Over the last decades, the humanities have come under pressure from the scientific worldview. To many, it seems as if the humanities provide us at best with less-than-objective knowledge claims. Arguably, there are at least two overall reasons for this. On the one hand, the scientific worldview tends to associate objectivity with the kind of knowledge-acquisition, explanation, and justification characteristic of the natural sciences. On the other hand, the humanities themselves have contributed to the impression that they might be less relevant than the natural sciences to epistemic progress due to internal problems having to do with the very concept(s) of knowledge, reality and objectivity.
New Realism is a term for a whole series of current trends in philosophy that has important consequences for our understanding of knowledge in general. In particular, it reshapes our account of the human being qua source and object of knowledge claims. In this context, New Realism draws on a crucial indispensability thesis: we simply cannot eliminate the standpoint from which humans gather information about human and non-human reality alike from our account of reality itself. In light of this thesis, it turns out that the humanities are fully-fledged contributions to objective knowledge about reality – a fact we cannot ignore without succumbing to illusion. Against this background, the talk concludes that the so-called “scientific worldview” is untenable: it is built upon a denial of knowledge we actually possess, and so, by not being scientific enough, it fails to respect its own premises.
About the speaker:
Markus Gabriel holds the chair in epistemology, modern and contemporary philosophy at the University of Bonn. He is the director of the International Center for Philosophy and the multidisciplinary Center for Science and Thought. With Jocelyn Benoist he also directs Bonn-Paris Center for Research on New Realisms. His work focuses on contemporary philosophy, in particular epistemology and ontology, in an attempt to spell out the consequences of various trends in philosophy in a conversation with the humanities. Currently, he is working on a book called Fictions which deals with topics at the intersection of philosophy, literary studies and sociology.
The NYU Department of German and Deutsches Haus at NYU present “Objectivity and the Humanities – Prospects for a New Realism,” a talk by Professor Markus Gabriel.
Attendance information:
Events at Deutsches Haus are free of charge. If you would like to attend this event, please send us an email to deutscheshaus.rsvp@nyu.edu. Space at Deutsches Haus is limited; please arrive ten minutes prior to the event. Thank you!
“Objectivity and the Humanities – Prospects for a New Realism” is a DAAD-supported event.
This talk explores the reflexive nature of consciousness, which consists primarily in the fact that a state of consciousness has a reflexive relation to the subject who has that state, so that the subject can typically be aware of itself as having that state. Comparing Kant’s, Fichte’s, and selected contemporary analytic theories of this reflexivity shows that there is a crucial difference in the way the relation between form (or mode) and content of a state of consciousness is conceived. The first part examines Kant’s formal theory of consciousness: reflexivity is understood not in terms of a self-referential content resulting from a reflection on the state of the subject, but as the universal transcendental form that any content must have in order to be representationally significant and potentially conscious to the subject. The second part examines Fichte’s departure from Kant in his theory of a self-positing consciousness: in the original act of self-positing, the mere form of reflexivity is turned into a self-referential content that determines the subject as an object from the absolute standpoint of consciousness. The third part examines analytic theories that explain the reflexivity (or what is often called the subjective character) of consciousness on a model of mental indexicality. These theories tend to reduce reflexivity to an objective constituent of content that, although often implicit, can be read off from the subject’s contextual situatedness in nature. In conclusion, Kant’s theory can be understood as a moderate, human-centered kind of perspectivism that navigates between Fichtean absolute subjectivity and a naturalist absolute objectivity.
Registration is free but required. A registration link will be shared via email with our department mailing lists a few weeks before the event. Please contact Jack Mikuszewski at jhm378@nyu.edu if you did not receive a registration link.
The Philosophy Department provides reasonable accommodations to people with disabilities. Requests for accommodations should be submitted to philosophy@nyu.edu at least two weeks before the event.
The Department of German at NYU and Deutsches Haus at NYU present a lecture by Professor Elisabeth Bronfen, who will speak on “Serial Reading as a Hermeneutic Practice,” in which Bronfen will discuss “serial reading” as a way of exploring variations and transformations within a given oeuvre. To do so, she will present the theoretical and methodological underpinning of her newest monograph Shakespeare and his Serial Configurations, which will appear with S. Fischer Verlag early 2025. Bronfen’s aim is, on the one hand, toillustrate what it means to read an oeuvre for the repetition and differences regarding the aesthetic, philosophical, psychological and cultural concerns it addresses for our contemporary moment. On the other hand, her concern is using critical terms taken from Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud and Stanley Cavell to expand on our current discussion of seriality as a theme of and as an ordering principle for critical reading.
To RSVP for in-person attendance, please click here.
