May
10
Fri
Feminist Historiography: Genre, Method, and the Scope of Philosophy- Karen Detlefsen @ CUNY Grad Center, rm 9206/7
May 10 @ 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm

A Sue Weinberg Series Lecture in honor of EILEEN O’NEILL(1953-2017)

EILEEN O’NEILL(1953-2017) was a professor of philosophy at University of Massachusetts at Amherst and one of the founding members of New York Society for Women in Philosophy (NYSWIP).

KAREN DETLEFSEN, University of Pennsylvania, professor of philosophy and education, will present “Feminist Historiography: Genre, Method, and the Scope of Philosophy.”

ALLAUREN FORBES, doctoral candidate at University of Pennsylvania, will serve as commentator.

GARY OSTERTAG, professor of philosophy at CUNY Graduate Center and Nassau Community College, will speak about Eileen O’Neill.

JULIE ZILBERBERG, CUNY Graduate Center PhD, will moderate the discussion.

This event will be held at the Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue (34th Street). It is free and open to the public. For more information see the Women’s Studies website: http://www.gc.cuny.edu/womencenter/

Oct
17
Thu
Positions in Patriarchy: Retooling the Metaphysics of Gender. Robin Dembroff (Yale) @ CUNY Grad Center, rm 5307
Oct 17 @ 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Decades of feminist theory have approached the question ‘what is gender?’ with an eye to gender as a system — in particular, the system that creates and sustains patriarchy. Using this approach, feminists have proposed theories of gender focused on the social positions that persons occupy within a patriarchal system. However, these analyses almost uniformly assume a gender binary (men women), and so look for corresponding, binary social positions. In this talk, I defend the importance of position-based metaphysics of gender, but challenge the assumption that positions in patriarchy can be captured in a binary. Rather than throw out the baby with the bath water, I’ll propose an alternative position-based approach. It begins with modeling the key axes of the patriarchal ‘blueprint’, or the shared beliefs, norms, and attitudes at the core of dominant, western gender ideology. I’ll then build a framework for describing the variety of positions that persons can collectively occupy in relation to this blueprint. A central upshot is that metaphysics intended to illuminate and debunk gender as imagined within the western patriarchal system fails to sufficiently achieve this end when it presupposes the same binary framework. The categories men and women, I’ll argue, are not primarily descriptive, but rather, contested tools with the central function of reinforcing or revising social power.

Presented by SWIP-Analytic

Nov
18
Mon
Transnational Feminism. Serene Khader @ CUNY Grad Center, rm 9207
Nov 18 @ 6:15 pm – 8:00 pm

Presented by the Center for Global Ethics & Politics, The Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies

Serene Khader, Brooklyn College

Feb
2
Wed
Art in the Brain of the Beholder @ ZOOM - see site for details
Feb 2 @ 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm

What can science teach us about how we perceive and understand art? How can art help us understand ourselves and each other? In this event, the Zuckerman Institute explores the interactions between our brains and the artistic world, finding connections and parallels between art and science.

Event Speakers

Please visit the event webpage to view the speaker list.

Event Information

Free and open to the public, registration is required by January 28, 2022. This event will also be live-streamed. Please email zuckermaninstitute@columbia.edu with any questions.

This talk is part of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Brain Insight Lecture series hosted by Columbia’s Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute and supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.

Sep
12
Mon
Free Market: The History of an Idea @ East Gallery, Maison Française
Sep 12 @ 11:30 pm – Sep 13 @ 12:30 am

Jacob Soll, in conversation with Pierre Force, John Shovlin, Carl Wennerlind, and Emmanuelle Saada

After two government bailouts of the U.S. economy in less than twenty years, free market ideology is due for serious reappraisal. In Free Market: the History of an Idea, Jacob Soll details how we got to this current crisis, and how we can find our way out by looking to earlier iterations of free market thought. Contrary to popular narratives, early market theorists believed that states had an important role in building and maintaining free markets. But in the eighteenth century, thinkers insisted on free markets without state intervention, leading to a tradition of ideological brittleness. That tradition only calcified in the centuries that followed. Tracing the intellectual evolution of the free market from Cicero to Milton Friedman, Soll argues that we need to go back to the origins of free market ideology in order to truly understand it—and to develop new economic concepts to face today’s challenges.

