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
What is critique? According to the Kantian tradition, it is an investigation of the transcendental conditions for the possibility of thinking and experience. While later critics shifted the focus to material conditions, core metaphysical commitments and procedures of critique remained unchanged. Critique of Critique (Stanford UP, 2023), the subject of this talk, probes critique as an orientation of thought through its historical manifestations from Plato to the Frankfurt school and present-day critical theory. In the process, it asks us to consider what critical thinking is and whether it can assume orientations other than critique.
Bio: Roy Ben-Shai, a New School graduate, is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College. His recently published book, Critique of Critique (Stanford University Press, 2023), is the first volume in a trilogy on the concept of “orientation” in critical thought. He is currently working on the second volume, Emancipatory Thinking, or the Art of Thinking Otherwise.
What does it mean to be, appear, and act in public? These questions are rarely asked when it comes to the often-diagnosed “structural transformation” (Habermas) of the public sphere. Yet people have a wide variety of “public experiences” every day: from the simple experience of leaving the house and moving on the street to highly networked and technologically mediated public communication and concerted action. In the project I would like to present in its outlines, I try to shed light on the quality and structure of such “public experiences” using a phenomenological approach. In this way, I want to reclaim public space as an experiential space and argue that experiences matter for the constitution of different kinds of public spheres and public spaces.
How, for example, do phenomena like visibility, attention, relevance, reality, trust, or their opposites emerge in public contexts? And how can our individual and collective experiences of the public retain its high democratic ideals while facing the constant threat of superficial entertainment and self-commercialization? In contrast to theories that view the public sphere primarily as a system of information, coordination, or discourse, a phenomenological approach aims to reveal the ways in which experiences constitute spaces of meaning. Such a disclosure of the world-building function of experience is crucial if we are to understand how people can relate to their public existence and a public world, how they can integrate into it or fall away from it, gain or lose trust, and how a shared world is either built or destroyed.
Bio:
Sophie Loidolt is Professor of philosophy and Chair of Practical Philosophy at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. She is a recurrent visiting professor at Center for Subjectivity Research in Copenhagen and the president of the German Society for Phenomenological Research. Most of her education took place at the University of Vienna. Research stays brought her to the Husserl-Archives in Leuven, St. Denis University in Paris, and the New School of Social Research in New York.
Her work centers on issues in the fields of phenomenology, political and legal philosophy, and ethics, as well as transcendental philosophy and philosophy of mind. Her book Phenomenology of Plurality. Hannah Arendt on Political Intersubjectivity (Routledge 2017) won the Edward Goodwin Ballard Book Prize in 2018. Other books include: Anspruch und Rechtfertigung. Eine Theorie des rechtlichen Denkens im Anschluss an die Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls (Springer 2009), Einführung in die Rechtsphänomenologie (Mohr Siebeck 2010; Japanese translation will appear in 2024).