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.
In this talk, I will sketch a theory of skill, which puts control at the center of the account. First, I present a definition of skill that integrates several essential features of skill that are often ignored or sidelined on other theories. In the second section, I spell out how we should think of the intentions involved in skilled actions and in the third section, I discuss why deliberate practice and not just experience, repetition, or exposure is required for skill development. In the fourth section, I claim that practice produces control and go on to spell out the notion of control relevant for a theory of skill. In the final section, I briefly outline three kinds of control that develop as a result of practice and which manifest the skillfulness of skilled action. They are strategic control, attention control, and motor control.
Presented by SWIP-Analytic
Presented by SWIP-Analytic
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
The 23rd Annual CUNY Graduate Student Philosophy Conference invites graduate students to submit their work engaging with philosophical topics and traditions that consider or bridge the analytic/continental divide. The analytic/continental division typically assumes contrasting notions of what philosophy ‘is’ and what it ought to be. The divide also describes the varying methodologies employed when we practice philosophy. Whether it refers to meta-philosophical commitments or strategies used, the divide can do exactly that – divide. When concerned with the nature of philosophy and how one ought to conceive of the practice the stakes can be high; when we ask, “What counts as philosophy?” we implicitly ask, “What doesn’t ‘count’ as philosophy?” This conference aims to explore issues that need to be explored by the philosophical community at large, especially when the legitimacy of certain practices are under scrutiny. The conference also aims to create a space where we can learn to ask better questions concerning the nature of our academic practices, the traditions we draw from, the methodologies we employ, and the topics we consider.
Keynote speaker: Talia Mae Bettcher (California State University, Los Angeles)
We are particularly interested in papers from all areas of philosophy that:
- explore the meta-philosophical or sociological questions concerning the analytical/continental divide without exclusionary border-policing. Is such a divide legitimate? What has motivated this divide? What are the advantages and disadvantages of maintaining the divide? How can we bridge or dismantle the divide? Etc.
- broadly engage with the question of “what can philosophy be?” How can philosophy establish fewer borders and more bridges?
- engage with philosophers (i.e. Rorty, Badiou, Williams, etc.), philosophical topics (i.e. race, gender, coloniality, etc.), and/or traditions (i.e. critical race theory, feminist philosophy, queer theory, postcolonial/decolonial theory, etc.) that have always or currently do bridge the analytic/continental divide, again without exclusionary border-policing.
- explore the analytic/continental divide in an interdisciplinary manner drawing from sociology, critical psychology, gender studies, race studies, literature, history, the arts, etc.
The conference is committed to providing a platform for marginalized persons and topics in the discipline. In answering some of the questions presented we highly encourage papers regarding, among other topics: critical race theory, feminist philosophy, queer theory, trans philosophy, and disabilities studies. Speakers from marginalized groups in the discipline are strongly encouraged to submit. Any abstracts that aim to discredit already marginalized philosophers or philosophies are strongly discouraged.
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.