Contact Professor Katja Vogt for more info.
The NYU Center for Bioethics is pleased to welcome submissions of abstracts for its 1st Annual Philosophical Bioethics Workshop, to be held at NYU on Friday, April 3, 2020.
We are seeking to showcase new work in philosophical bioethics, including (but not limited to) neuroethics, environmental ethics, animal ethics, reproductive ethics, research ethics, ethics of AI, data ethics, and clinical ethics.
Our distinguished keynote speaker will be Frances Kamm.
There will be four additional slots for papers chosen from among the submitted abstracts, including one slot set aside for a graduate student speaker. The most promising graduate student submission will be awarded a Graduate Prize, which includes coverage of travel expenses (up to $500, plus accommodation for two nights) as well as an award of $500. Please indicate in your submission email whether you would like to be considered for the Graduate Prize.
Please submit extended abstracts of between 750 and 1,000 words to philosophicalbioethics@gmail.com by 11:59 pm EST on Friday, January 24, 2020. Abstracts should be formatted for blind review and should be suitable for presentation in 30-35 minutes. Notification of acceptance will take place via email by Friday, February 14, 2020.
When submitting your abstract, please also indicate whether you would be interested in serving as a commentator in the event that your abstract is not selected for presentation. We will be inviting four additional participants to serve as commentators.
NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH PHILOSOPHY GRADUATE CONFERENCE
Keynote Speakers: Cary Wolfe (Rice) and Lori Gruen (Wesleyan)
This conference seeks to explore the relationship between animals and their environs, as well as the philosophical traditions that speak to these complex notions. We invite participants to question if and how philosophy’s treatment of animals and their environs can help us make sense of our current ecological situation. How have considerations of habitat, dominion, and domesticity determined the (ethical, ontological, rhetorical) status of animals? Conversely, how have presuppositions about “the animal” informed what environs are proper to “man”? What would it mean for an animal to be “at home” in the current world? Can philosophical approaches to animals be more than an instrumentalizing procedure? How will climate change alter not only the vitality of a species but the very grounds from which it lays claim to a home?
We welcome paper submissions of no more than 2500 words, that are prepared for a blind review, and suitable for a 15-20 minute long presentation.
Email your submission (in PDF format) to tns.animalhouse@gmail.com with “Animalhouse Submission” in the subject line. In your email, please include the following details: (a) author’s name; (b) paper title; (c) institutional affiliation; (d) contact information; and (e) abstract of no more than 250 words. Please do not include your name on the paper you are submitting. The deadline for submissions is December 31, 2019. Accepted speakers will be notified by February 1, 2020.
Questions can be directed to Aaron Neber at tns.animalhouse@gmail.com.
For updated program information and full CFP, see: https://animalhouse2020.weebly.com/
https://philevents.org/event/show/77650
Since Plato, western philosophy has been set down a path paved by a disavowal of the sensuous, bracketed material bodies, and delimited aesthetic conceptions, leaving human beings and their built environments separated from the natural world. Such exclusions have left philosophy ill-equipped to deal with the various environmental crises we currently face, as economic rationality and utilitarian logic further de-animate the world and sharpen the human/nature distinction. Even the concept “environment” often, and ironically, brings with it implicit anthropocentric assumptions, conceptualizing, and thereby separating, the human as independent from the surrounding world and reinforcing the human/nature divide. As a result, our (mis)understandings of “nature” and “environment” may make us insensitive to and perpetuate, rather than address, climate change and other environmental catastrophes. To avoid ambiguities and clarify our understanding, we must ask: what role does Nature play within our theories and practices concerning so-called Environmental Philosophy? Furthermore, what spaces, practices, and questions are made possible when we broaden our understanding of “environment” to include a more robust conceptualization of the natural world and how the human being ought to be contextualized within it?
This conference asks how we might reorient the language and practices of philosophy in a way that can enable us to adequately respond to ongoing environmental crises. As a starting point, we propose a need to reimagine the concepts “human,” “nature,” and “environment,” as well as the reciprocal relations that constitute them. To recognize humans as natural organisms, we must reevaluate the sensuous, the material, and the aesthetic and the roles they play in our attempts to construct, understand, and preserve our environment(s). How should we make sense of our practices and our relations to those with whom we share our surroundings? How can we re-situate the human with/in the environment? Do we have the right tools to guide these investigations? How might philosophy look beyond itself—to literature, architecture, music, film, design—to better bring Environment, and thus the world, into view? In the spirit of this, we invite paper as well as project submissions from current graduate students in any discipline.
