What does a philosopher look like? Inevitably, our mental pictures are shaped by the dominant imagery of the white male marble busts of Greco-Roman antiquity—Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca—and their modern European heirs—Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Mill. Even today Western philosophy is largely male and overwhelmingly white—about 97 percent in the U.S., close to 100 percent in Europe. Diversifying the field requires expanding our corporeal imaginary of its practitioners. This conference, timed to honor Professor Anita Allen-Castellitto (Penn), the first black female President in the 100-year-plus history of the American Philosophical Association, aims to showcase the work of a traditionally under-represented population, challenging these preconceptions. Allen and fifteen other black women will speak on their research across a wide variety of philosophical topics.
ORGANIZED BY:
Charles W. Mills & Linda Martín Alcoff
LIST OF SPEAKERS
Anita Allen-Castellitto, University of Pennsylvania
Kathryn Belle, Penn State University
Emmalon Davis, New School for Social Research
Nathifa Greene, Gettysburg College
Devonya Havis, Canisius College
Janine Jones, University of North Carolina Greensboro
Axelle Karera, Wesleyan University
Michele Moody-Adams, Columbia University
Mickaella Perina, University of Massachusetts Boston
Camisha Russell, University of Oregon
Jackie Scott, Loyola University Chicago
Kris Sealey, Fairfield University
Jameliah Shorter-Bourhanou, Georgia College, College of the Holy Cross
Anika Simpson, Morgan State University
Briana Toole, CUNY Baruch College
Yolonda Wilson, Howard University
Stay tuned for schedule details!
Hosted by: The Center for the Humanities and the PhD Program in Philosophy at the The Graduate Center, CUNY.
Co-sponsored by: The American Philosophical Association Committee on the Status of Black Philosophers, and the Advanced Research Collaborative at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
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Free and open to the public, but please register for Friday, March 15th here:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/black-women-philosophers-conference-day-1-march-15th-2019-registration-56225763773
Please register for Saturday, March 16th here:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/black-women-philosophers-conference-day-2-march-16th-2019-registration-56225886139
The venue is wheel-chair accessible.
To download a PDF version of the flyer, click here.
Propositional dynamic logic (PDL) is a framework for reasoning about nondeterministic program executions (or, more generally, nondeterministic actions). In this setting, nondeterminism is taken as a primitive: a program is nondeterministic iff it has multiple possible outcomes. But what is the sense of “possibility” at play here? This talk explores an epistemic interpretation: working in an enriched logical setting, we represent nondeterminism as a relationship between a program and an agent deriving from the agent’s (in)ability to adequately measure the dynamics of the program execution. More precisely, using topology to capture the observational powers of an agent, we define the nondeterministic outcomes of a given program execution to be those outcomes that the agent is unable to rule out in advance. In this framework, determinism coincides exactly with continuity: that is, determinism is continuity in the observation topology. This allows us to embed PDL into (dynamic) topological (subset space) logic, laying the groundwork for a deeper investigation into the epistemology (and topology) of nondeterminism.
The seminar is concerned with applying formal methods to fundamental issues, with an emphasis on probabilistic reasoning, decision theory and games. In this context “logic” is broadly interpreted as covering applications that involve formal representations. The topics of interest have been researched within a very broad spectrum of different disciplines, including philosophy (logic and epistemology), statistics, economics, and computer science. The seminar is intended to bring together scholars from different fields of research so as to illuminate problems of common interest from different perspectives. Throughout each academic year, meetings are regularly presented by the members of the seminar and distinguished guest speakers.
details tba
02/08/2019 Faculty House, Columbia University
4:00 PM
03/29/2019 Faculty House, Columbia University
4:00 PM
04/19/2018 Faculty House, Columbia University
4:00 PM
Convergence to the truth is viewed with some ambivalence in philosophy of science. On the one hand, methods of inquiry that lead to the truth in the limit are prized as marks of scientific rationality. But an agent who, by using some method, expects to always converge to the truth seems to fail a minimum standard of epistemic modesty. This point was recently brought home by Gordon Belot in his critique of Bayesian epistemology. In this paper I will study convergence to the truth theorems within the framework of Edward Nelson’s radically elementary probability theory. This theory provides an enriched conceptual framework for investigating convergence and gives rise to an appropriately modest from of Bayesianism.
The seminar is concerned with applying formal methods to fundamental issues, with an emphasis on probabilistic reasoning, decision theory and games. In this context “logic” is broadly interpreted as covering applications that involve formal representations. The topics of interest have been researched within a very broad spectrum of different disciplines, including philosophy (logic and epistemology), statistics, economics, and computer science. The seminar is intended to bring together scholars from different fields of research so as to illuminate problems of common interest from different perspectives. Throughout each academic year, meetings are regularly presented by the members of the seminar and distinguished guest speakers.
details tba
02/08/2019 Faculty House, Columbia University
4:00 PM
03/22/2019 Faculty House, Columbia University
4:00 PM
04/19/2018 Faculty House, Columbia University
4:00 PM
A Sue Weinberg Series Lecture in honor of EILEEN O’NEILL(1953-2017)
EILEEN O’NEILL(1953-2017) was a professor of philosophy at University of Massachusetts at Amherst and one of the founding members of New York Society for Women in Philosophy (NYSWIP).
