Our next meeting will be on September 6 and we will go over Christian List’s survey article on Social Choice from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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)
Zionists and anti-Zionists alike agree that Zionism consists in the idea that the Jewish People has the right to their own nation state. They deeply disagree about the legitimacy of such politics. Whereas anti-Zionists maintain that a Jewish State is necessarily discriminatory and even racist, Zionists tend to reject anti-Zionist arguments as anti-Semitic. I argue that both sides of this familiar debate are wrong. (Or worse: all too often, both are right.) A Jewish State indeed cannot be a liberal democracy; and yet Zionist politics — contrary to the consensus held by Zionists and anti-Zionists alike — does not require a Jewish State. That’s a form of Zionism that’s legitimate, important and still viable: the liberal Zionism of the future.
Learn more about the book A Future for Israel, Beyond the Two-State Solution, by Omri Boehm.
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
Meetings are held on Tuesdays at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus in Manhattan in the Plaza View Room on the 12th floor of the Lowenstein Building (113 W 60th St).We meet from 5:30 to 6:45 and papers are read in advance. If interested in attending, contact sahaddad@fordham.edu, swhitney@fordham.edu, or jeflynn@fordham.edu.
2019-20
- September 24 – Rosaura Martínez (UNAM) “Alterability and Writing. Rethinking an Ontology of Dependency”
- October 15 – Jesús Luzardo (Fordham) “The Wages of the Past: Whiteness, Nostalgia, and Property”
- November 19 – Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson (Syracuse) “Conceptualizing Terrorism ‘From Below’: Lynching as Racial Terrorism”
- February 11 – Jill Stauffer (Haverford)
- March 10 – Sina Kramer (Loyola Marymount), “How to Read a City: Toward a Political Epistemology of Gentrification.”
- April 7 – David Lay Williams (DePaul) “’Too much abundance in one or a few private men’: Hobbes on Inequality and the Concentration of Wealth”
ERIK OLIN WRIGHT spent the last years of his life thinking about ways to challenge and transform capitalist societies. He distilled his thinking in a book, How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21st Century (Verso, 2019). The symposium is designed to launch a debate about the strengths and weaknesses of Wright’s approach. We seek to both honor our colleague’s memory and assure that his ideas become part of current discussions of socialism and socialist strategy. The event will consist of three panels during the day and an evening session that will include tributes to Wright and a keynote by his friend, Ira Katznelson.
This event is co-sponsored by the Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies at The New School for Social Research, and the journal, Politics & Society.
Conference Schedule
10AM Teddy Seidenfeld – Conditional Probability, Conditionalization, and Total Evidence
11AM Eleonora Cresto – Beyond Indeterminate Utilities. The Case of Neurotic Cake-Cutting
11:20AM Ignacio Ojea Quintana – Unawareness and Levi’s Consensus as Common Ground
11:40AM Rush Stewart – Uncertainty, Equality, Fraternity
1PM Nils-Eric Sahlin – Levi’s Decision Theory: Lessons Learned
1:45PM Wilfried Sieg – Scientific Theories as Set-Theoretic Predicates?
2:45PM Panel Discussion – Learning from Levi
Abstracts available in attached documents under “Supporting material.”
Memorial
A memorial service will be held at 5PM at St. Paul’s Chapel on the Columbia campus. Reception to follow on the 7th floor of Philosophy Hall.
Our situation is dangerous, there are uncertainties and elements of chaos in our environment, in international relations, in biotechnology, in sexual relations… But it is here that we should remember Mao’s old motto: “There is great disorder under heaven, so the situation is excellent!” Let’s not lose nerves, let’s exploit the confusion as a chance to propose a new radical vision. In January 2019, an international team of scientists proposed “a diet it says can improve health while ensuring sustainable food production to reduce further damage to the planet.” We are talking about a radical reorganization of our entire food production and distribution—so how to do it? Is it not clear that a strong global agency is needed with the power to coordinate such measures? And is not such an agency pointing in the direction of what we once called “Communism”? And does the same not hold for other threats to our survival as humans? Is a similar global agency not needed also to deal with the problem of increasing numbers of refugees and immigrants, with the problem of digital control over our lives? Let’s not be afraid to tackle the problem of the new order that the ongoing disorder is calling for.
Slavoj Žižek will be introduced by Xudong Zhang, Professor of Comparative Literature & East Asian Studies, and Director of China House at NYU.
About the speakers:
Slavoj Žižek, Ph.D., is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and visiting professor at a number of U.S. Universities (Columbia, Princeton, New School for Social Research, New York University, University of Michigan). He obtained his Ph.D. in Philosophy in Ljubljana studying Psychoanalysis and also studied at the University of Paris. Slavoj Zizek is a Hegelian philosopher, Lacanian psychoanalyst, and Marxist social analyst. He is the author of The Indivisible Remainder; The Sublime Object of Ideology; The Metastases of Enjoyment; Looking Awry: Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture; The Plague of Fantasies; The Ticklish Subject; Disparities; and Antigone. His latest publication, Like a Thief in Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism (Seven Stories Press), will be on sale at the event by the NYU Bookstore.
Xudong Zhang is Professor of Comparative Literature and East Asian Studies at NYU, and founding director of the International Center for Critical Theory (a consortium of Peking University, New York University, University of Tokyo and Eastern China Normal University). He is also Director of China House NYU. He has published widely on critical theory and transcultural comparisons of Chinese and European modernities.
As part of NYU Skirball Talks, the NYU Department of German and Deutsches Haus at NYU present Disorder under Heaven with Slavoj Žižek.
Attendance information:
This event is free and open to the general public. Please RSVP here.
“SKIRBALL TALKS: SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: DISORDER UNDER HEAVEN” is a DAAD-supported event.
Meetings are held on Tuesdays at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus in Manhattan in the Plaza View Room on the 12th floor of the Lowenstein Building (113 W 60th St).We meet from 5:30 to 6:45 and papers are read in advance. If interested in attending, contact sahaddad@fordham.edu, swhitney@fordham.edu, or jeflynn@fordham.edu.
2019-20
- September 24 – Rosaura Martínez (UNAM) “Alterability and Writing. Rethinking an Ontology of Dependency”
- October 15 – Jesús Luzardo (Fordham) “The Wages of the Past: Whiteness, Nostalgia, and Property”
- November 19 – Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson (Syracuse) “Conceptualizing Terrorism ‘From Below’: Lynching as Racial Terrorism”
- February 11 – Jill Stauffer (Haverford)
- March 10 – Sina Kramer (Loyola Marymount), “How to Read a City: Toward a Political Epistemology of Gentrification.”
- April 7 – David Lay Williams (DePaul) “’Too much abundance in one or a few private men’: Hobbes on Inequality and the Concentration of Wealth”
Although the Colloquium on Legal, Political, and Social Philosophy is on hiatus this year, it will convene a special “pop-up” session on Thursday, October 17 from 4-7 p.m. in the Faculty Library on the third floor of Vanderbilt Hall. Professor Joseph Raz, who has long been an important member of the Colloquium community, will present a pre-circulated paper on this occasion, which marks the end of many years during which he has taught regularly at Columbia Law School each fall. Professor Raz’s paper will be posted on the Colloquium website in due course.