Possible Topics:
● Environmental Aesthetics: Re-Considering Beauty + the Sublime
● Environmental Justice + Restorative Justice + Transformative Justice
● Environmental Ethics + Sustainable Practices
● Diversity + Biodiversity
● Capitalism and Climate
● Eco-phenomenology
● Eco-deconstruction
● Environmental Racism/Racist Environments
● Ecofeminist conceptions of nature
● Land Rights and Property Relations
● Posthumanism + Object Ontologies
● Afrofuturism + Technological Utopias
● Environmental Ethics In Narratives
● Mastery of Nature in Philosophy
● Anarcho-primitivism
● Queer and Trans Ecologies
● Local and Global Ecologies
● Regionalisms and Globalisms in the Ecological Imagination
Confirmed Conference Keynotes:
Sandra Shapshay, CUNY Graduate Center, New York
Emanuele Coccia, École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris
Dates and Location:
This conference will be held at the New School for Social Research in New York City from Thursday, April 14, to Saturday, April 16. While we (tentatively) plan to hold the conference primarily in-person we would also like to provide a hybrid option for those who would prefer to participate remotely. Following the conference, on Sunday, April 17, all participants and attendees are invited to participate in a conference hike in Cold Spring, NY (about an hour and a half north of NYC and accessible by the Metro North commuter train).
Call for Papers: Submission Procedure:
Please submit complete papers (Word Limit: 3500) and an abstract of 250 words or less by January 1st in the form of a Word attachment (.docx) or PDF to WithInEnvironments@gmail.com. Please prepare your submission for blind review by removing any identifying information from the body of the paper. In your email please include your name, affiliation, and paper title. Notification of acceptance will be sent by January 15.
Call for Projects: Submission Procedure:
Please submit a project description (Word Limit: 1000) by December 1st in the form of a Word attachment (.docx) to WithInEnvironments@gmail.com, as well as:
For Visual Arts projects: submit 5 images of your work as .jpeg.
For Performing Arts projects: submit video/ audio of your work in .mp4 format
Please prepare your submission for blind review by removing any identifying information. In your email please include your name, affiliation, and project title. Notification of acceptance will be sent by January 15.
If you have any questions please email WithInEnvironments@gmail.com
Book panel: Anat Matar, The Poverty of Ethics (Verso books 2022)
Participants:
Anat Matar (Senior Lecturer of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University)
Simon Critchley (Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at NSSR)
Raef Zreik (Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School, and Associate Professor of Jurisprudence at Ono Academic College)
Abstract:
It is a common assumption that ethics must serve as the cornerstone of politics. Yet abstract moral arguments have always been used for justifying all kinds of atrocities; ethical sensitivity and compassion have been expressed towards particular kinds of victims, while totally ignoring others.
The liberal West, in particular, continually manifests such blindness. It is horrified by non-Western oppressive methods, but turns a blind eye to their Western equivalents.
The gratification of holding the moral high ground consistently serves as a political instrument in the hands of those seeking to shore up the existing order.
In The Poverty of Ethics, philosopher and activist Anat Matar argues for the conceptual primacy of political discourse over ethics and claims that only the political force which stands for equality, justice and democracy – the Left – can provide the coordinates for an ethical life under conditions of global injustice.
Appealing to philosophical ideas on the essence of language, Matar shows how the ethos of the Left, as it has evolved over years, underlies and gradually forms the basis for ethics.
Struggles against slavery, racism, colonization and militarization, protests against exploitation and the capitalist order, the feminist movement, global demands for climate action – all these are primarily motivated by a deep understanding of Left heritage rather than by abstract ethical requirements or by airy sensitivities. They, in turn, shape and reshape our notion of moralit
What makes right acts right? A Stoic answer to Ross’s question.
When W.D. Ross poses the question, “what makes right acts right?” (The Right and the Good ch. 2), he is asking a question that is prior to the deliberative question, “how do I determine the right thing to do?” The Stoics recognize this: in De Officiis 1.7, Cicero says that every inquiry about duty has two parts: (1) a theoretical part concerned with the end of goods and evils, which addresses such matters as whether all duties are perfect, whether some are more important than others, and what are the kinds of duties, and (2) a practical part which sets out rules (praecepta) by which our conduct can be made to conform with the end. This paper focuses on (1) and in particular asks Ross’s question about Stoic right actions (kathêkonta).
The endpoint of Stoic deliberation is determining what token action is the right action. The paper begins with the Stoic distinction between a thing’s choiceworthiness, its intrinsic disposition to elicit a choice response in a suitable subject, and its possession being to-be-chosen. The determination of what is to-be-done is made by weighing against each other all the values of the relevant action types specified by their content (the so-called ‘intermediate actions’) that are in accordance with nature, as Stoic value theory says that according with nature is an objective reason to do an action. What constitutes the rightness of the token right action, and is given in its reasonable defense, is the same as what constitutes the rightness of a perfect (katorthôma) action. The Stoic distinction between right and perfect action depends on the action’s moral goodness—not rightness—which is due to its causal origin.
