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Please note: All events are virtual until otherwise stated.

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Susan Neiman develops in Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (2002, Princeton: Princeton University Press) a watershed perspective on the longstanding problem of evil, the perniciously difficult to satisfy “need to find order within those appearances so unbearable that they threaten reason’s ability to go on.” The book thereby also presents a radically new perspective on traditional debates within metaphysics. On the occasion of its twentieth anniversary, we gather to celebrate her accomplishment and to advance the research program it reflects. Participants will include, in addition to Neiman herself: Annalise Acorn, Frederick Beiser, Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, Omri Boehm, Dan Brudney, Caroline Bynum, Lorraine Daston, Michael Della Rocca, Wendy Doniger, Wolfram Ellenberger, John Faithful Hamer, Carey Harrison, Patricia Kitcher, Philip Kitcher, Christia Mercer, Cornel West, Allen Wood, and James Wood.

Distinguished Guest:
Peter van Inwagen (University of Notre Dame)

Speakers:
Aaron Segal (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Alex Rosenberg (Duke University)
Anna Marmodoro (Durham University & Oxford University)
Barry Loewer (Rutgers University)
Brian Leftow (Rutgers University)
David Builes (Princeton University)
Dean Zimmerman (Rutgers University)
Ernest Sosa (Rutgers University)
John Hawthorne (University of Southern California & Australian Catholic University)
Laurie Paul (Yale University)
Ted Sider (Rutgers University)
Trenton Merricks (University of Virginia)

The tentative schedule can be found here.

This event is sponsored by the Rutgers Center for the Philosophy of Religion and the Department of Philosophy

Registration

To register, please inform Esther Goh (esther.goh@rutgers.edu) that you plan to attend.

Note: Space is limited, and non-Rutgers attendees must provide proof of vaccination (you can email this to Esther or show us on the day itself) or a negative PCR test.

Travelling to Rutgers (Plane & Train)

The closest airport is EWR (Newark Liberty International Airport). When you are at Newark Airport, just follow the signs to the monorail “airtrain”. The airtrain will take you to the NJ transit train stop, and then you can take the NJ Transit train (Northeast Corridor Line) to New Brunswick station (It costs $14; takes approx. 45mins).

Another two nearby airports are JFK (John F. Kennedy International Airport) and LGA (LaGuardia Airport). Both are in New York. It takes 1hr+ by taxi or 2hr+ by public transport to come to Rutgers.

Hotels

The closest hotels are “Hyatt Regency New Brunswick” (6mins walk from train station) and “The Heldrich Hotel and Conference Center” (8mins walk from train station). You can also check out “Rutgers University Inn and Conference Center” which is further away.

The best rates for the Hyatt can often be found on hotels.com.

Questions

For any inquiries, please contact Esther Goh at esther.goh@rutgers.edu.
(If you are a guest speaker, please contact Frederick Choo at frederick.choo@rutgers.edu for inquiries instead.)

Keynote Speakers

Joel Kotkin, Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange, California, and author of The New Class Conflict

Michael Lind, Professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, and author of The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite

Schedule and Registration

The event will take place from 3 pm to 6 pm on October 14 and from 9 am to 5 pm on October 15. The registration rate is $100 for both days and includes a reception on October 14 and lunch on October 15. Click here to register for the event.

Event Description

In the last fifteen years, the discussion of class has shifted with the rise of the Tea Party and then Trumpism in the United States. Whereas the notion of class used to be a left-wing category championed by socialists, Marxists, and anarchists, the critique of class division has now shifted to right-wing denunciations of the managerial class. This shift toward a populist politics targeting the new class has long been a topic of discussion in Telos, starting with the classic 1975 essay by Alvin Gouldner “Prologue to a Theory of Revolutionary Intellectuals” (in Telos 26) and continuing through Paul Piccone’s work in the early 1990s in essays such as “The Crisis of Liberalism and the Emergence of Federal Populism” (in Telos 89) and “Postmodern Populism” (in Telos 103). A search of the Telos archive will uncover literally hundreds of essays that address various aspects of this issue. The recent popularizing of the critique of the new class has led to a conflict between the liberal pursuit of redistributive policies and the expansion of the welfare state, on the one hand, and the populist attempt to disempower governmental managerial elites and dismantle the welfare state, on the other hand. How is the underlying notion of class being defined by the different parties to this debate? What are the political possibilities, both on the left and on the right, that can emerge from the conflict? Is this conflict leading to a new kind of civil war, or can we envision new solutions?

In addition to engaging with these questions, our event will feature Telos editors, who will discuss the past and current trajectories of Telos as well as Telos 200, devoted to the place of truth at the university.

