John Dewey, in his resistance to foundational individualism, declares that individual autonomy so conceived is a fiction; for Dewey, it is association that is a fact. In his own language: “There is no sense in asking how individuals come to be associated. They exist and operate in association.” In a way that resonates with Confucian role ethics, the revolutionary Dewey particularizes the fact of associated living and valorizes it by developing a vision of the habitude of unique, defused, relationally-constituted human beings. That is, he develops a distinctive, if not idiosyncratic language of habits and “individuality” to describe the various modalities of association that enable human beings to add value to their activities and to transform mere relations into a communicating community.
In Confucian role ethics, Dewey’s contention that association is a fact is restated in a different vocabulary by appealing to specific roles rather than unique habitudes for stipulating the specific forms that association takes within lives lived in family and community—that is, the various roles we live as sons and teachers, grandmothers and neighbors. For Confucianism, not only are these roles descriptive of our associations, they are also prescriptive in the sense that roles in family and community are themselves normative, guiding us in the direction of appropriate conduct. Whereas for both Confucianism and Dewey, mere association is a given, flourishing families and communities are what we are able to make of our facticity as the highest human achievement.
8 February @Columbia
Patricia Kitcher: The Fact of Reason in Kant’s Moral Psychology
Response: Jessica Tizzard
22 February @NSSR
5 April @Columbia
Beatrice Longuenesse: Residues of First Nature
19 April @NSSR
Angelica Nuzzo: Approaching Hegel’s Logic Obliquely: Melville, Moliere, Beckett
Response: David Carlson
10 May @Columbia
Amy Allen: Turning Dead Ends into Through Streets: Psychoanalysis and the Idea of Progress
The New York City Wittgenstein Workshop has the following workshops scheduled for this semester and more planned workshops to be announced soon.
All workshops are on Fridays from 4 to 6 pm in room D1106.
2/22 — Zed Adams (the New School) — History of the digital/analogue distinction in philosophy
4/19 — Nickolas Pappas (CUNY) — “Plato on the Opposite of Philosophy”
4/26 — Larry Jackson
5/03 — Nuno Venturinha (Nova University of Lisbon) — “Autobiographical Writing, Self-knowledge, and the Religious Point of View.”
5/10 — Pierre-Jean Renaudi (Lyon)
8 February @Columbia
Patricia Kitcher: The Fact of Reason in Kant’s Moral Psychology
Response: Jessica Tizzard
22 February @NSSR
5 April @Columbia
Beatrice Longuenesse: Residues of First Nature
19 April @NSSR
Angelica Nuzzo: Approaching Hegel’s Logic Obliquely: Melville, Moliere, Beckett
Response: David Carlson
10 May @Columbia
Amy Allen: Turning Dead Ends into Through Streets: Psychoanalysis and the Idea of Progress
The universe plausibly has an infinite future and an infinite past. Given unlimited time, every qualitative state that has ever occurred will occur again, infinitely many times. There will thus exist in the future persons arbitrarily similar to you, in any desired respects. A person sufficiently similar to you in the right respects will qualify as literally another incarnation of you. Some theories about the nature of persons rule this out; however, these theories also imply, given an infinite past, that your present existence is a probability-zero event. Hence, your present existence is evidence against such theories of persons.
Vegan reception to follow.
8 February @Columbia
Patricia Kitcher: The Fact of Reason in Kant’s Moral Psychology
Response: Jessica Tizzard
22 February @NSSR
5 April @Columbia
Beatrice Longuenesse: Residues of First Nature
19 April @NSSR
Angelica Nuzzo: Approaching Hegel’s Logic Obliquely: Melville, Moliere, Beckett
Response: David Carlson
10 May @Columbia
Amy Allen: Turning Dead Ends into Through Streets: Psychoanalysis and the Idea of Progress
Rebecca Comay, Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature, The University of Toronto discusses Hegel and Beckett followed by a response from Paul Kottman of The New School for Social Research.
This one-day symposium looks at Hofstra Professor Kathleen Wallace’s new book, The Network Self: Relation, Process, and Personal Identity (Routledge, 2019). The book offers a systematic treatment of the notion of the self as constituted by social, cultural, political, and biological relations. The event will feature Diana Meyers, University of Connecticut; Vincent Colapietro, University of Rhode Island; and Amy Shuster, Dennison University, with a response from Professor Wallace.
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