Presented by Professor Rachana Kamtekar (Cornell University)
The NYU Wild Animal Welfare Program will launch with a roundtable discussion between program directors Becca Franks and Jeff Sebo and program affiliates Christine Webb, Colin Jerolmack, and Dale Jamieson. The discussion will cover an array of topics including: Why does wild animal welfare matter more than ever? What are the most urgent and actionable issues confronting wild animals? and How does wild animal welfare relate to conservation biology and other fields? We will also have plenty of time for discussion with the audience
About the panelists
Becca Franks is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at NYU. She was previously a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow with the Animal Welfare Program at UBC, where she was awarded the Killam Research Prize. Her research and teaching lie at the intersection of environmental and animal protection, specializing in animal behavior, aquatic animal welfare, quantitative methods, and human-animal relationships. In addition to publishing scholarly articles, commentaries, and book chapters, she co-edited a special issue for the journal Frontiers in Veterinary Science and is an Associate Editor for the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
Jeff Sebo is Clinical Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, Affiliated Professor of Bioethics, Medical Ethics, Philosophy, and Law, Director of the Animal Studies M.A. Program, Director of the Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program, and Co-Director of the Wild Animal Welfare Program at NYU. Jeff is author of Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves (2022) and co-author of Chimpanzee Rights (2018) and Food, Animals, and the Environment (2018). He is also an executive committee member at the Center for Environmental and Animal Protection, a board member at Minding Animals International, a senior research fellow at the Legal Priorities Project, and a mentor at Sentient Media.
Christine Webb is a lecturer and post-doctoral researcher in Harvard University’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. A broadly trained primatologist with expertise in social behavior, motivation, and emotion, her recent work centers on consolation and empathy in our close primate cousins across several sanctuary and wild settings. Her research and teaching also engage critically with questions in animal and environmental ethics, particularly in deconstructing anthropocentric biases that affect the way we approach primatology, science, and our relationship with the natural world more broadly.
Colin Jerolmack is Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies at NYU. He is also the current Chair of Environmental Studies there. His research examines how relationships with animals and nature shape social life in the city, among other topics. He is author of Up to Heaven and Down to Hell: Fracking, Freedom, and Community in an American Town (2021) and The Global Pigeon (2013). He is also author of many articles on sociology, animals, and the environment, and he is editor of the Animals in Context series for NYU Press and an executive committee member of the NYU Center for Environmental and Animal Protection.
Dale Jamieson is Professor Emeritus of Environmental Studies and Director of the Center for Environmental and Animal Protection at NYU. He has published more than 100 articles and chapters, including Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle to Stop Climate Change Failed—and What It Means For Our Future (2014), Ethics and the Environment: An Introduction (2008), and Morality’s Progress: Essays on Humans, Other Animals, and the Rest of Nature (2002). He is also on the boards of several journals and has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the US Environmental Protection Agency, and more.
Artificial intelligence (AI) promises to automate and scale solutions to perennial accessibility challenges (e.g., generating image descriptions for blind users). However, research shows that AI-bias disproportionately impacts people already marginalized based on their race, gender, or disabilities, raising questions about potential impacts in addition to AI’s promise. In this talk, Cynthia Bennett will overview broad concerns at the intersection of AI, disability, and accessibility. She will then share details about one project in this research space that led to guidance on human and AI-generated image descriptions that account for subjective and potentially sensitive descriptors around race, gender, and disability of people in images.
This event will feature a thought-provoking panel discussion with sexual and reproductive justice experts on the value of the sexual and reproductive justice framework and how it can be applied to diverse stakeholders, settings, and contexts. Panelists will also highlight examples from around the world of momentum towards sexual and reproductive justice.
Event Information
Free and open to the public; registration is required for both in-person and online attendance. For additional information, please visit the event webpage. Please email Malia Maier at mm5352@cumc.columbia.edu with any questions. All in-person attendees must follow Columbia’s COVID-19 policies.
Hosted by the Global Health Justice and Governance Program at Columbia University.
Poets and singers in a number of medieval vernacular languages reached non-native audiences and inspired speakers of other languages to compose in theirs; and many imagined their compositions enjoying a universality similar to that of cosmopolitan languages like Latin and Arabic. An interesting rationalization of these aspirations can be discerned in a short verse narrative of a well-known episode in the youth of Alexander the Great, conqueror of India, together with his tutor, the philosopher Aristotle. Not only does it involve Greeks and Indians singing French songs and cosplaying French lovers, but the philosopher is induced to pretend to be a horse and then justifies his behavior as “natural,” with far-reaching implications which this talk will explore.
Sarah Kay is Professor Emerita in the Department of French Literature, Thought and Culture at New York University and Life Fellow at Girton College, University of Cambridge. In Spring 2023, she is Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the Columbia Society of Senior Scholars.
This talk is presented by the Columbia Maison Française, Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, The Society of Senior Scholars, the Department of Music, and Medieval and Renaissance Studies.