Jacob Soll is professor of history and accounting at the University of Southern California. He has been awarded numerous prestigious prizes including two NEH Fellowships, the Jacques Barzun Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and, in 2011, the MacArthur Fellowship. He also advises political and financial leaders across the globe to promote accounting standards and financial transparency.

Joining Jacob Soll to discuss his book will be: Pierre Force, Professor of French and History at Columbia; John Shovlin, Professor of History at NYU; and Carl Wennerlind, Professor of History at Barnard College. Emmanuelle Saada, Professor of History and French at Columbia, will moderate the discussion.

This event is co-sponsored by the Maison Française and the Department of History.

Oct
1
Sat
Feminist Crisis? Philosophical Interventions @ Philosophy Dept., CUNY Graduate Center
Oct 1 all-day
24th Annual CUNY Graduate Student Conference

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.

Mar
17
Fri
Grit & Imposter Syndrome. Joint Lectures by Jennifer Morton & Leonie Smith @ CUNY Grad Center 9207
Mar 17 @ 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm

SWIPNYC Sue Weinberg Lecture Series presents:
Grit & Imposter Syndrome
Joint Lectures by
Jennifer Morton (University of Pennsylvania)
Talk Title: Interpreting Obstacles
&
Leonie Smith (University of Manchester)
Talk Title: Class, Academia, and Imposter Syndrome
Friday, March 17
57 p.m.
CUNY Graduate Center
365 5th Avenue
Room 9207
QUESTIONS? EMAIL swipnyc@gmail.com

Oct
7
Mon
Resisting the Divides: Contemporary Philosophy of Art @ Brooklyn College Library
Oct 7 – Oct 8 all-day

The philosophy of art, as practiced in the western world, has tended to have two divided homes: in analytic philosophy and continental philosophy. Within the analytic tradition, the philosophy of art has recently undergone a revival with the emphasis on perception. This has more closely aligned art theory to science and questions of biology as well as to issues within psychology. The continental tradition has traditionally drawn upon phenomenology’s first-person experience with its ties to embodied perception as well as the social and historical concerns of the social aspect of art. In the realm itself of visual art, the state of (so-called) post-post modernism has resulted in both the dissolution of belief in progress and even, according to some art critics, a lamentable stagnation. But many philosophers of the last century, beginning with Walter Benjamin, Adorno, Nelson Goodman, etc., have suggested that art needs to be thought of within its social, pragmatic, or epistemological functions, suggesting perhaps a need to think of art outside the confines of modernism’s stylistic revolutions and formalist issues. Relatedly, the pluralism within science could be accessed as model for this enterprise. Multiple views on a phenomenon are required due to the complexity of the enterprise, and the practice of both making art and of perceiving it might be in that category. This conference seeks to bring these strands, the analytical and the continental ones, together and evaluate how to move forward with art theory in an age of globalization.

We welcome submissions on these possible questions:

1.     Should we value a diversity of perspectives in art theory? If so, what is the value? If not, why not?

2.     Are there aspects of art that we presume to be universal that are, in fact, culturally situated?

3.     How should different ways of experiencing art be characterized?

4.     What is the epistemological function of art?

5.     How does the monetary role in art affect both the artist and the perceiver of art?

6.     How do the mechanics of seeing (e.g., gist perception, peripheral vision, etc.) affect how we experience art?

7.     How does the practice of making art relate to the first-person experience?

8.     What role does Husserl’s “bracketing” have in the viewing or making of art?

9.     Are there specific non-western traditions that provide a better explanatory solution for the role of art than have the competing paradigms of continental and analytic?

We welcome your participation and look forward to your contributions. Papers should not extend over 45 minutes. Q & A are 15 minutes.

To submit anonymized abstract BY JULY 15, 2024: papers: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe5c9bmoBYb3hCAb0YWWfzV0BLWbhig2PD5VeKU358VA3RKGw/viewform?usp=sf_link