Propositional dynamic logic (PDL) is a framework for reasoning about nondeterministic program executions (or, more generally, nondeterministic actions). In this setting, nondeterminism is taken as a primitive: a program is nondeterministic iff it has multiple possible outcomes. But what is the sense of “possibility” at play here? This talk explores an epistemic interpretation: working in an enriched logical setting, we represent nondeterminism as a relationship between a program and an agent deriving from the agent’s (in)ability to adequately measure the dynamics of the program execution. More precisely, using topology to capture the observational powers of an agent, we define the nondeterministic outcomes of a given program execution to be those outcomes that the agent is unable to rule out in advance. In this framework, determinism coincides exactly with continuity: that is, determinism is continuity in the observation topology. This allows us to embed PDL into (dynamic) topological (subset space) logic, laying the groundwork for a deeper investigation into the epistemology (and topology) of nondeterminism.
The seminar is concerned with applying formal methods to fundamental issues, with an emphasis on probabilistic reasoning, decision theory and games. In this context “logic” is broadly interpreted as covering applications that involve formal representations. The topics of interest have been researched within a very broad spectrum of different disciplines, including philosophy (logic and epistemology), statistics, economics, and computer science. The seminar is intended to bring together scholars from different fields of research so as to illuminate problems of common interest from different perspectives. Throughout each academic year, meetings are regularly presented by the members of the seminar and distinguished guest speakers.
details tba
02/08/2019 Faculty House, Columbia University
4:00 PM
03/29/2019 Faculty House, Columbia University
4:00 PM
04/19/2018 Faculty House, Columbia University
4:00 PM
Convergence to the truth is viewed with some ambivalence in philosophy of science. On the one hand, methods of inquiry that lead to the truth in the limit are prized as marks of scientific rationality. But an agent who, by using some method, expects to always converge to the truth seems to fail a minimum standard of epistemic modesty. This point was recently brought home by Gordon Belot in his critique of Bayesian epistemology. In this paper I will study convergence to the truth theorems within the framework of Edward Nelson’s radically elementary probability theory. This theory provides an enriched conceptual framework for investigating convergence and gives rise to an appropriately modest from of Bayesianism.
The seminar is concerned with applying formal methods to fundamental issues, with an emphasis on probabilistic reasoning, decision theory and games. In this context “logic” is broadly interpreted as covering applications that involve formal representations. The topics of interest have been researched within a very broad spectrum of different disciplines, including philosophy (logic and epistemology), statistics, economics, and computer science. The seminar is intended to bring together scholars from different fields of research so as to illuminate problems of common interest from different perspectives. Throughout each academic year, meetings are regularly presented by the members of the seminar and distinguished guest speakers.
details tba
02/08/2019 Faculty House, Columbia University
4:00 PM
03/22/2019 Faculty House, Columbia University
4:00 PM
04/19/2018 Faculty House, Columbia University
4:00 PM
Session I – Chair: Michael Begun (Fordham)
10:00 – Samantha Matherne (Harvard University)
“Rethinking Kantian Aesthetic Normativity”
11:30 – Wiebke Deimling (Clark University)
“Kant’s Theory of Tragedy”
1:00 – Lunch Break
Session II – Chair: Daryl Tress (Fordham)
2:30 – Melissa Zinkin (SUNY Binghamton)
“Aesthetic Judgment, the Generation of Concepts, and Cognitive Mastery in Kant”
4:00 – Jay Bernstein (New School for Social Research)
“Kant and Adorno on Mind and World: From Wild Beauties to Spiral Jetty”
Sponsored by the Fordham Philosophy Department’s German Philosophy Group
Contact: Reed Winegar (bwinegar@fordham.edu)
Ronald Dworkin’s work always spanned a wide array of topics, from the most abstract jurisprudence through the details of American constitutional law all the way over to political philosophy and theories of justice and equality. In the last decades of his life, however, Dworkin’s work flowered in ways that went beyond even this prodigious range. Though he continued his central work in the philosophy of law and constitutional theory, he also addressed issues in international law, human dignity, the philosophy of religion, the relation between ethics, morality and legal theory, and the unity of practical thought generally. This conference will explore some of these themes in Dworkin’s late work. Beginning with a panel on his understanding of religion, we will also convene discussions of his work on legal integrity, international law, and the relation between law and morality. There will be a total of nine presentations, with plenty of time for discussion. All are welcome.
