Calendar

Generative art made with algorithms has existed since the early days of computing in the 1960s. In recent years, a new strand of generative art has emerged: AI-generated art, which leverages the recent progress of artificial intelligence to create artworks. Unlike old-fashioned generative art, AI-generated art is not produced with an explicit set of programming instructions provided by human artists; instead, it involves training an algorithm on a dataset so that it can later produce artworks (images, music, or video clips) using its own internal parameters that have not been explicitly defined by a human. This process raises fascinating questions at the intersection of computer science, art history, and the philosophy of art. At a superficial level of analysis, AI-generated art seems to offload much of the creative impetus of art production to the machine, requiring minimal intervention from the artist. On closer inspection, however, it involves a novel process of curation at two key stages: upstream in the selection of the dataset on which the algorithm is trained, and downstream in the selection of the outputs that should qualify as artworks. Instead of replacing human artists with computers, AI-generated art can be understood as a new kind of collaboration between mind and machine, both of which contribute to the aesthetic value of the final artwork.

This seminar will bring together AI artists and philosophers to explore the significance of this new mode of art production. It will discuss the implications of AI-generated art for the definition of art, the nature of the relationship between artists and tools, the process of digital curation, and whether AI systems can be as creative as humans.

Event Speakers

• Sougwen Chung, artist and researcher
• Helena Sarin, visual artist
• Anne Spalter, digital mixed-media artist
• Katherine Thomson-Jones, Professor of Philosophy at Oberlin College
• Moderated by Raphaël Millière, Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience at Columbia University

Event Information

Free and open to the public. Registration is required via Eventbrite. Registered attendees will receive an event link shortly before the seminar begins.

This event is hosted by the Presidential Scholars in Society and Neuroscience as part of the Seminars in Society and Neuroscience series.

The Center for Science and Society makes every reasonable effort to accommodate individuals with disabilities. If you require disability accommodations to attend a Center for Science and Society event, please contact us at scienceandsociety@columbia.edu or (212) 853-1612 at least 10 days in advance of the event. For more information, please visit the campus accessibility webpage.

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To this day, many theorists regard the commodity theory and the credit theory as the two main rival accounts of the nature of money. Yet cryptocurrency has revolutionized the institution of money in ways that most commodity and credit theorists could hardly have anticipated. Assuming that cryptocurrency is a new form of money, the question arises whether the commodity and credit theories can adequately account for it. This talk argues that they cannot. It first offers an interpretation of the commodity and credit theories according to which these theories uphold differing claims about the origin of money, the ontology of money, and the function of money. It then argues that thus understood, neither theory can accommodate cryptocurrency. Finally, it proposes a novel hybrid hylomorphic account of money which draws on aspects of both the commodity and credit theories, and it argues that this hybrid account can accommodate cryptocurrency.

Interviewer: Graham Hubbs (University of Idaho)

We are pleased to announce the launch of a new and thought-provoking interview series: “In Conversation: Exploring the Philosophy of Money and Finance”. The series kicks off with a selection of esteemed contributors to the recently published book, The Philosophy of Money and Finance (OUP, 2024).

Each interview will be followed by a live debate, encouraging active audience participation. The sessions (interview plus debate) will be 30 minutes long.

chair: Emiliano Ippoliti (Sapienza University of Rome)

organization: Emiliano Ippoliti (Sapienza University of Rome); Joakim Sandberg (University of Gothenburg); Lisa Warenski (CUNY Graduate Center and University of Connecticut)

info: phinancenet@gmail.com; lwarenski@gc.cuny.edu ; emiliano.ippoliti@uniroma1.it

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Philosophers tend to assume that money has only an instrumental relation to state legitimacy. This discussion explains how money raises state legitimacy issues of its own. Assuming a credit/debt theory of money, the state can be seen as an active participant in a credit economy of its own making. Insofar as a state issues or recognizes a money as a means of ruling people’s lives, it is subject to promissory requirements of redemption. This has significant implications for its legitimate and equitable management of a modern economy, the centerpiece of a social compact.