KAREN DETLEFSEN, University of Pennsylvania, professor of philosophy and education, will present “Feminist Historiography: Genre, Method, and the Scope of Philosophy.”
ALLAUREN FORBES, doctoral candidate at University of Pennsylvania, will serve as commentator.
GARY OSTERTAG, professor of philosophy at CUNY Graduate Center and Nassau Community College, will speak about Eileen O’Neill.
JULIE ZILBERBERG, CUNY Graduate Center PhD, will moderate the discussion.
This event will be held at the Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue (34th Street). It is free and open to the public. For more information see the Women’s Studies website: http://www.gc.cuny.edu/womencenter/
About this Event
Wednesday, September 11, 2019 6:15 – 8:45 pm at Columbia University
With Professor Amy Allen and Bernard E. Harcourt
Readings include:
Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, 76-100. New York, Pantheon Books, 1984.
_____. “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx.” In The Essential Works of Michel Foucault: Power, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al., 277-278. New York: New Press, 2000.
Harcourt, Bernard E., “The Illusion of Influence: On Foucault, Nietzsche, and a Fundamental Misunderstanding” (May 24, 2019). Columbia Public Law Research Paper No. 14-627 (2019). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3393827
These events are free and open to the public. Please RSVP.
The syllabus is available here.
September 20: Matthias Michel
Philosophy and Laboratoire Sciences, Université Paris-Sorbonne and NYU
“Consciousness and the Prefrontal Cortex”
October 4: Ryan McElhaney
Cognitive Science and Philosophy, CUNY Graduate Center
“Explanation and Consciousness”
October 18: Sascha Benjamin Fink
Philosophy-Neurosciences-Cognition, University of Magdeburg and NYU
“Varieties of Phenomenal Structuralism”
November 1: Jesse Atencio
Cognitive Science and Philosophy, CUNY Graduate Center
Title TBA
November 15: Frank Pupa
Philosophy, Nassau Community College
“Getting Between: Predicativism, Domain Restriction, and Binding”
December 6: Susana Martinez-Conde
Neurology and Integrative Neuroscience, Downstate Medical Center
Title TBA
https://philosophy.commons.gc.cuny.edu/cognitive-speaker-series-fall-2019/
This essay tries to develop a “black radical Kantianism” – that is, a Kantianism informed by the black experience in modernity. After looking briefly at socialist and feminist appropriations of Kant, I argue that an analogous black radical appropriation should draw on the distinctive social ontology and view of the state associated with the black radical tradition. In ethics, this would mean working with a (color-conscious rather than colorblind) social ontology of white persons and black sub-persons and then asking what respect for oneself and others would require under those circumstances. In political philosophy, it would mean framing the state as a Rassenstaat (a racial state) and then asking what measures of corrective justice would be necessary to bring about the ideal Rechtsstaat.
Response by César Cabezas Gamarra.
Presented by the German Idealism Workshop
About this Event
Wednesday, September 25, 2019 6:15-8:45 pm at Columbia University
Professor Axel Honneth and Bernard E. Harcourt discussing the early Frankfurt School, specifically Max Horkheimer’s 1937 essay, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” and Theodor Adorno’s 1931 essay, “The Actuality of Philosophy.”
This event is co-sponsored by the Columbia Maison Française.
Readings include:
Horkheimer, Max. “Traditional and Critical Theory, in Horkheimer, Max. Critical Theory: Selected Essays. New York: Continuum, 1992.
Adorno, Theodor W. “The Actuality of Philosophy.” Telos 1997, no. 31 (1997): 120-133.
These events are free and open to the public. Please RSVP.
The syllabus is available here.
September 20: Matthias Michel
Philosophy and Laboratoire Sciences, Université Paris-Sorbonne and NYU
“Consciousness and the Prefrontal Cortex”
October 4: Ryan McElhaney
Cognitive Science and Philosophy, CUNY Graduate Center
“Explanation and Consciousness”
October 18: Sascha Benjamin Fink
Philosophy-Neurosciences-Cognition, University of Magdeburg and NYU
“Varieties of Phenomenal Structuralism”
November 1: Jesse Atencio
Cognitive Science and Philosophy, CUNY Graduate Center
Title TBA
November 15: Frank Pupa
Philosophy, Nassau Community College
“Getting Between: Predicativism, Domain Restriction, and Binding”
December 6: Susana Martinez-Conde
Neurology and Integrative Neuroscience, Downstate Medical Center
Title TBA
https://philosophy.commons.gc.cuny.edu/cognitive-speaker-series-fall-2019/
Presented by SWIP-Analytic