About the participant:
Elisabeth Bronfen is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Zurich and, since 2007, Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. She completed her habilitation at the University of Munich on representations of femininity and death. Her areas of specialization include gender studies, psychoanalysis, visual culture, and television seriality. She published Obsession. The Cultural Critic’s Life in the Kitchen with Rutgers University Press, and Serial Shakespeare. An Infinite Variety of Appropriations in American TV Drama with Manchester University Press. Her debut novel Händler der Geheimnisse appeared with Limmat Verlag in September 2023.
Attendance information:
To RSVP for in-person attendance, please click here.
“Elisabeth Bronfen’s Serial Reading as a Hermeneutic Practice,” is funded by the DAAD from funds of the German Federal Foreign Office (AA).
Deutsches Haus at NYU presents a reading of Karl Marx’s Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 (Princeton University Press, 2024) and a conversation with the book’s editor Paul North (Yale University) and translator Paul Reitter (Ohio State University), which will be moderated by Emily Apter (NYU). The first new English translation in fifty years – and the only one based on the last German edition revised by Marx himself – produces a critical edition of Capital for our time, one that faithfully preserves the vitality and directness of Marx’s German prose and renders his ideas newly relevant to modern readers.
Please RSVP for in-person attendance here.
About the book:
Karl Marx (1818–1883) was living in exile in England when he embarked on an ambitious, multivolume critique of the capitalist system of production. Though only the first volume saw publication in Marx’s lifetime, it would become one of the most consequential books in history. This magnificent new edition of Capital is a translation of Marx for the twenty-first century. It is the first translation into English to be based on the last German edition revised by Marx himself, the only version that can be called authoritative, and it features extensive commentary and annotations by Paul North and Paul Reitter that draw on the latest scholarship and provide invaluable perspective on the book and its complicated legacy. At once precise and boldly readable, this translation captures the momentous scale and sweep of Marx’s thought while recovering the elegance and humor of the original source.
For Marx, our global economic system is relentlessly driven by “value”—to produce it, capture it, trade it, and, most of all, to increase it. Lifespans are shortened under the demand for ever-greater value. Days are lengthened, work is intensified, and the division of labor deepens until it leaves two classes, owners and workers, in constant struggle for life and livelihood. In Capital, Marx reveals how value came to tyrannize our world, and how the history of capital is a chronicle of bloodshed, colonization, and enslavement.
About the participants:
Emily Apter (moderator) is Silver Professor of French and Comparative Literature at New York University. Her books include: Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse and the Impolitic (Verso, 2018); Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (2013); Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (co-edited with Barbara Cassin, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood) (2014); and The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006). The current project What is Just Translation? takes up questions of racial justice, reparative translation, and the limits of translation as a medial form.
Paul North writes and teaches in the tradition of critical theory, emphasizing Jewish thought, emancipatory strains in the history of philosophy, and European literatures. He has written books on the concept of distraction, on Franz Kafka, and on likeness in culture and thought. Currently he is co-editing an edition Marx’s Capital volume 1 with a new translation, which will appear from Princeton University Press in 2024 and writing a monograph entitled “The Standpoint of Marx’s Capital.” He co-edits the book series IDIOM: thinkingwritingtheory at Fordham University Press and co-directs the international exchange, Critical Theory in the Global South, in collaboration with faculty at the Universidad Metropolitana de Sciencias de la Educación in Santiago, Chile.
Paul Reitter earned his PhD at UC Berkeley and teaches in the German department at Ohio State University. He’s written many books, including a widely discussed history of crisis thinking in the academic humanities. His essays have appeared in Harper’s, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among other venues. His most recent translation, The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon, was shortlisted for a National Jewish Book Award.
Attendance information:
While NYU has ended COVID-19 related restrictions and policies, we continue to remind and recommend to members of the NYU community that they stay up-to-date on their boosters and stay home if they feel sick. Masks are always welcome.
Please RSVP for in-person attendance here.
“Karl Marx’s ‘Capital:’ An Evening with Paul North, Paul Reitter, and Emily Apter” is funded by the DAAD from funds of the German Federal Foreign Office (AA).
The New York Institute of Philosophy announces a panel:
“Philosophical Foundations of Reparations”
Speakers:
- Daniel Fryer (University of Michigan)
- Erin Kelly (Tufts)
- Christopher Lewis (Harvard)
The panel will be moderated by Juliana Bidadanure (NYU).
Information:
The talk will be Friday December 6th from 3:30-5:30pm.
Location: TBD
This panel is a part of the ongoing Project on the Philosophy of Race and Racism.
Registration is free but required for non-NYU attendees. A registration link will be shared via email with our department mailing lists a few weeks before the event. Please contact Jack Mikuszewski at jhm378@nyu.edu if you did not receive a registration link.