Interviewer: Richard Endörfer (University of Gothenburg)

We are pleased to announce the launch of a new and thought-provoking interview series: “In Conversation: Exploring the Philosophy of Money and Finance”. The series kicks off with a selection of esteemed contributors to the recently published book, The Philosophy of Money and Finance (OUP, 2024).

Each interview will be followed by a live debate, encouraging active audience participation. The sessions (interview plus debate) will be 30 minutes long.

chair: Emiliano Ippoliti (Sapienza University of Rome)

organization: Emiliano Ippoliti (Sapienza University of Rome); Joakim Sandberg (University of Gothenburg); Lisa Warenski (CUNY Graduate Center and University of Connecticut)

info: phinancenet@gmail.com; lwarenski@gc.cuny.edu ; emiliano.ippoliti@uniroma1.it

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).

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This talk examines the instruments suggested by the key policy document driving sustainable finance in the European Union, the Action Plan on Financing Sustainable Growth. It uses a reflexive law approach coupled with insights from epistemology. The chapter first discusses the Action Plan and the concept of reflexive law (which focuses on such epistemic instruments as disclosure, reporting, and labelling). It discusses a number of challenges the plan faces (about, e.g., investor ignorance, long-termism, scenario analysis, accounting standards). It then introduces an alternative to reflexive law (called “epistemic law”), and argues that disclosure, reporting, and labelling improve by taking into account insights from epistemology and social science concerning the form and content of information. The talk’s recommendation is, in a slogan, to provide different information, and to provide information differently.

Interviewer: Lisa Warenski (CUNY Graduate Center and University of Connecticut)

We are pleased to announce the launch of a new and thought-provoking interview series: “In Conversation: Exploring the Philosophy of Money and Finance”. The series kicks off with a selection of esteemed contributors to the recently published book, The Philosophy of Money and Finance (OUP, 2024).

Each interview will be followed by a live debate, encouraging active audience participation. The sessions (interview plus debate) will be 30 minutes long.

chair: Emiliano Ippoliti (Sapienza University of Rome)

organization: Emiliano Ippoliti (Sapienza University of Rome); Joakim Sandberg (University of Gothenburg); Lisa Warenski (CUNY Graduate Center and University of Connecticut)

info: phinancenet@gmail.com; lwarenski@gc.cuny.edu ; emiliano.ippoliti@uniroma1.it

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The author argues that the credit system may improve distributive justice, but only indirectly, via job creation and government spending. The reason for this is that cheap credit on commercial terms is only available to people in the upper half of the wealth distribution. By contrast, the forms of credit available more widely are too expensive to make taking out credit a realistic option to escape poverty for most. However, credit can improve distributive justice indirectly, if entrepreneurs and corporations borrow for purposes that create jobs, or states spend borrowed funds on programs that address poverty or inequality. For these reasons, the author suggests that improving access to credit is less important from the perspective of distributive justice than how the credit system interacts with the tax system and labor laws.

Interviewer: Lisa Warenski (CUNY Graduate Center and University of Connecticut)

We are pleased to announce the launch of a new and thought-provoking interview series: “In Conversation: Exploring the Philosophy of Money and Finance”. The series kicks off with a selection of esteemed contributors to the recently published book, The Philosophy of Money and Finance (OUP, 2024).

Each interview will be followed by a live debate, encouraging active audience participation. The sessions (interview plus debate) will be 30 minutes long.

chair: Emiliano Ippoliti (Sapienza University of Rome)

organization: Emiliano Ippoliti (Sapienza University of Rome); Joakim Sandberg (University of Gothenburg); Lisa Warenski (CUNY Graduate Center and University of Connecticut)

info: phinancenet@gmail.com; lwarenski@gc.cuny.edu ; emiliano.ippoliti@uniroma1.it