Queerness”
9:55 am – 10:45 am
Muhammad Faruque (Fordham)
“Attending to Oneself: Muḥammad Iqbāl and his Indian Contemporaries”
10:45 am – 11:00 am
Morning Break
11:00 am – 12:45 pm
Panel 2. Attention and Affect
Chair: Joerg Tuske (Salisbury)
11:00 am – 11:50am
Evan Thompson (British Columbia)
“Affect Biased Attention and Concept Formation”
11:55 am – 12:45 pm
Sonam Kachru (Virginia)
“Attention and Affect: A View from Indian Buddhist Philosophy”
12:45 pm – 2:00 pm
Lunch Break
2:00 pm – 3:45 pm
Panel 3. Decision and Exclusion
Chair: Emily McRae (New Mexico)
2:00 pm – 2:50 pm
Arindam Chakrabarti (Stonybrook)
“Deciding to Attend and the Problem of Disjunctive Attention”
2:55 pm – 3:45 pm
Catherine Prueitt (George Mason)
“At the Limits of Pain: Attention, Exclusion, and Self-Knowledge in Pratyabhijñā Śaivism.”
3:45 pm – 4:00 pm
Afternoon Break
4:00 pm – 5:45 pm
Panel 4. The Ethics of Attention
Chair: Eyal Aviv (George Washington)
4:00 pm – 4:50 pm
Curie Virag (Edinburgh)
“Attention as Cognitive Resonance”
4:55 pm – 5:45 pm
Shalini Sinha (Reading)
“The Ethics of Attention in Śāntideva and Simone Weil”
April 26, 2019|DAY 2
10:15 am – 10:30 am
Coffee
10:30 am – 12:15 pm
Panel 5. Self-Awareness and Attention
Chair: Payal Doctor (LaGuardia)
10:30 am – 11:20 am
Amit Chaturvedi (Hong Kong)
“Phenomenal Priority and Reflexive Self-Awareness: Watzl meets Yogācāra”
11:25 am – 12:15 pm
Nilanjan Das (University College London)
“Śrīharṣa on Self-knowledge and the Inner Sense”
12:15 pm – 1:30 pm
Lunch Break
1:30 pm – 3:15 pm
Panel 6. Mindfulness and Justification
Chair: Bryce Huebner (Georgetown)
1:30 pm – 2:20 pm
Georges Dreyfus (Williams)
“But What is Mindfulness? A Phenomenological Approach”
2:25 pm – 3:15 pm
Anand Vaidya (San Jose)
“Attention and Justification”
3:15 pm – 3:30 pm
Afternoon Break
3:30 pm – 5:15 pm
Panel 7. The Wandering Self
Chair: Adriana Renero (NYU)
3:30 pm – 4:20 pm
Carolyn Jennings (UC Merced)
“From Attention to Self”
4:25 pm – 5:15 pm
Zac Irving (Virginia)
“Harnessing the Wandering Mind”
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.
Ronald Dworkin’s work always spanned a wide array of topics, from the most abstract jurisprudence through the details of American constitutional law all the way over to political philosophy and theories of justice and equality. In the last decades of his life, however, Dworkin’s work flowered in ways that went beyond even this prodigious range. Though he continued his central work in the philosophy of law and constitutional theory, he also addressed issues in international law, human dignity, the philosophy of religion, the relation between ethics, morality and legal theory, and the unity of practical thought generally. This conference will explore some of these themes in Dworkin’s late work. Beginning with a panel on his understanding of religion, we will also convene discussions of his work on legal integrity, international law, and the relation between law and morality. There will be a total of nine presentations, with plenty of time for discussion. All are welcome.
Panel 1 (Friday 1:30 p.m.): Dworkin’s Religion without God.
Eric Gregory (Princeton),
Moshe Halbertal (NYU and Hebrew U.) Ronald Dworkin Religion Without God: Morality and the Transcendent
Larry Sager (Texas) Solving Religious Liberty
Panel 2 (Friday 4:30 p.m.): Dworkin on international law.
Samantha Besson (Fribourg)
The Political Legitimacy of International Law: Sovereign States and their International Institutional Order
John Tasioulas (King’s College, London)
Panel 3 (Saturday 10 a.m.): The idea of integrity in Law’s Empire.
Andrei Marmor (Cornell) Integrity in Law’s Empire
Jeremy Waldron (NYU) The Rise and Decline of Integrity
Panel 4 (Saturday 2:15 p.m.): Law and morality in Justice for Hedgehogs.
