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Søren Kierkegaard’s most famous work, Fear and Trembling, has the distinction of drawing near-universal derision from scholars of political theory and ethics. Dr. Dinan suggests that Kierkegaard’s readers haven’t accounted for his return to Socratic political philosophy as a direct riposte to the politics of G.W.F. Hegel and his successors. He considers the implications of Kierkegaard’s use of the ‘questionable stratagem’ of Socratic irony in relation to politics, ethics, Christian faith, and philosophy. Kierkegaard is concerned not with destroying political philosophy, but with restoring its attentiveness to paradox.

Dr. Matt Dinan, Assistant Professor, St. Thomas University

“What is Democracy? is the latest movie from Astra Taylor, the world’s foremost philosophy documentarian. It chronicles conversations with middle schoolers, workers, activists, and political philosophers about what democracy is, its promises and pitfalls, and how to strengthen it. On Wednesday, April 17th at 7:00 PM, Taylor is coming to Brooklyn to present a free screening of the film. Afterwards, she will be joined by the political philosopher Nancy Fraser for a discussion of themes from the movie. If you know who either of these people are, you will understand how ridiculously excited I am for this.

As usual, we meet at the Dweck Center at the Grand Army Plaza branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. Here’s the Facebook event. Please note that this event begins at 7:00 PM. Tell and bring everybody.”

Zionists and anti-Zionists alike agree that Zionism consists in the idea that the Jewish People has the right to their own nation state. They deeply disagree about the legitimacy of such politics. Whereas anti-Zionists maintain that a Jewish State is necessarily discriminatory and even racist, Zionists tend to reject anti-Zionist arguments as anti-Semitic. I argue that both sides of this familiar debate are wrong. (Or worse: all too often, both are right.) A Jewish State indeed cannot be a liberal democracy; and yet Zionist politics — contrary to the consensus held by Zionists and anti-Zionists alike — does not require a Jewish State. That’s a form of Zionism that’s legitimate, important and still viable: the liberal Zionism of the future.

Learn more about the book A Future for Israel, Beyond the Two-State Solution, by Omri Boehm.

Recently, Rebecca Kukla – among others – has argued that consent language is too narrow to adequately capture the ethical obligations and failures arising in the context of sex. Instead, she offers more nuanced scripts for the kinds of communication that occur throughout sex, not just at the beginning. I agree with Kukla that consent language is too narrow; however, I argue that she overlooks the fact that intimate personal communication requires an emotional attunement to context precisely because it cannot be fully scripted. To demonstrate this I turn to Cavell’s category of the passionate utterance which gestures at this dynamic dimension of performatives, but doesn’t deliver a detailed account. In this paper I will expand on Cavell’s idea of the passionate exchange in order to shed light on the active interpretive role of the audience, and how it contributes to performative success.

This paper considers Cornelius Castoriadis’s articulation of social imaginary significations with an emphasis on their link to the radical imaginary. Castoriadis wrote on social imaginary significations for more than thirty years, and his understanding of them changed significantly during this time, yet this is not reflected in debates on his work. The paper argues that there are three distinct phases in his reflections. The first phase can be dated 1964-1970. This early phase is characterized by Castoriadis’s break from Marx and subsequent settling of accounts with Marxism. Central to Castoriadis’s critique of Marx was the recognition of history (or: the social-historical) as the domain of meaning and unmotivated creation as the work of the radical imaginary. Importantly, Castoriadis also considered the intertwining of the imaginary with the symbolic, on the one hand, and with social doing, on the other. Castoriadis’s approach in this early phase can be considered phenomenological in the broad sense that Merleau-Ponty gave it in the Phenomenology of Perception. The second phase is dated 1970-1975; that is, the period in which Castoriadis wrote the second part of The Imaginary Institution of Society wherein he announced his turn to ontology. This is his most self-contained and systematic articulation of social imaginary significations. Castoriadis extends and develops his notion of magma in relation to social imaginary significations and emphasizes the social imaginary creation of a world ex nihilo as an ontological creation, whilst the radical imaginary is presented as a part of his emergent general ontology of à-être. The third ‘kaleidoscopic’ phase is dated 1976-1997 and may be understood as a period of consolidation and expansion. Although his basic understanding of social imaginary significations did not dramatically alter (although further developments are visible), his thought went in a myriad of different directions and patterns – hence kaleidoscopic — that nonetheless shaped a wider background against which his elucidation of social imaginaries were configured. His reconsideration of the sacred, the ‘ground power’ of institutions, and the development of a poly-regional ontology of the for-itself were key to this changing background. The paper will conclude with a critical engagement with the implications of the changing permutations of the imaginary element for Castoriadis’s thought.

Dr. Suzi Adams is Senior Lecturer in the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at Flinders University and permanent External Fellow at the East-Central European Institute for Philosophy, Charles University (Prague). She is a founding co-ordinating editor of the Social Imaginaries refereed journal and book series, and from October-December 2019, was an inaugural Senior Research Fellow at the Humanities Centre for Sustainable Futures at the University of Hamburg. She has published widely in the social imaginaries field, including most recently Social Imaginaries: Critical Interventions (Eds. Suzi Adams and Jeremy Smith), 2019, Rowman and Littlefield International, London. She is currently writing a monograph entitled Castoriadis and the Imaginary Element (forthcoming with Rowman and Littlefield International).

The fate of democracy is increasingly in doubt, in America and around the world. But what if the greatest danger for democratic societies comes from within? In his insightful new book, philosopher Robert B. Talisse reports that he has seen the enemy and it is us: we are overdoing democracy, making every issue a political issue and every human engagement a political interaction. If we hope to save democracy, Talisse argues, we need to put politics in its place. Please join us for this essential discussion as Talisse is joined by The Guardian columnist Oliver Burkeman.

Presented by the Gotham Philosophical Society

Co-Sponsored by the CUNY Academy for the Humanities and Sciences

Robert B. Talisse is W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. His latest book, Overdoing Democracy: Why We Must Put Politics in its Place, argues that when citizen allow their political divides to infiltrate the entirely of the social worlds, they actually erode their capacities for competent democratic citizenship.

Oliver Burkeman is a New York based columnist for The Guardian and the author of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking.