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.
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.
Ronald Dworkin’s work always spanned a wide array of topics, from the most abstract jurisprudence through the details of American constitutional law all the way over to political philosophy and theories of justice and equality. In the last decades of his life, however, Dworkin’s work flowered in ways that went beyond even this prodigious range. Though he continued his central work in the philosophy of law and constitutional theory, he also addressed issues in international law, human dignity, the philosophy of religion, the relation between ethics, morality and legal theory, and the unity of practical thought generally. This conference will explore some of these themes in Dworkin’s late work. Beginning with a panel on his understanding of religion, we will also convene discussions of his work on legal integrity, international law, and the relation between law and morality. There will be a total of nine presentations, with plenty of time for discussion. All are welcome.
Panel 1 (Friday 1:30 p.m.): Dworkin’s Religion without God.
Eric Gregory (Princeton),
Moshe Halbertal (NYU and Hebrew U.) Ronald Dworkin Religion Without God: Morality and the Transcendent
Larry Sager (Texas) Solving Religious Liberty
Panel 2 (Friday 4:30 p.m.): Dworkin on international law.
Samantha Besson (Fribourg)
The Political Legitimacy of International Law: Sovereign States and their International Institutional Order
John Tasioulas (King’s College, London)
Panel 3 (Saturday 10 a.m.): The idea of integrity in Law’s Empire.
Andrei Marmor (Cornell) Integrity in Law’s Empire
Jeremy Waldron (NYU) The Rise and Decline of Integrity
Panel 4 (Saturday 2:15 p.m.): Law and morality in Justice for Hedgehogs.
Mark Greenberg (UCLA)
What Makes a Moral Duty Legal? Dworkin’s Judicial Enforcement Theory Versus the Moral Impact Theory
Ben Zipursky (Fordham)
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.
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
Yejin Choi is Wissner-Slivka Professor and a MacArthur Fellow at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. She is also a senior director at AI2 overseeing the project Mosaic and a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford. Her research investigates if (and how) AI systems can learn commonsense knowledge and reasoning, if machines can (and should) learn moral reasoning, and various other problems in NLP, AI, and Vision including neuro-symbolic integration, language grounding with vision and interactions, and AI for social good. She is a co-recipient of 2 Test of Time Awards (at ACL 2021 and ICCV 2021), 7 Best/Outstanding Paper Awards (at ACL 2023, NAACL 2022, ICML 2022, NeurIPS 2021, AAAI 2019, and ICCV 2013), the Borg Early Career Award (BECA) in 2018, the inaugural Alexa Prize Challenge in 2017, and IEEE AI’s 10 to Watch in 2016.
The speaker will be Prof. Lewis Gordon of the University of Connecticut, on “From Harlem to the World: Philosophy from a Center of the Black World with Questions for the 21st Century.” Gordon will talk about worldliness and public aspects of philosophy, placing them in the context of Harlem both at City College and the public world of Africana philosophy from Du Bois to Malcolm X to contemporaries such as Nathalie Etoke. He will conclude with a set of questions for 21st century philosophy to consider.
Lewis R. Gordon is Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy at UCONN-Storrs; Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies; Honorary Professor in the Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes University, South Africa; and Distinguished Scholar at The Most Honourable PJ Patterson Centre for Africa-Caribbean Advocacy at The University of the West Indies, Mona. He co-edits the journal Philosophy and Global Affairs, the Rowman & Littlefield book series Global Critical Caribbean Thought, and the Routledge-India book series Academics, Politics and Society in the Post-Covid World. He is the author of many books, including, most recently, Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (Routledge, 2021) and Fear of Black Consciousness (hardcover, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022; in the UK, London: Penguin Books, 2022), Picador paperback 2023. He is the 2022 recipient of the Eminent Scholar Award from the Global Development Studies division of the International Studies Association.
Join us for a special live taping of the Clearer Thinking podcast. Host Spencer Greenberg and guest Jeff Sebo will discuss the moral status of insects and AI systems, as well as other thorny questions in global priorities research.
About the speakers
Jeff Sebo is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, Affiliated Professor of Bioethics, Medical Ethics, Philosophy, and Law, Director of the Animal Studies M.A. Program, Director of the Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program, and Co-Director of the Wild Animal Welfare Program at New York University. He is the author of Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves (2022) and co-author of Chimpanzee Rights (2018) and Food, Animals, and the Environment (2018). He is also an executive committee member at the NYU Center for Environmental and Animal Protection, a board member at Minding Animals International, an advisory board member at the Insect Welfare Research Society, a senior research fellow at the Legal Priorities Project, and a mentor at Sentient Media.
Spencer Greenberg is an entrepreneur and mathematician with a focus on improving human well-being. He’s the founder of ClearerThinking.org, which provides 70 free, digital tools to help people make better decisions and improve their lives, as well as the host of the Clearer Thinking podcast. Spencer is also the founder of Spark Wave, an organization that conducts psychology research and builds psychology-related products designed to help benefit the world. He has a Ph.D. in applied math from New York University, with a specialty in machine learning, and his work has been featured by numerous major media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, the Independent, the New York Times, Gizmodo, and more.
Thank you to Effective Altruism New York City for their generous support of this event.
Democracy is often presented as the sine qua non of politics today. Yet our own democratic political orders across the West consistently fail to deliver the desiderata they promise to provide. Does this failure arise in part from the theoretical insufficiency of conventional diagnoses of democracy’s challenges and ills? As the primaries for the 2024 U.S. presidential election open, we invite participants to consider critically the status of democracy with an eye toward the concerns that have defined Telos over its 55-year history.
The main advantage of democracy over other political forms is that, by allowing broader participation in decision-making, it prevents domination of the many by the few. In theory, it also fosters decision-making that is comparatively effective and meaningful by allowing views and information from the many to be communicated efficiently to political leaders, while also holding the latter to account for their actions. At the same time, a major difficulty of democracy is that the rule by the many requires some procedure for translating a multitude of opinions into unified decisions and action. In addition, precisely by exercising its majority will, the many can trammel the integrity of the individual—the key threat that liberalism seeks to hold at bay.
These advantages—and, especially, these challenges—have produced two competing visions of democracy in the contemporary West. Their division reflects differences about the politics of representation and decision-making. On one hand, liberals view democracy as the following of appropriate procedures for channeling the opinions of the multitude through the election of representatives. On the other hand, populists might disregard such procedural restrictions to arrive at outcomes that are acclaimed by the people directly.
While both sides nod to the importance of the popular will, both are in fact willing to denigrate it. The liberal camp reacts in horror when democratic elections result in the election of populists, who are said to lack proper governing expertise, as in the 2016 victory of Donald Trump. The populist camp charges conspiracy when electoral results fail to reflect their own conception of the people’s will, as in Trump’s reaction to his 2020 ouster. Depending on which camp is describing the times, the false mediator of popular will is either the demagogue or the bureaucrat—Telos has long opposed both.
Different narratives, in turn, have taken hold about democracy’s present challenges. From the point of view of the liberal proceduralist critique of demagogues, the means of moving from a multiplicity of opinions to a unified decision inevitably involves discourse within a public sphere. This discourse depends on a common understanding of historical facts, as well as a public sphere that allows different perspectives to face each other in debate. In our contemporary world, however, the breakdown of previous limits to accessing the public sphere has led to an inability to arrive at a consensus on the difference between fact and fiction, as well as an increasing tendency of citizens to exist within a social media echo chamber of their own views, undermining the common ground that a public sphere presupposes.
At the same time, public debate necessarily implicates values and identities that have an ultimately mythic basis that cannot be rationally determined. People’s opinions, moreover, are invariably shaped by leaders as much as the people shape what leaders ought to do. Experts lament how this representational dynamic undermines the procedures that govern and channel the representation of the popular will. Yet the narrative aspect of representation is an ineradicable element of the way in which the popular will coalesces. The process of narrativized representation will never be an entirely rational one, and the prominence of media personalities such as Reagan, Trump, and Zelensky as politicians underlines the futility of attempting to rid the public sphere of drama and spectacle.