Panel 1 (Friday 1:30 p.m.): Dworkin’s Religion without God.
Eric Gregory (Princeton),
Moshe Halbertal (NYU and Hebrew U.) Ronald Dworkin Religion Without God: Morality and the Transcendent
Larry Sager (Texas) Solving Religious Liberty
Panel 2 (Friday 4:30 p.m.): Dworkin on international law.
Samantha Besson (Fribourg)
The Political Legitimacy of International Law: Sovereign States and their International Institutional Order
John Tasioulas (King’s College, London)
Panel 3 (Saturday 10 a.m.): The idea of integrity in Law’s Empire.
Andrei Marmor (Cornell) Integrity in Law’s Empire
Jeremy Waldron (NYU) The Rise and Decline of Integrity
Panel 4 (Saturday 2:15 p.m.): Law and morality in Justice for Hedgehogs.
Mark Greenberg (UCLA)
What Makes a Moral Duty Legal? Dworkin’s Judicial Enforcement Theory Versus the Moral Impact Theory
Ben Zipursky (Fordham)
Columbia University’s Department of Philosophy, the Morningside Institute, and the Thomistic Institute invite graduate students in philosophy, theology/religious studies, literature, and related disciplines to submit papers for “The Moral Imagination of the Novel.” The conference will examine the ways in which individual novels and the novel as a literary genre can be understood both to depict the search for moral, philosophical, and religious truth and to engage in this very search themselves. Is the novel a realistic or idealistic genre? Can novels expand our sense of moral possibilities? Can they contract them?
The conference will begin with four twenty-minute graduate student papers on Friday, October 4, followed by talks that day and the next from faculty. Confirmed speakers include:
Paul Elie (Georgetown)
Ann Astell (Notre Dame)
Thomas Pavel (Chicago)
Lauren Kopajtic (Fordham)
Dhananjay Jagannathan (Columbia)
Limited financial assistance is available to defray the cost of travel for student presenters, but students are encouraged to seek funds from their own institutions as well.
One-page proposals should be emailed to Molly Gurdon at mcg2197@columbia.edu by Saturday, August 31 to be considered. Invitations to present papers will be sent by Friday, September 6. Submissions should not contain any identifying information except for a title, but the author’s institution and program, along with the title of their proposed submission, should be noted in the e-mail submission.
Contact Crina Gschwandtner for more information.
Scholars working under the broad umbrella of New Materialism have offered compelling reappraisals of the ways in which we know, interact with, and exist in the world. This scholarship also intersects with recent work on music and sound, which raises rich sets of questions regarding human agency, material, ethics, aesthetics, embodiment, and the subject/object dichotomy, among other issues.
We invite scholars working in the humanities, arts and sciences to submit proposals for papers and performances that engage with the themes of sound and new materialism, broadly construed. We welcome work that adopts historical, technological, analytical, philosophical, materialist, and creative vantage points, among others. Overall, this conference will direct these diverse disciplinary and methodological perspectives towards convergent and critical issues, creating new, interdisciplinary lines of enquiry and generating original research.
The one-day conference will consist of panels that comprise of papers with short reflections by a moderator, as well as an evening concert that includes opportunities for discussion. The concluding concert of work that engages with these themes from creative perspectives will afford attendees with an opportunity to consider and discuss issues concerning sound, material, and agency in a forum that contrasts with, but also complements, our events during the day. Conference participants are strongly encouraged to attend both the daytime and evening portions of the conference.
Proposals are called for:
Paper presentations of 20 minutes with 10 minutes of Q&A.
Artistic presentation of 20 minutes with 10 minutes of discussion
Submission: Proposals of no more than 500 words (300 words for artistic presentation) should be submitted as a PDF by August 14th 2019 to jc5036@columbia.edu
and include “NMAS Submission” in the subject line. If you’re applying for an artistic presentation please include three representative 2 minute audio/video examples. Please also include the title of your proposed paper and anonymize your submission. Include your name, affiliation, and contact information in the body of the email, and also nominate any audio/visual requirements for your paper or performance.
We live in an era of aesthetics. Art has become both pervasive and powerful – it is displayed not only in museums and galleries but also on the walls of corporations and it is increasingly fused with design. But what makes art so powerful, and in what does its power consist?
