Physicists and philosophers question the validity of one of the most observed and seemingly obvious appearance in our world: that time flows. Many in the physics and philosophy communities contend that the flow of time is not a fundamental feature of the world, nor even a fact of the world, but is an illusion. As a case in point, we will consider Brian Greene’s view of time in his PBS exposition “The Elegant Universe” holding that time may not flow, the past may not be gone, the future may already exist, and that now is not special. Most people, as observers of time’s passage, might agree with the Greek philosopher Heraclitus who expressed the idea that all is change and that change occurs with the flow of time. I will explore some of the motivation and reasons given for these positions and contrast the arguments made for each viewpoint.
The schedule: a short presentation on topic of 3-D Printing, and then Stuart’s presentation for about 1 hr. plus time for questions. It is necessary to register beforehand to be admitted.
CV: Stuart Kurtz graduated from MIT with an SB in Chemical Engineering and from Princeton with an MS degree in Polymer Engineering and an MA and PhD. in Chemical Engineering. He taught at RPI and in Brazil as Professor Titular in Materials Engineering. This was followed by a research career in industry accumulating around 30 patents and publishing at least a few good papers. He now focuses on Philosophy of Science and Physics and climbing mountains because they are there. He has spoken to the Lyceum Society many times; most recently in January, 2018 he spoke on the topic: Lessons from Science Lysenko, Velikovsky and the Demarcation Problem; In February, 2018 he spoke on Geoengineering for Climate Change Mitigation. In December, 2018 he reviewed the Nobel Prize in Physics for that year.
The philosophical traditions of India offer contemporary researchers an unparalleled and mostly untapped resource for fresh thinking about attention, its relations to mind and world. From Nyāya manas-theory to the extensive Buddhist theories about attention’s relationship with consciousness, and from precise taxonomies of the varieties of attention to discussions about the norms governing attention, epistemic, moral, and practical, the wealth and sophistication of Indian analysis is astounding. Our workshop will look at the ways in which Indian, including Buddhist, philosophical theory can enrich contemporary discussion, and there will be presentations by a world-class panel of speakers.
We hope too that this workshop will serve as a catalyst to Indian philosophical studies in the New York area. The workshop is open to everyone, free and without registration, and the program is here.
April 25, 2019|DAY 1
8:45 am – 9:00 am
Coffee & Welcome (Jonardon Ganeri NYU)
9:00 am – 10:45 am
Panel 1. Attending to Oneself
Chair: Nic Bommarito (Buffalo)
9:00 am – 9:50 am
Sharon Street (NYU, via video conferencing)
“On Recognizing Oneself in Others: A Meditation-Based Response to Mackie’s Argument from Queerness”
9:55 am – 10:45 am
Muhammad Faruque (Fordham)
“Attending to Oneself: Muḥammad Iqbāl and his Indian Contemporaries”
10:45 am – 11:00 am
Morning Break
11:00 am – 12:45 pm
Panel 2. Attention and Affect
Chair: Joerg Tuske (Salisbury)
11:00 am – 11:50am
Evan Thompson (British Columbia)
“Affect Biased Attention and Concept Formation”
11:55 am – 12:45 pm
Sonam Kachru (Virginia)
“Attention and Affect: A View from Indian Buddhist Philosophy”
12:45 pm – 2:00 pm
Lunch Break
2:00 pm – 3:45 pm
Panel 3. Decision and Exclusion
Chair: Emily McRae (New Mexico)
2:00 pm – 2:50 pm
Arindam Chakrabarti (Stonybrook)
“Deciding to Attend and the Problem of Disjunctive Attention”
2:55 pm – 3:45 pm
Catherine Prueitt (George Mason)
“At the Limits of Pain: Attention, Exclusion, and Self-Knowledge in Pratyabhijñā Śaivism.”
3:45 pm – 4:00 pm
Afternoon Break
4:00 pm – 5:45 pm
Panel 4. The Ethics of Attention
Chair: Eyal Aviv (George Washington)
4:00 pm – 4:50 pm
Curie Virag (Edinburgh)
“Attention as Cognitive Resonance”
4:55 pm – 5:45 pm
Shalini Sinha (Reading)
“The Ethics of Attention in Śāntideva and Simone Weil”
April 26, 2019|DAY 2
10:15 am – 10:30 am
Coffee
10:30 am – 12:15 pm
Panel 5. Self-Awareness and Attention
Chair: Payal Doctor (LaGuardia)
10:30 am – 11:20 am
Amit Chaturvedi (Hong Kong)
“Phenomenal Priority and Reflexive Self-Awareness: Watzl meets Yogācāra”
11:25 am – 12:15 pm
Nilanjan Das (University College London)
“Śrīharṣa on Self-knowledge and the Inner Sense”
12:15 pm – 1:30 pm
Lunch Break
1:30 pm – 3:15 pm
Panel 6. Mindfulness and Justification
Chair: Bryce Huebner (Georgetown)
1:30 pm – 2:20 pm
Georges Dreyfus (Williams)
“But What is Mindfulness? A Phenomenological Approach”
2:25 pm – 3:15 pm
Anand Vaidya (San Jose)
“Attention and Justification”
3:15 pm – 3:30 pm
Afternoon Break
3:30 pm – 5:15 pm
Panel 7. The Wandering Self
Chair: Adriana Renero (NYU)
3:30 pm – 4:20 pm
Carolyn Jennings (UC Merced)
“From Attention to Self”
4:25 pm – 5:15 pm
Zac Irving (Virginia)
“Harnessing the Wandering Mind”
Various programmes and results in the philosophy/foundations of spacetime theories illustrate themes from reductionism and functionalism in general philosophy of science. I will focus on some programmes and results about how the physics of matter contributes to determining, or even determines, or even explains, chrono-geometry. I hope to say something about most of the following examples: in the philosophical literature, Robb (1914), and Mundy (1983); and in the physics literature: Barbour and Bertotti (1982); Hojman, Kuchar and Teitelboim (1976); Dull, Schuller et al. (2012, 2018); and Gomes & Shyam (2016).
