STEFAN BERNARD BAUMRIN was a husband, father, philosopher, lawyer, colleague, teacher, and friend. As a professional philosopher, Baumrin wrote sparingly, but incisively, on moral and political philosophy, medical ethics, the history of philosophy, and on matters of both theoretical and practical import. We, his students, colleagues, and most importantly friends, celebrate his memory with this symposium on his philosophy.
THE PROGRAM
Welcome
Professors David Rosenthal and Manfred Philipp
Session I
I. “Baumrin’s Hobbes”: Rosamond Rhodes
II. “A possibility for Moore’s Faulty Fallacy” Mark Sheehan
Discussion
Break (Light Refreshments)
Session II
I.“Baumrin on Autonomy” Katherine Mendis
II. “‘Physician, Stay Thy Hand!’ Revisited” Kyle Ferguson
III. “Our Immorality” Joseph S. Biehl
Discussion
Farewell
PARTICIPANTS
DAVID ROSENTHAL, PhD, is professor of philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center, and Coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Concentration in Cognitive Science there. He taught at Lehman College from 1971 to 2009. He works mainly in philosophy of mind.
MANFRED PHILIPP, PhD, is professor emeritus at the CUNY Graduate Center and at Lehman College. He was Chair of CUNY’s University Faculty Senate, and member of the CUNY Board of Trustees and of the CUNY Research Foundation Board of Directors. He was President of the CUNY Academy for the Humanities & Sciences, Board President of the Fulbright Association in Washington, and President of the US Alumni Association for the German Academic Exchange Service. At Lehman College he was a Department Chair and Chapter Chair of the Professional Staff Congress of CUNY. He currently serves as a Trustee of the Belle Zeller Scholarship Fund for CUNY.
ROSAMOND RHODES, PhD, is Professor of Medical Education and Director of Bioethics Education at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Professor of Philosophy at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and Professor of Bioethics and Associate Director of the Clarkson-Mount Sinai Bioethics Program. She writes on a broad array of issues in bioethics and has published more than 200 papers and chapters. She is co-editor of The Human Microbiome: Ethical, Legal and Social Concerns (Oxford University Press, 2013), The Blackwell Guide to Medical Ethics (Blackwell, 2007), Medicine and Social Justice: Essays on the Distribution of Health Care (Oxford University Press, first edition 2002; second edition 2012), Physician Assisted Suicide: Expanding the Debate (Routledge, 1998), and the author of the forthcoming monograph, The Trusted Doctor: Medical Ethics and Professionalism (Oxford University Press, 2019). Professor Rhodes also serves on the editorial board of the journal Hobbes Studies and as Sovereign of the International Hobbes Association (2013-2018).
MARK SHEEHAN, PhD, leads the Oxford Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) Ethics Group and is Oxford BRC Ethics Fellow at the Ethox Centre in the Nuffield Department of Population Health, University of Oxford. He is Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at St. Benet’s Hall and a Research Fellow at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics also in the University of Oxford. He is currently a member of the NICE’s Highly Specialised Technology Evaluation Committee, a member of the Health Research Authority’s National Research Ethics Advisors Panel, a member of the Thames Valley Healthcare Priorities Forum and Co-leader of the Ethical Analysis of Key Concepts GECiP sub-domain in the 100K Genome Project. He was a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics Working Party on research in children, a member of the Royal College of General Practitioners Ethics Committee and an Associate Editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics.
KATHERINE MENDIS is a doctoral candidate in the philosophy program at the CUNY Graduate Center and a Clinical Professor of Bioethics at the CUNY School of Medicine, where she serves on the St. Barnabas Hospital Ethics Committee. She has also been an Ethics Fellow at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai for several years. She founded and for many years administered the CUNY Graduate Center Philosophy Program’s NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament pool, in which Stefan Baumrin was the only faculty participant.
KYLE FERGUSON is a PhD candidate in philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. He also teaches philosophy at Hunter College, CUNY, and medical ethics at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He will soon defend his dissertation, “Metaethical Intentionalism and the Intersubjectivity of Morals,” a project he began with Stefan Baumrin and is completing under the supervision of Jesse Prinz. This summer, he begins a postdoctoral fellowship at the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU School of Medicine.
JOSEPH S. BIEHL, PhD, is the founder and Executive Director of the Gotham Philosophical Society, Inc., a non-profit organization that uses philosophy to transform the civil, political, and educational institutions of New York City. Through its youth program, Young Philosophers of New York, it encourages elementary, middle, high school students to think critically, imaginatively, and normatively about their lives and the city they call home. Stefan Baumrin, who supervised Biehl’s dissertation, “The Ways of Wrongdoing: The Cognitivist’s Conundrum,” served on the Gotham Philosophical Society’s Board of Directors. Dr. Biehl is the co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of the City (Routledge, 2019).