Telos has always had a conflicted relationship with universities. On the one hand, university academics have constituted the primary audience and contributors to Telos. On the other hand, Telos has always maintained a distance from university structures, precisely because of the tie between universities and the managerial class, and previous special issues in Telos 81 and Telos 111 have attempted to address this problem.

Today, the situation of universities has become more dire than ever. Trapped between the pressure to provide job training on the one hand and political advocacy on the other hand, the idea of a search for truth sounds hopelessly naive as a description of the task of colleges and universities today. Matching the shift of our society toward technocratic and managerial solutions to problems, the natural and social sciences have become recognized authorities based on their claim to being scientific. Yet the authority of “science” is misleading in the sense that science never has straightforward answers but relies on a method of constant questioning. Science itself cannot be counted on to make policy decisions but can only provide relevant information for decision makers. Recent pieces in TelosScope by Russell Berman and Mathieu Slama address this issue by looking at the way pandemic policies were dominated by an ideology of “following the science” that amounted to an abdication of democratic decision-making.

Meanwhile, university discussion and debate about decision-making, traditionally the place of the humanities and social sciences, have been suppressed in favor of a focus on political engagement. The range of perspectives available for discussion has been reduced, to the exclusion of those views that might challenge the technocratic bias and the reduction of politics to identity politics that have become dominant at universities.

This narrowing of perspectives has also undermined the research project of the university. The exclusion of relevant perspectives in university debates has degraded the peer review process in the social sciences and the humanities, maintaining an orthodoxy that favors the reinforcement of previously held views rather than the challenging of such views. Such research can then be cited as the “scientific” basis for a set of policy prescriptions that have been agreed upon in advance. Where Max Weber once lamented the transformation of the lecture hall into a pulpit, it is difficult today for academics to avoid the pressure to either conform to a particular political perspective or, in rejecting such politicization, to be forced into an “obstructionist” camp.

In the midst of these developments, what is the status of the idea of truth? Will truth necessarily remain subordinate to politics? How might the search for truth remain a focus of colleges and universities?

In addressing these questions, the 200th issue of Telos features contributions by Joseph W. Bendersky, Russell Berman, Valerie J. D’Erman, J. E. Elliott, Wayne Hudson, Michael Hüther, Mark G. E. Kelly, Tim Luke, Richard T. Marcy, Greg Melleuish, David Pan, Susanna Rizzo, and David Westbrook.

If you have any questions about the event, please contact us at telos200@telosinstitute.net.

Contact Frederick Choo, fredrick.choo@rutgers.edu

One of the most challenging aspects of the war in Ukraine is the way in which the conflict has been constantly shifting in its form. In the first place, there is a conventional ground war between Russia and Ukraine, in which the identity and will of the two peoples is at stake. Yet Russia has used weapons supplied by Iran, and Ukraine depends on NATO for its own supplies, indicating that this war depends on the maintenance and expansion of alliances. The stability of these alliances in turn depends on a combination of Realpolitik and shared values as the glue that holds them together. This logic of alliances motivates the energy war that Russia is waging with Europe, revealing that, unbeknownst to Europe, Russian energy policy over the last decade was an early form of the war. Similarly, the threat of nuclear war also tests the resolve of NATO, forcing it to consider the values at stake in the conflict. Is the war about Ukraine’s sovereignty or the principle of nation-state sovereignty itself? Is it about human rights for Ukrainians or the entire human rights project? For Russia, is it about self-defense or a pan-Slavic identity? Is it about the protection of Russian minorities in Ukraine or the threat of Western secularization?

The material form of the war—economic, conventional, nuclear—will depend on the way in which the participants on all sides and in all parts of the world come to an understanding about these questions concerning the moral and spiritual stakes in the war. If it is just a matter of giving up Ukraine, then the economic costs for Europe may not be worth the fight, and Russia’s victory in the energy war could lead to a general NATO capitulation. But if the freedom and security of central and western Europe are also at stake, then even a severe economic recession would be a small price to pay for the reestablishment of a NATO-dominated security order. Is freedom worth the risk of annihilation? Is peace worth the indignities and repression of authoritarianism? As the most serious global conflict since World War II, the war in Ukraine risks going beyond the bounds of all other forms of war before it. What are the resources that are necessary for meeting its challenges? How can the shifting forms of the war be contained and channeled toward a future lasting peace?

These types of questions are not specific to the war in Ukraine but arise in any situation of war. Every war forces us to reconsider the character of war and the forms that it can take. In the first place, the insight that leads to a war is one about the nature of a conflict. War only begins once the parties determine that there is an otherwise irresolvable conflict about the basis of order. The course of a war also results in a practical insight into the form of a postwar order. Peace and stability cannot arrive until all come to an agreement about the new understanding of order. This intertwining of practical and theoretical gains means that the time of war is also a time of shifting manifestations of the forms by which war is fought, as well as the forms of order to be established by the outcome of the war. The course of a war will be decided by our understanding of the kind of world we want to live in, the risks we are willing to take to establish such a world, and our belief in its practical possibility. A war will necessarily change in form depending upon where we are in the movement from the conflict of competing ideas to the victory of a particular conception of order. Since the result of the conflict would be an establishment of sovereignty based on some understanding of order, the conflict is not just a material one but also a theoretical and spiritual one about the metaphysical basis of order. In the process of war, insight leads to conflict, and conflict leads to insight.

