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).
According to a pervasive and widespread literature, we came, whether we want it or not, to surround our existences with all sorts of narratives: retrospective interpretations of what came before us and how we were born, anticipative stories about what is to come and what we should expect, and, most of all, restless attempts to describe what our present is made of so that we know how to make sense of it. First-person narratives occupy a central position amongst these varieties of narratives, as they give each of us a chance to provide meaning to our lives and achieve some kind of self-understanding.
Taking a resolutely opposite stance, Sartre (in)famously declared through the voice of the main character of his novel La Nausée that stories cannot but betray the lives they claim to describe, and necessarily fail to be faithful to the very experiencing of life that constitutes its specific grain and texture. In which sense is this failure a failure? In which sense must we consider it a failure, if narratives are the privileged device we use to make sense of existences in general, and ours in particular? Wouldn’t it be both tragic and ironical, from that perspective, that we live our lives in a way that remains impervious to our attempts to bring some meaning over our existence, and that first-person narratives should be regarded as fundamentally inadequate to account for life as we live it?
This paper will address these questions in light of the definition of ‘tragic irony’ that Richard Moran draws from his interpretation of Sartre, understanding tragedy as a clash between forms of significance displayed by incompatible perspectives. We will examine in particular the problem raised by first-person narratives, which conflate the seemingly incompatible perspectives of the narrator and of the character of the story. I will argue that Moran’s view fails to show in which sense the failure of first-person narratives are also, according to Sartre, the condition of their success, and that the irony of life might rely first and foremost on its ability to succeed even when and where it fails. After all, isn’t it the most ironical of it all that Sartre, notwithstanding his harsh critique of the fundamental inadequacy of life narratives, ended his literary career with the publication of his most acclaimed autobiography?
Bio:
Pierre-Jean Renaudie is Assistant Professor of philosophy (phenomenology and contemporary German philosophy) at the University of Lyon. He is the author of a book on Husserl’s theory of knowledge (Husserl et les categories. Langage, pensée et perception, Paris, Vrin, 2015), co-edited a book on phenomenology of matter (Phénoménologies de la matière, with C.V. Spaak, Paris, CNRS Editions, 2020) and published many articles, in French and in English, on the phenomenological tradition and its connection with contemporary issues in philosophy of mind. He is a member of the Institut de recherches philosophiques de Lyon (IRPHIL) and an associate member of the Husserl Archives in Paris.
In the final part of The Human Condition (1958) Hannah Arendt turns to the danger of ‘world- alienation’. Based on a variety of discoveries and evolutions that are constitutive of modernity (globalization, Protestantism, the invention of the telescope), modern man has adopted an Archimedean, external position vis-à-vis the world. According to Arendt, this ‘view from without’ has gradually jeopardized the experience of a shared world, endangering the foundation of all meaning-giving activities.
My talk can be considered as a reply to Arendt’s pessimistic account of modern ‘world-alienation’. It builds on the idea that some of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century (Ernst Jünger, Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Aby Warburg, Sigmund Freud) did not equate the loss of a shared world with the loss of meaning. Rather, the conceptual framework of a substantial part of early twentieth century German philosophy centers on the exploration of a productive opposition, negation or fragmentation of the world. From the perspective of these thinkers, the world’s ‘durability’ (Arendt) is not simply a source of shared meaning since it can be experienced as the mark of its indifference to change and renewal.
Bio:
Stéphane Symons is Full Professor of Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy of the University of Leuven, Belgium. His research is focused on interwar German thought (Frankfurt School) and postwar French philosophy (structuralism and post-structuralism).