Our next meeting will be on September 6 and we will go over Christian List’s survey article on Social Choice from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Presented by SWIP-Analytic
Presented by the Center for Global Ethics & Politics, The Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies
Andrea Sangiovanni, European University Institute
Please R.S.V.P.
The City University of New York, Graduate Center, is hosting its second Emotion Workshop. This semester, we are profiling the work of local scholars and visitors to New York. Topics relate to mind, social philosophy, epistemology, aesthetics, experimental philosophy, and psychology. The workshop will be 1 day long. Participants should not feel obligated to attend every session, but we do ask you to RSVP (this is to make sure everyone is allowed Saturday building access). If you think there is a chance you will join us for any part of the day, please send your name to Sarah Arnaud, postdoc in the Philosophy Program and co-organizer: sarnaud@gc.cuny.edu
PROGRAM
10:00-10:15 Introduction
10:15-11:00 Jesse Prinz (CUNY, Philosophy), “Are emotions socially constructed?”
11:00-11:15 Break
11:15-12:00 Rodrigo Díaz (Bern, Philosophy), “Folk emotion concepts”
12:00-12:45 Juliette Vazard (NYU / Institut Jean Nicod, Paris / University of Geneva), “Epistemic anxiety”
12:45-2:15 Break (lunch)
2:15-3:00 S. Arnaud & K. Pendoley (CUNY, Philosophy), “Intentionalism and the understanding of emotion experience”
3:00-3:15 Break
3:15-4:00 Jonathan Gilmore (CUNY, Philosophy), “Emotion, absorption, and experiential imagining”
4:00-4:45 Jordan Wylie (CUNY, Psychology), “Investigating the influences of emotion on object recognition”
4:45-6:00 Reception
Is feminism in crisis? Recently, in the United States and abroad, historic events rendered ever more precarious the lives and well-being of people marginalized by their sex, gender, race, and class, often in complexly intersecting and regionally specific ways. The rise of right-wing populism transnationally and attacks on reproductive rights, for example, exacerbate the challenges feminists confront. At the same time, as external conditions shift, feminism’s own faultlines continue to deepen. Feminism’s rising trans-exclusionary contingent, certain feminists’ hesitancy to reckon with complicity in racial and colonial violence, and the ongoing cooptation of feminism by neoliberalism signal serious internal fractures.
As feminism faces external and internal pressures, how can philosophy help us understand this moment of potential crisis and what, if anything, can philosophy do to address it? To devise answers to these urgent questions, we welcome contributions that focus on:
1. The relation between feminism and philosophy, including how feminism should intervene in philosophical debates, and how philosophy should intervene in feminist debates;
2. Questions concerning the nature and practice of gender, sex, sexuality, race, class, and disability that draw on feminist literatures or methodologies;
3. Perspectives that integrate different feminist traditions to build intersectional and transnational feminist coalitions;
4. Analyses of discourses on sex, gender, sexuality, race, class, and disability in media, law, and the sciences;
5. Translating feminist views on sex, gender, sexuality, race, class, and disability into public policy and social advocacy.
We welcome contributions from scholars working in philosophy and who draw on a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Scholars of all identities, especially those from groups underrepresented and/or marginalized in academia, are encouraged to submit contributions.
Please send anonymized abstracts of up to 500 words to cunygc.philosophy.conference@gmail.com, along with any questions you may have. The deadline for submissions is September 7th.
Keynote Speakers
Joel Kotkin, Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange, California, and author of The New Class Conflict
Michael Lind, Professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, and author of The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite
Schedule and Registration
The event will take place from 3 pm to 6 pm on October 14 and from 9 am to 5 pm on October 15. The registration rate is $100 for both days and includes a reception on October 14 and lunch on October 15. Click here to register for the event.
Event Description
In the last fifteen years, the discussion of class has shifted with the rise of the Tea Party and then Trumpism in the United States. Whereas the notion of class used to be a left-wing category championed by socialists, Marxists, and anarchists, the critique of class division has now shifted to right-wing denunciations of the managerial class. This shift toward a populist politics targeting the new class has long been a topic of discussion in Telos, starting with the classic 1975 essay by Alvin Gouldner “Prologue to a Theory of Revolutionary Intellectuals” (in Telos 26) and continuing through Paul Piccone’s work in the early 1990s in essays such as “The Crisis of Liberalism and the Emergence of Federal Populism” (in Telos 89) and “Postmodern Populism” (in Telos 103). A search of the Telos archive will uncover literally hundreds of essays that address various aspects of this issue. The recent popularizing of the critique of the new class has led to a conflict between the liberal pursuit of redistributive policies and the expansion of the welfare state, on the one hand, and the populist attempt to disempower governmental managerial elites and dismantle the welfare state, on the other hand. How is the underlying notion of class being defined by the different parties to this debate? What are the political possibilities, both on the left and on the right, that can emerge from the conflict? Is this conflict leading to a new kind of civil war, or can we envision new solutions?
In addition to engaging with these questions, our event will feature Telos editors, who will discuss the past and current trajectories of Telos as well as Telos 200, devoted to the place of truth at the university.