According to a widespread view, the power of art – its beauty – lies in the eye of the beholder. What counts as art appears to be a function of individual acts of evaluation supported by powerful institutions. On this account, the power of art stems from a force that is not itself aesthetic, such as the art market and the financial power of speculators. Art expresses, in a disguised form, the power of something else – like money – that lies behind it. In one word, art has lost its autonomy.
In his talk, Markus Gabriel rejects this view. He argues that art is essentially uncontrollable. It is in the nature of the work of art to be autonomous to such a degree that the art world will never manage to overpower it. Ever since the cave paintings of Lascaux, art has taken hold of the human mind and implemented itself in our very being. Thanks to the emergence of art we became human beings, that is, beings who lead their lives in light of an image of the human being and its position in the world and in relation to other species. Due to its structural, ontological power, art itself is and remains radically autonomous. Yet, this power is highly ambiguous, as we cannot control its unfolding.
Markus Gabriel holds the chair for Epistemology, Modern and Contemporary Philosophy at the University of Bonn and is also the Director of the International Center for Philosophy in Bonn as well as the director of the Center for Science at Thought at Bonn.
Presented by The New School for Social Research and Philosophy Department and it is co-sponsored with the Liberal Studies Department.
This will be the third (and, time permitting, some material from the fourth) of a series of lectures that I aim to write up formally as a book. We will begin with a brief review of the most familiar theory of Chinese aesthetics: works of art are the products of sensitive human beings who cannot suppress their sincere responses to emotional stimuli. If art is understood as a sincere statement of this kind by a great genius, it stands to reason that, by correctly interpreting the work, one can communicate with that genius’s mind (xin 心) even after his or her death–and, likewise, that an artist today can communicate with audiences yet unborn. Art is thus timeless and offers the possibility of incorporeal immortality. If there is extra time, I will also survey two interrelated phenomena that I call meta-criticism and meta-writing (since there are no technical terms for them in Chinese). Meta-criticism, i.e. criticism of criticism, is a major feature of Chinese theories about art. Meta-criticism must be related to meta-writing, or the practice of writing about writing while exemplifying the very styles and techniques that one recommends: for example, artfully rhyming a couplet about rhyming.
With responses from: SANDRA SHAPSHAY (Hunter College, CUNY)
The Fall dates for the Comparative Philosophy seminar:
September 20 – Justin Tiwald (San Francisco State University)
October 11 – Richard Kim (Loyola University, Chicago
November 8 – Sungmoon Kim (City University of Hong Kong)
December 6 – Paul R. Goldin (University of Pennsylvania)
More details (such as titles, abstracts, and respondents) to follow. Looking forward to seeing you soon.
Hagop Sarkissian
Associate Professor & Chair, Department of Philosophy, The City University of New York, Baruch College
Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, CUNY Graduate Center
Co-Director, Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy
https://www.cbs.columbia.edu/cscp/
Please R.S.V.P.
The City University of New York, Graduate Center, is hosting its second Emotion Workshop. This semester, we are profiling the work of local scholars and visitors to New York. Topics relate to mind, social philosophy, epistemology, aesthetics, experimental philosophy, and psychology. The workshop will be 1 day long. Participants should not feel obligated to attend every session, but we do ask you to RSVP (this is to make sure everyone is allowed Saturday building access). If you think there is a chance you will join us for any part of the day, please send your name to Sarah Arnaud, postdoc in the Philosophy Program and co-organizer: sarnaud@gc.cuny.edu
PROGRAM
10:00-10:15 Introduction
10:15-11:00 Jesse Prinz (CUNY, Philosophy), “Are emotions socially constructed?”
11:00-11:15 Break
11:15-12:00 Rodrigo Díaz (Bern, Philosophy), “Folk emotion concepts”
12:00-12:45 Juliette Vazard (NYU / Institut Jean Nicod, Paris / University of Geneva), “Epistemic anxiety”
12:45-2:15 Break (lunch)
2:15-3:00 S. Arnaud & K. Pendoley (CUNY, Philosophy), “Intentionalism and the understanding of emotion experience”
3:00-3:15 Break
3:15-4:00 Jonathan Gilmore (CUNY, Philosophy), “Emotion, absorption, and experiential imagining”
4:00-4:45 Jordan Wylie (CUNY, Psychology), “Investigating the influences of emotion on object recognition”
4:45-6:00 Reception