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This essay tries to develop a “black radical Kantianism” – that is, a Kantianism informed by the black experience in modernity. After looking briefly at socialist and feminist appropriations of Kant, I argue that an analogous black radical appropriation should draw on the distinctive social ontology and view of the state associated with the black radical tradition. In ethics, this would mean working with a (color-conscious rather than colorblind) social ontology of white persons and black sub-persons and then asking what respect for oneself and others would require under those circumstances. In political philosophy, it would mean framing the state as a Rassenstaat (a racial state) and then asking what measures of corrective justice would be necessary to bring about the ideal Rechtsstaat.

Response by César Cabezas Gamarra.

Presented by the German Idealism Workshop

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/

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.

Making Space for Justice: Social Movements, Collective Imagination, and Political Hope
by Michele M Moody-Adams

From nineteenth-century abolitionism to Black Lives Matter today, progressive social movements have been at the forefront of social change. Yet it is seldom recognized that such movements have not only engaged in political action but also posed crucial philosophical questions about the meaning of justice and about how the demands of justice can be met.

Michele Moody-Adams argues that anyone who is concerned with the theory or the practice of justice—or both—must ask what can be learned from social movements. Drawing on a range of compelling examples, she explores what they have shown about the nature of justice as well as what it takes to create space for justice in the world. Moody-Adams considers progressive social movements as wellsprings of moral inquiry and as agents of social change, drawing out key philosophical and practical principles. Social justice demands humane regard for others, combining compassionate concern and robust respect. Successful movements have drawn on the transformative power of imagination, strengthening the motivation to pursue justice and to create the political institutions and social policies that can sustain it by inspiring political hope.

Making Space for Justice contends that the insights arising from social movements are critical to bridging the gap between discerning theory and effective practice—and should be transformative for political thought as well as for political activism.

Please join us for a talk by Eric-John Russell (Universität Potsdam), who will present chapters from his recently published book, Why Everything is as it Seems: Hegel and Debord. Jacob McNulty (University College London) will provide a response followed by a Q&A with our audience.

Guy Debord has been called many things: pseudo-philosopher, nihilist, filmmaker, megalomaniac, strategist, third-rate Mephistopheles. His book The Society of the Spectacle (1967) has fallen into a similarly motley reception, frequently enveloped within the discourses of postmodernism, media and cultural studies, and avant-garde art history. My research however, dispenses with such narratives and instead offers a sustained examination of the concept of the society of the spectacle through the two pillars upon which Debord understood his own work as a critical theory of society: Marx’s critique of political economy and Hegel’s speculative philosophy. It is the latter that will be the focus of my paper, first by offering some introductory remarks on Debord’s theory of the spectacle but then arguing  that it precisely the speculative dimension of Hegel’s dialectic that remains central for Debord’s diagnosis of twentieth century capitalism, with emphasis placed on the importance of Hegel’s Wesenslogik. I will conclude with the historical significance of Debord’s “heretical Hegelianism,” specifically as an intervention within the atmosphere of the French Hegelianism of the interwar and postwar period.