Calendar

July 5 — Becky Keller – note Friday meeting because of “some kind of American holiday”

July 11 — Alex Kiefer – room will be Philosophy 201B (downstairs to the right)

July 18 — Kathryn Pendoley

July 25 — Andrew Lee

Aug 1 — Simon Brown

Aug 8 — tbd

Aug 12ish— Henry Shevlin

Aug 22 — Andrew Richmond

July 5 — Becky Keller – note Friday meeting because of “some kind of American holiday”

July 11 — Alex Kiefer – room will be Philosophy 201B (downstairs to the right)

July 18 — Kathryn Pendoley

July 25 — Andrew Lee

Aug 1 — Simon Brown

Aug 8 — tbd

Aug 12ish— Henry Shevlin

Aug 22 — Andrew Richmond

July 5 — Becky Keller – note Friday meeting because of “some kind of American holiday”

July 11 — Alex Kiefer – room will be Philosophy 201B (downstairs to the right)

July 18 — Kathryn Pendoley

July 25 — Andrew Lee

Aug 1 — Simon Brown

Aug 8 — tbd

Aug 12ish— Henry Shevlin

Aug 22 — Andrew Richmond

Presented by Fordham Philosophy

Here is the tentative schedule for PoPRocks sessions this semester. We will be meeting, usually, on Thursday or Friday evenings from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm in the 2nd floor seminar room at the NYU philosophy department.

Th. 10/03 Luke Roelofs
Fr. 10/18 Josh Myers
CANCELLED Fr. 10/25 Sam Clarke
Th. 10/31 Simon Brown
Th. 11/14 Noga Gratvol
Fr. 11/22 Cristina Ballarini
Th. 12/12 Rodrigo Diaz

You can still sign up to present! Of course, the earlier you request, the easier it is to schedule a session.

I defend a contextual reconstruction of Nietzsche’s philosophical project. My contextualist reconstruction contrasts with the rationalist reconstruction predominant in contemporary Anglo-American scholarship. After discussing the differences between the two approaches, I show how the rationalist reconstruction has distorted our understanding of Nietzsche in at least two respects. First, in trying to extract theories from Nietzsche’s corpus that will be attractive to contemporary philosophers, it has caused scholars largely to neglect the nature, structure, and argument of Nietzsche’s published works. Here, I make my case by focusing on common misunderstandings of Nietzsche’s free spirit works. Second, it has caused scholars to tame Nietzsche’s project by dismissing Thus Spoke Zarathustra as mere poetry and distancing Nietzsche from controversial ideas such as the will to power and the eternal recurrence. In contrast, I argue that by reading Nietzsche as a naturalist through the lens of a historical influence like Schopenhauer, rather than anachronistically through Quine, we can begin to make sense of these essential features of his project. I close with some remarks about why a contextual reconstruction may not only be truer to Nietzsche, but also more philosophically satisfying than the rationally reconstructed Nietzsche currently on offer.

Contact Sara Pope for more information.

Theoretical reasoning is a process by which we form doxastic states on the basis of our previously-held attitudes. One of the foundational questions about the nature of reasoning is with which mental states we can reason. Many discussions of reasoning assume that we can only reason with doxastic states such as beliefs. In this paper, I argue that we can also reason with imaginings. The argument has two parts. First, I argue that epistemic uses of the imagination instantiate a number of markers which, taken together, are very good evidence for a process counting as reasoning. These include (rule-based) operation on contents, the transmission of justification, transitions between mental states that we can be held epistemically responsible for, and the ability of imaginings to enter into explicit conscious deliberation. Second, I argue that reasoning with imagination is not reducible to reasoning with beliefs. Imaginings and beliefs make different kinds of epistemically appropriate transitions available. This is, in part, due to the distinctive way that imaginative episodes develop their content over time. Thus, the markers of reasoning that epistemic uses of the imagination instantiate cannot be explained away. One interesting upshot is that, although reasoning with imagination and reasoning with beliefs are quite psychologically different in certain important respects, they share an underlying epistemic structure.

Here is the tentative schedule for PoPRocks sessions this semester. We will be meeting, usually, on Thursday or Friday evenings from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm in the 2nd floor seminar room at the NYU philosophy department.

Th. 10/03 Luke Roelofs
Fr. 10/18 Josh Myers
Fr. 10/25 Sam Clarke
Th. 10/31 Simon Brown
Th. 11/14 Noga Gratvol
Fr. 11/22 Cristina Ballarini
Th. 12/12 Rodrigo Diaz

You can still sign up to present! Of course, the earlier you request, the easier it is to schedule a session.