Telos has always had a conflicted relationship with universities. On the one hand, university academics have constituted the primary audience and contributors to Telos. On the other hand, Telos has always maintained a distance from university structures, precisely because of the tie between universities and the managerial class, and previous special issues in Telos 81 and Telos 111 have attempted to address this problem.
Today, the situation of universities has become more dire than ever. Trapped between the pressure to provide job training on the one hand and political advocacy on the other hand, the idea of a search for truth sounds hopelessly naive as a description of the task of colleges and universities today. Matching the shift of our society toward technocratic and managerial solutions to problems, the natural and social sciences have become recognized authorities based on their claim to being scientific. Yet the authority of “science” is misleading in the sense that science never has straightforward answers but relies on a method of constant questioning. Science itself cannot be counted on to make policy decisions but can only provide relevant information for decision makers. Recent pieces in TelosScope by Russell Berman and Mathieu Slama address this issue by looking at the way pandemic policies were dominated by an ideology of “following the science” that amounted to an abdication of democratic decision-making.
Meanwhile, university discussion and debate about decision-making, traditionally the place of the humanities and social sciences, have been suppressed in favor of a focus on political engagement. The range of perspectives available for discussion has been reduced, to the exclusion of those views that might challenge the technocratic bias and the reduction of politics to identity politics that have become dominant at universities.
This narrowing of perspectives has also undermined the research project of the university. The exclusion of relevant perspectives in university debates has degraded the peer review process in the social sciences and the humanities, maintaining an orthodoxy that favors the reinforcement of previously held views rather than the challenging of such views. Such research can then be cited as the “scientific” basis for a set of policy prescriptions that have been agreed upon in advance. Where Max Weber once lamented the transformation of the lecture hall into a pulpit, it is difficult today for academics to avoid the pressure to either conform to a particular political perspective or, in rejecting such politicization, to be forced into an “obstructionist” camp.
In the midst of these developments, what is the status of the idea of truth? Will truth necessarily remain subordinate to politics? How might the search for truth remain a focus of colleges and universities?
In addressing these questions, the 200th issue of Telos features contributions by Joseph W. Bendersky, Russell Berman, Valerie J. D’Erman, J. E. Elliott, Wayne Hudson, Michael Hüther, Mark G. E. Kelly, Tim Luke, Richard T. Marcy, Greg Melleuish, David Pan, Susanna Rizzo, and David Westbrook.
If you have any questions about the event, please contact us at telos200@telosinstitute.net.
Our speakers will be Karen Lewis (Columbia), Sam Berstler (MIT), Ray Buchanan (Texas/Austin), and Elmar Unnsteinsson (UC Dublin and U of Iceland). We will post titles and abstracts for their talks, along with a schedule of who is speaking when, soon.
If you are not a faculty or student at CUNY, you will have to RSVP for the event at this URL, no later than Monday, November 14th:
https://forms.gle/KN3YJNaCs5yHPtBP7
Please also be prepared to show proof of vaccination when you enter the building.
11:00 – 11:30
Opening Remarks
11:40 – 1:00
Literature and Social Knowledge
1:00 – 2:00
Lunch
2:00 – 3:20
Labor and Power
3:30 – 4:50
The Necessity of Philosophy
5:00 – 6:20
Knowledge Factories
6:30 – 8:00
Closing Remarks and Reception
Speakers:
Peter Bratsis – CUNY
B. Ricardo Brown – Pratt Institute
Michael Denning – Yale
Michael Ferlise – Hudson Community College
Barbara Foey – Rutgers University Newark
Bruno Gulli – CUNY
Josh Kolbo – Institute for the Radical Imagination
Kristin Lawler – College of Mt. St. Vincent
Andrew Long – Claremont College
Michael Menser – CUNY
Immanuel Ness – CUNY
Michael Pelias – LIU – Brooklyn
Sohnya Sayers – Cooper Union
David van Arsdale – Syracuse University
Cornel West – Union Theological Seminary
David Winters – Rutgers University
Richard Wolff – New School
Ivan Zatz – Pratt institute
Sponsored by the MA Program in Liberal Studies: https://goo.gl/Qz8tLP
Co-sponsored by the Institute for the Radical Imagination: https://radicalimagination.info
For more information: pbratsis@bmcc.cuny.edu
This talk will develop the idea that racial identities are best understood as formed through large scale historical events, and that this genesis can only be obscured by disavowals of racial categories as conceptually mistaken and inevitably morally pernicious. In this sense, races are formed not simply as ideas, or ideologies and policies, as many social constructivists about race argue, but as forms of life with associated patterns of subjectivity including, as a wealth of social psychology has shown, presumptive attitudes and behavioral dispositions (Jeffers 2019; Steele 2010; Sullivan 2005). Because they are historical formations, racial identities are thoroughly social, contextual, variegated internally, and dynamic. It is history that will alter them, not merely policy changes.