Presented by Metro Area Philosophers of Science
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Armin Schulz (University of Kansas)
Details: 4:30-6:30pm Wednesday Oct 9; 3rd floor seminar room, 5 Washington Place (NYU).
Title: TBD.
Abstract: TBD.
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Christopher Weaver (University of Illinois)
Details: 4:30-6:30pm Wednesday Nov 13; 3rd floor seminar room, 5 Washington Place (NYU).
Title: TBD.
Abstract: TBD.
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)
Rebecca Comay, Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature, The University of Toronto discusses Hegel and Beckett followed by a response from Paul Kottman of The New School for Social Research.
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.
I will argue, pace a great many of my contemporaries, that there’s something right about Boltzmann’s attempt to ground the 2nd law of thermodynamics in deterministic time-reversal invariant classical dynamics, and that in order to appreciate what’s right about (what was at least at one time) Boltzmann’s explanatory project one has to fully apprehend the nature of (a) microphysical causal structure, (b) time-reversal invariance, and (c) the relationship between Boltzmann entropy and the work of Rudolf Clausius.
There will be dinner after the talk. If you are interested, please send an email with “Dinner” in the heading to nyphilsci@gmail.com (please note that all are welcome, but only the speaker’s dinner will be covered.) If you have any other questions, please email denise.dykstra@rutgers.edu.
David Albert’s work has been of seminal importance to the foundations of physics, exerting central influence on the direction the field and laying foundations for much of its ongoing development. In celebration of David’s many past and continuing contributions, we will be hosting a conference at Columbia University on the foundations of physics. We expect talks on a range of topics, including the foundations of quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics, the possible emergence of space and time, the metaphysics of science, and the nature of agency.
Confirmed Speakers
Jeff Barrett (UC Irvine)
Gordon Belot (Michigan)
Craig Callender (UC San Diego)
Sean Carroll (Caltech)
Eddy Chen (UC San Diego)
Sidney Felder (Rutgers)
Alison Fernandes (Dublin)
Shelly Goldstein (Rutgers)
Ned Hall (Harvard)
Barry Loewer (Rutgers)
Tim Maudlin (NYU)
Michael Miller (Toronto)
Alyssa Ney (UC Davis)
Lev Vaidman (Tel Aviv)
David Wallace (Pittsburgh)
Nino Zanghi (Genoa)
Organizing Committee
Alison Fernandes (alison.fernandes@tcd.ie)
Michael Miller (mike.miller@utoronto.ca)
Porter Williams (porterwi@usc.edu)
.
The conference is open to the public. Please direct any questions to Porter Williams (porterwi@usc.edu).
Friday, November 15
8:45 am: Breakfast
9:30 am: Jeff Barrett (UC Irvine): Quantum Randomness and Empirical Underdetermination
10:15 am: Shelly Goldstein (Rutgers): Typicality, Humean Probability, and the Mentaculus
11:00: Coffee Break
11:20 am: Craig Callender (UC San Diego): No Time for Time from No-Time
12:05 pm: Alyssa Ney (UC Davis): WFR or QFT?
12:50: Lunch
2:20 pm: Gordon Belot (Michigan): The Mach-Einstein Principle of 1917-1918
3:05 pm: Sean Carroll (Caltech): The Mentaculus as a Causal Network
3:50: Coffee Break
4:10 pm: David Wallace (Pittsburgh): TBA
4:55 pm: Ned Hall (Harvard): Respectful Deflationism
5:45 pm: Adjourn
Saturday, November 16
8:45 am: Breakfast
9:30 am: Lev Vaidman (Tel Aviv): The many-worlds interpretation and the Born rule
10:15 am: Eddy Chen (UC San Diego): Nomic Vagueness
11:00: Coffee Break
11:20 am: Michael Miller (Toronto): Infrared Cancellation and Measurement
12:05 pm: Alison Fernandes (Trinity College Dublin): The Direction of Records
12:50: Lunch
2:20 pm: Sidney Felder (Rutgers): Gödel’s Rotating Solutions, Bilking, and Natural Laws
3:05 pm: Nino Zanghi (INFN Genova): TBA
3:50: Coffee Break
4:10 pm: Tim Maudlin (NYU): S = k ln(B(W)): Boltzmann entropy, the Second Law, and the Architecture of Hell
4:55 pm: Barry Loewer (Rutgers): The Consequence Argument Meets the Mentaculus
5:45 pm: Adjourn
The Vanishing Point of Existence: Kierkegaard and the Ethics of the Novel.
Presented by: Yi-Ping Ong, Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Thought and Literature, Johns Hopkins University.
Presented by Liberal Studies at The New School of Social Research