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Advance Registration Required; RSVP details coming soon

La Maison Française is pleased to host the second symposium of Arts and Pragmatism. Join us for two days of fascinating talks and encounters at the intersection of philosophy and artistic practice under the direction of Sandra Laugier and Yann Toma.
with the support of Panthéon Sorbonne University, Politique scientifique program, Global Works and Society, Liberal Studies, and La Maison Française at New York University.

Full program details to follow.

*We are so excited to welcome the general public back to most events at La Maison Francaise of NYU. Instructions for attending events in-person will be confirmed shortly before each event. Please note that NYU requires all visitors to provide official proof (in English) that they are fully vaccinated and boosted against COVID-19. Additional details to follow.

A two-day conference on the philosophy of deep learning, organized by Ned Block (New York University), David Chalmers (New York University) and Raphaël Millière (Columbia University), and jointly sponsored by the Presidential Scholars in Society and Neuroscience program at Columbia University and the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at New York University.

About

The conference will explore current issues in AI research from a philosophical perspective, with particular attention to recent work on deep artificial neural networks. The goal is to bring together philosophers and scientists who are thinking about these systems in order to gain a better understanding of their capacities, their limitations, and their relationship to human cognition.

The conference will focus especially on topics in the philosophy of cognitive science (rather than on topics in AI ethics and safety). It will explore questions such as:

• What cognitive capacities, if any, do current deep learning systems possess?
• What cognitive capacities might future deep learning systems possess?
• What kind of representations can we ascribe to artificial neural networks?
• Could a large language model genuinely understand language?
• What do deep learning systems tell us about human cognition, and vice versa?
• How can we develop a theoretical understanding of deep learning systems?
• How do deep learning systems bear on philosophical debates such as rationalism vs empiricism and classical vs. nonclassical views of cognition.
• What are the key obstacles on the path from current deep learning systems to human-level cognition?

A pre-conference debate on Friday, March 24th will tackle the question “Do large language models need sensory grounding for meaning and understanding ?”. Speakers include Jacob Browning (New York University), David Chalmers (New York University), Yann LeCun (New York University), and Ellie Pavlick (Brown University / Google AI).

Conference speakers

• Cameron Buckner (University of Houston)
• Rosa Cao (Stanford University)
• Ishita Dasgupta (DeepMind)
• Nikolaus Kriegeskorte (Columbia University)
• Brenden Lake (New York University / Meta AI)
• Grace Lindsay (New York University)
• Tal Linzen (New York University / Google AI)
• Raphaël Millière (Columbia University)
• Nicholas Shea (Institute of Philosophy, University of London)

Call for abstracts

We invite abstract submissions for a few short talks and poster presentations related to the topic of the conference. Submissions from graduate students and early career researchers are particularly encouraged. Please send a title and abstract (500-750 words) to phildeeplearning@gmail.com by January 22nd, 2023 (11.59pm EST).

https://philevents.org/event/show/106406

Our friends from Université de Paris Panthéon-Sorbonne return for a third installment of their symposium Arts & Pragmatism: From Ordinary Aesthetics to Post Creation. 

This day-long symposium will be chaired by Yann Toma and Sandra Laugier. From the organizers:

We have noticed it during the two previous symposia of our program: the pragmatist philosophy and in particular Dewey defends the idea that aesthetics must not only be considered as the search for truths about art and its creations but also as what concerns the experience of the persons with an artwork (a sensitive and active experience). The reception would thus be the dynamic experience of an incarnated observer, acting, feeling in his senses and his affects what is the work and what it makes him feel.

The political stake of the pragmatist aesthetics is to make sure that the strong aesthetic experiences remain open and accessible to the largest public and become even a «matter of ordinary conversation». It is then a matter of thinking about shared experience as a transmission of values, an important phenomenon for the moral, political, “educational” reflection of adults» (Cavell 1979, 1981, Shusterman, Laugier 2019, 2023, Gerrits 2020). Thus, this question of pragmatism addresses societal issues that concern all audiences, not just from a broadcast/transmission perspective. By focusing on experience and agency, this way of approaching pragmatism involves the cultural audience in a broad way to the point where it engages mediums such as television and in general digital cultures.

The concept of Post-Creation, insofar as it plays a form of exteriority to an original Creation, has all its place in a world where the strong aesthetic experiences remain open and accessible to a wider public. It is a question of placing the creation beyond what is biased, in the heart of a form of Third State of the artistic act in charge of a heuristic and critical potential, towards a form extracted from the zone of influence of the world of the art as such. The idea of Post-Creation tends towards the universal that would be the fact of conceiving the creation beyond any not institutionalized academism. We will see how a possible emulation between the ordinary aesthetic and the shared experience of the Post-Creation is articulated and played, where the experience of the creation produces knowledge and transforms what is out of the specific field of perception of the art in so many new acting and reflexive spaces. In that, the influence of the artistic creation on whole sections of the society, domains of perception until now inaccessible, becomes a stake of opening which results from the transformation of a form of ordinary aesthetics in a Post-Creation freed from the aesthetic channels of the contemporary art.

Read the statement in French

Program:

10:30AM : Opening Yann Toma, Sandra Laugier and François Noudelmann

11:00AM – 1:00PM : Panel I Pragmatism and the Project of an Ordinary Aesthetics

Chair : Yann Toma

Andrew Brandel (Penn State University) From the Aesthetics of the Everyday Life to Ordinary Aesthetics.

Barbara Formis (Panthéon-Sorbonne University) Doings and redoings of the Identical.

Sandra Laugier (Panthéon-Sorbonne) Ordinary Creation and Shared Culture.

Emmanuel Kattan (Columbia University) What happens when nothing happens: Chantal Akerman, Francis Ponge, Marisa Merz and the emergence of time.

1:00PM – 3:00PM : Lunch Break

3:00PM – 6:00PM : Panel II Pragmatism, Post-Creation

Chair : Sandra Laugier

Yann Toma (Artist/Panthéon-Sorbonne University) Post-Creation, a new way of making creation

The example of L’Or bleu.

Jung Hee Choi (artist and author of «Manifest Unmanifest»)    Dream House.

Dan Thomas (United Nations Global Compact), The importance of Art and Perception in the Diplomatic Way.

Warren Neidich (Artist and Founding Director Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art) The Brain Without Organs and the Ecocene.

This event is organized with the support of Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Politique scientifique program, and La Maison Française at New York University