Mark Greenberg (UCLA)
What Makes a Moral Duty Legal? Dworkin’s Judicial Enforcement Theory Versus the Moral Impact Theory
Ben Zipursky (Fordham)
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 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
Over the last decades, the humanities have come under pressure from the scientific worldview. To many, it seems as if the humanities provide us at best with less-than-objective knowledge claims. Arguably, there are at least two overall reasons for this. On the one hand, the scientific worldview tends to associate objectivity with the kind of knowledge-acquisition, explanation, and justification characteristic of the natural sciences. On the other hand, the humanities themselves have contributed to the impression that they might be less relevant than the natural sciences to epistemic progress due to internal problems having to do with the very concept(s) of knowledge, reality and objectivity.
New Realism is a term for a whole series of current trends in philosophy that has important consequences for our understanding of knowledge in general. In particular, it reshapes our account of the human being qua source and object of knowledge claims. In this context, New Realism draws on a crucial indispensability thesis: we simply cannot eliminate the standpoint from which humans gather information about human and non-human reality alike from our account of reality itself. In light of this thesis, it turns out that the humanities are fully-fledged contributions to objective knowledge about reality – a fact we cannot ignore without succumbing to illusion. Against this background, the talk concludes that the so-called “scientific worldview” is untenable: it is built upon a denial of knowledge we actually possess, and so, by not being scientific enough, it fails to respect its own premises.
About the speaker:
Markus Gabriel holds the chair in epistemology, modern and contemporary philosophy at the University of Bonn. He is the director of the International Center for Philosophy and the multidisciplinary Center for Science and Thought. With Jocelyn Benoist he also directs Bonn-Paris Center for Research on New Realisms. His work focuses on contemporary philosophy, in particular epistemology and ontology, in an attempt to spell out the consequences of various trends in philosophy in a conversation with the humanities. Currently, he is working on a book called Fictions which deals with topics at the intersection of philosophy, literary studies and sociology.
The NYU Department of German and Deutsches Haus at NYU present “Objectivity and the Humanities – Prospects for a New Realism,” a talk by Professor Markus Gabriel.
Attendance information:
Events at Deutsches Haus are free of charge. If you would like to attend this event, please send us an email to deutscheshaus.rsvp@nyu.edu. Space at Deutsches Haus is limited; please arrive ten minutes prior to the event. Thank you!
“Objectivity and the Humanities – Prospects for a New Realism” is a DAAD-supported event.
The New York University Department of Philosophy will host the sixteenth in its series of conferences on issues in the history of modern philosophy on November 8 and 9, 2019. Each conference in the series examines the development of a central philosophical problem from early modern philosophy to the present, exploring the evolution of formulations of the problem and of approaches to resolving it. By examining the work of philosophers of the past both in historical context and in relation to contemporary philosophical thinking, the conferences allow philosophy’s past and present to illuminate one another.
Friday, November 8
9:00-10:00
Check-in and Continental Breakfast
10:00-12:00
Speaker: Michael Gill (University of Arizona), “Shaftesbury’s Claim That Beauty and Good Are One and the Same”
Commentator: Julia Driver (Washington University)
2:00-4:00
Speaker: Jacqueline Taylor (San Francisco University), “Hume on Humanity: Its Force and Authority”
Commentator: Rachel Cohon (University at Albany, SUNY)
4:00-4:30
Coffee Break
4:30-6:30
Speaker: Marcus Willascheck (Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main), “The Structure of Normative Space According to Kant“
Commentator: Janum Sethi (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)
6:30-7:30
Reception
Saturday, November 9
9:00-10:00
Continental Breakfast
10:00-12:00
Speaker: João Constâncio (Universidade Nova de Lisboa / Nova FCSH), “Nietzsche on Normativity: Reason in the Space of Culture and Taste”
Commentator: Ariela Tubert (University of Puget Sound)
2:00-4:00
Speaker: Hannah Ginsborg (University of California, Berkeley), “Rule-Following without Rules: Wittgenstein on Normativity in Social Practice”
Commentator: Gary Ebbs (Indiana University)
4:00-4:30
Coffee Break
4:30-6:30
Speaker: Stephen Darwall, (Yale University), “Normativity in Contemporary (and the History of) Ethics”
Commentator: Nomy Arpaly (Brown University)
6:30-7:30
Reception
- Nomy Arpaly
- Rachel Cohon
- João Constâncio
- Stephen Darwall
- Julia Driver
- Gary Ebbs
- Michael Gill
- Hannah Ginsborg
- Janum Sethi
- Jacqueline Taylor
- Ariela Tubert
- Marcus Willascheck
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).