For the populist, by contrast, the primary threat to democracy lies in bureaucracy. In his 2016 end run around the political establishment, Trump’s electoral success was driven by a broader critique of the administrative state’s undermining of democratic process. The rise of the managerial bureaucratic state that was set in motion by the development of the welfare state in the twentieth century has created a class divide between managers and managed that has shifted decision-making power over the conditions of everyday life away from individuals and toward government and corporate bureaucracies. Because more and more of our economic and social welfare is under the direct influence of the state, the resultant bloated administrative state has now become prey to a frenzy of lobbyists, who further distance the people from political decision-making. The protections of minority rights that constitute the liberal aspect of today’s democracies have turned communities into special interests that lobby administrators to pass on privileges to favored groups. The result has been a growing restriction of freedom of expression in the public sphere and an eroding of a unifying basis for constructing a political order now dominated by the collusion of bureaucracy with corporations.
While the liberal critique of demagoguery resorts to more government controls that exacerbate the expansion of bureaucracy, the populist critique of bureaucracy has attempted to dismantle government without considering how to establish mechanisms that would take over the functions that bureaucracies have coopted. Focusing on opposition to government, the populist perspective often lacks any sense of alternative institutional structures that could remedy the administration and commodification of everyday life.
Both sides have contributed to a polarization of views that threatens the underlying consensus necessary for democratic politics. The political gridlock that has ensued from their diverging diagnoses has meant that our political orders consistently fail to deliver peace, prosperity, and accountable government. Moreover, regardless of the rhetoric or credentials of those in power, democracy today seems always to leave us with broadly the same basic policies, despite some of them being deeply unpopular.
We invite those who are interested in presenting at the 2024 Telos Conference to consider critically the status of democracy today by addressing one or more of the following questions:
Democratic Values
- Does democracy have a value of its own independent of its practical consequences?
- What kinds of basic agreements on principles are necessary to maintain a democracy?
- Is there a limit to diversity in a democracy?
- To what extent is polarization itself a threat to democracy?
- What is the relationship between democracy and liberalism?
Democracy and the Administrative State
- To what extent is the consistent reality of all self-styled “democracies” of the world today a form of managerial governance that resists change from below?
- What role is left in an age of managerialism for the popular will?
- Might the appropriate response to managerialism not be more democracy, both at the level of the state but also inside corporate and workplace structures, e.g., through workers’ self-management?
Democracy and the Public Sphere
- What is the role of representation in a democracy, and how do today’s representational processes threaten democratic decision-making?
- How have social media and artificial intelligence changed the way in which democratic processes function, and what changes to these processes might be necessary in the future to accommodate these new technological developments?
- To what extent and in what ways does the public sphere function in today’s democracies? What kinds of limitations are necessary to guarantee the functioning of the public sphere as a space for democratic debate and decision-making?
Democracy and Religion
- What role is there for religion in today’s democracies?
- To what extent does either secularization or religion pose a threat to democracy?
Democracy and Authoritarianism
- What is the relationship between democracy and authoritarianism? Do the current ills of democracy promote a global shift toward authoritarian government?
- What are the key components of democracy that differentiate it from authoritarianism? Where do countries such as Hungary, Turkey, India, and Russia fall on the continuum from democracy to authoritarianism?
Abstract Submissions
Whatever specific questions you address, we invite you to present your analysis with an eye toward the long-standing concerns of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute and thereby to help develop a trenchant, independent view of democracy that can inform both critique and practical action within our present historical moment. Please submit a short c.v. and an abstract of up to 250 words by October 15, 2023, to telosnyc2024@telosinstitute.net and place “The 2024 Telos Conference” in the email’s subject line. Please direct questions to Professor Mark G. E. Kelly, Western Sydney University, M.Kelly@westernsydney.edu.au.
Conference Location
The conference will take place at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute in New York City from Friday, March 22, to Saturday, March 23, 2024.