At the 2023 Telos-Paul Piccone Institute conference on forms of war, we will consider different ways of understanding the relationship between conflict and insight in war as well as examples of how the conceptualization of conflict affects the outbreak, progress, and outcome of wars. On the one hand, we will consider the way in which the experience of war, both on the battlefield and on the home front, affects the outcome of the war. On the other hand, we will look at how this importance of the experience of war in turn affects the strategy of war. Such strategizing begins already at the nascent stages of conflict, before any actual fighting begins, but in which the possibility of conflict can already lead to concessions by one side or the other that lead to a transformation of the basis of order. Similarly, fears and hopes for the future also determine the course of a war, helping the participants to end a war by offering them a mutually acceptable vision of the terms of peace.

Questions include:

• What are the different causes of war in any particular case? How do these causes attain such significance that they become a casus belli? Were there alternatives to war that were not taken?
• In what situations does the refusal of war lead to an outcome that is tantamount to surrender in war? How can the threat of war be used as a political tool?
• To what extent is war a continuation of politics? Or is war the breakdown of politics?
• How have different wars been experienced on the battlefield and on the home front? How have the different experiences of war affected the outcomes?
• How does our understanding of world order affect the turn to war?
• What is the relationship between war and peace in terms of international order?
• How do fictional or historical representations of war affect the conduct of war?
• What is the relationship between war and the collective identity of a people?
• How are wars between nation-states linked to their domestic politics? In what situations does an external enemy create unity or division in domestic politics?
• How is war used as a tool in domestic politics, for instance, as a way to divert attention from domestic political problems?
• What are the characteristics of different types of war, such as limited war, absolute war, civil war, cold war, proxy war, phony war, trade war, guerilla war, war on terror, nuclear war? What factors lead to a war being fought in a particular way?
• To what extent can a representation of war replace a real war, for instance, when single combat is supposed to substitute for the combat of armies, or when war is televised?
• What is the relationship between spiritual concerns and the forms of war? Are all wars in some sense religious wars?

Conference Location

The conference will take place at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute in New York City from Thursday, March 30, to Saturday, April 1, 2023.

Abstract Submissions

Please note: Abstracts for this conference will only be accepted from current Telos-Paul Piccone Institute members. In order to become a member, please visit our membership enrollment page. Telos-Paul Piccone Institute memberships are valid until the end of the annual New York City conference.

If you are interested in making a presentation, please submit a 200-word abstract and 50-word bio by December 15, 2022, to telosnyc2023@telosinstitute.net. Please place “The 2023 Telos Conference” in the email’s subject line.

The Center for Philosophy of Religion at Rutgers University is pleased to host an in-person, working-papers conference on the Psychology and Epistemology of Religious Experience. We are seeking abstracts (150-350 words) from those interested in participating. The tentative date is 15-16 April 2023. And the deadline for submission is 28 February 2023. Participants with accepted submissions will be given hotel accommodations and a modest honorarium to help defray travel costs.

Theme

The overall theme of the workshop is the Psychology and Epistemology of Religious Experiences. Philosophers of religion frequently assign religious experiences important epistemic roles, such as justifying religious beliefs. But religious experiences of the kind philosophers are interested in are also studied in other fields as well, such as psychology and religious studies. However, the psychology and epistemology of religious experiences are presumably not independent; studying them together is likely to be insightful in various ways. To that end, we are interested in bringing together scholars working on the psychology and epistemology of religious experiences. Potential topics include:

·       The nature of religious experiences

·       Taxonomies of religious experiences

·       Potential psychological mechanisms and accounts of religious experience

·       The relation between perception and religious experiences

·       The epistemology of religious experience

·       The interactions between the psychology and epistemology of religious experience

·       The relation of cognitive science of religion to religious experience

Any proposed papers on these topics, or similar ones, are welcome. Papers exploring interdisciplinary approaches are also welcome.

Instructions

Please submit an abstract (150-350 words), long abstract (350-650 words), or full paper to Timothy Perrine at tp654@scarletmail.rutgers.edu. Submission should be prepared for blind review. In a separate document please provide your name, institutional affiliation (if applicable), and contact information. Submission deadline is 28 February; acceptances will be decided by 5 March; and the workshop will be held 15-16 April.