Calendar

15 Feb, 4pm:

James Kreines (Claremont McKenna)

From Shapeless Abyss Towards Self-Developing Thought: Taking Hegel on Spinoza Seriously

@ The New School, Room L502, at 2 W 13th Street

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Feb 24:

Georg Spoo (Freiburg)

Grounds and Limits of Immanent Critique: Kant, Hegel, Marx

@ Columbia

Mar 3:

Heikki Ikaheimo

Hegel, Humanity, and Social Critique

@ Zoom

Mar 24:

Stephen Howard (KU Leuven)

Kant’s Late Philosophy of Nature: The Opus Postumum

@ Columbia

Apr 11:

Karin de Boer

Does Kant’s Antinomy of Pure Reason Amount to an A Priori History of Rational Cosmology?

@ Columbia

Apr 15, 4pm:

Eva von Redecker

Co-sponsored by the New School Graduate Student Conference

@ The New School

Apr 21:

Giulia Battistoni

NAture, Life, Organizm: The Legacy of Romanticism and Classical German Philosophy in Jonas’ Philosophical Biology

@ The New School

Kant and Spinoza on Prophecy, Enlightenment and Revolution

Presented by Columbia University Dept. of Philosophy

The COVID-19 pandemic is said to be a once-in-a-century incident, and it brought to us a sense of crisis at various levels. What is a crisis, though? Can any unnerving moment or period be called a crisis, or are there different dimensions of a crisis to which we need to be attentive? Is solidarity possible after experiencing a crisis like Covid-19? Can Buddhism make any contribution to facilitating solidarity? This presentation explores the meaning and nature of a crisis and our responses to it by drawing on modern Korean political thinker Pak Ch’iu’s (1909–1949) analysis of crisis and feminist-Buddhist thinker Kim Iryŏp’s (1896–1971) Buddhist philosophy. By doing so, this presentation considers what social, political, existential, and even religious meaning we can draw from our experience of crises, and what questions these insights present to us.

With responses from Karsten Struhl (John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY)

Presented by THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY

RSVP is required for dinner. If you would like to participate in our dinner, a $30 fee is required. Please contact Lucilla at lm3335@columbia.edu for further information.

When someone is in a conscious state, must they be aware of that state?  The Buddhist philosopher Dignāga offers a brilliant route to answering this question by leveraging the role awareness might play as a constraint on memory.  I begin by clarifying his strategy and what conclusions it might be used to establish.  Here I examine different candidate directions of explanation between consciousness and inner awareness.  I interpret the metaphor of consciousness as a lamp that lights itself, and use the metaphor to distinguish between his view and contemporary higher-order theories of consciousness.  I then turn to explain why the memory argument fails.  The first main problem is that, contrary to Dignāga’s contemporary defenders, there is no good way to use the argument to reach a conclusion about all conscious states.  The second main problem is that the proposed awareness constraint on memory is highly problematic, in tension both with ancient objections as well as current psychology.

With responses from Lu Teng (NYU Shanghai)

Paternal, patriarchal, and fraternal concepts, metaphors, and images have long dominated thinking about politics. But the political, Gil Anidjar argues, has always been maternal.

In a series of finely woven meditations on slavery, sovereignty, and the social contract, this book places mothers and mothering at the crux of political thought. Anidjar identifies a maternal sovereignty and a maternal contract, showing that without motherhood, there could be no constitution, preservation, or reproduction of collective existence in time. And maternal power is also power over life and death, as he reveals through a nuanced consideration of abortion.

Through the concept of the maternal, Anidjar offers new insights into abiding sources from the Bible and ancient Greece to classical and modern political philosophy—the story of Hagar and Sarah, Oedipus and his two mothers, Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave—reinterpreted in light of Black and feminist criticism, psychoanalytic theory, and autotheoretical reflection. Elegantly written and provocative, On the Sovereignty of Mothers offers the maternal as a new frame for understanding the political order.

About the Author

Gil Anidjar teaches in the Department of Religion, where his interest in religion and politics, and more specifically in political theology and political philosophy, have guided courses such “God,” “Vampires” and “Mothers” for a number of years now. He is the author, among other books, of The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Columbia University Press 2003) and Blood: A Critique of Christianity (Columbia University Press 2014). He has also edited Jacques Derrida’s Acts of Religion. Recent essays include “The Destruction of Thought,” “That Great Mother of Danger,” “The Rights of White (In Search of a Majority),” “D—nce,” and “Learning Waters.”

About the Speakers

Amaryah Armstrong is an assistant professor of race in American religion and culture at Virginia Tech. Her research cuts across the fields of Black Studies, American Studies, Political Theology, and Continental Philosophy of Religion to explore the relationship between religion and the reproduction of race in the aftermath of 1492. She is working on two projects: Reproducing Peoplehood: On the Afterlife of Christian Orde and A Measure of Existence: On the Value of Black Theology. She also has several articles in the works on the insights of various black intellectuals (W.E.B. Du Bois, Hortense Spillers) and the relationship between black culture and political theology.

Beth A. Berkowitz is Ingeborg Rennert Chair of Jewish Studies and Professor in the Department of Religion at Barnard College. She is the author of Execution and Invention: Death Penalty Discourse in Early Rabbinic and Christian Cultures (Oxford University Press, 2006; winner of the Salo Baron prize for First Book in Jewish Studies); Defining Jewish Difference: From Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Animals and Animality in the Babylonian Talmud (Cambridge University Press, 2018). She is co-editor of Religious Studies and Rabbinics: A Conversation (Routledge, 2017) and a contributor to it.

Matthew Engelke is Professor and Chair of the Department of Religion and a member of the Executive Committee of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. From 2018-2024, he also served as Director of the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life. Trained as an anthropologist, Professor Engelke’s main research interests are on Christianity, secular humanism, media theory, materiality, and semiotics. He has conducted fieldwork in Zimbabwe and in Britain. He is currently working on a book about secularity and death, based on research among humanist funeral celebrants in London.

Zehra Mehdi is a PhD candidate in South Asian Religions, working at the intersections of religion, political violence, and psychoanalysis. Her dissertation is a thick psychoanalytic ethnographic account of how Muslims as religious minorities in India facing state oppression use religion to express themselves both emotionally and politically. Focusing on the lives of Muslims in north India, her research studies how persecuted religious minorities draw upon religion as a psychic reserve to articulate their trauma, mourn their losses, and forge political resistance against the state. Her dissertation is titled, “The ‘work of Religion’: Trauma, Mourning and Political Resistance in the lives of Muslims in ‘Old Lucknow.’”