The 23rd Annual CUNY Graduate Student Philosophy Conference invites graduate students to submit their work engaging with philosophical topics and traditions that consider or bridge the analytic/continental divide. The analytic/continental division typically assumes contrasting notions of what philosophy ‘is’ and what it ought to be. The divide also describes the varying methodologies employed when we practice philosophy. Whether it refers to meta-philosophical commitments or strategies used, the divide can do exactly that – divide. When concerned with the nature of philosophy and how one ought to conceive of the practice the stakes can be high; when we ask, “What counts as philosophy?” we implicitly ask, “What doesn’t ‘count’ as philosophy?” This conference aims to explore issues that need to be explored by the philosophical community at large, especially when the legitimacy of certain practices are under scrutiny. The conference also aims to create a space where we can learn to ask better questions concerning the nature of our academic practices, the traditions we draw from, the methodologies we employ, and the topics we consider.
Keynote speaker: Talia Mae Bettcher (California State University, Los Angeles)
We are particularly interested in papers from all areas of philosophy that:
- explore the meta-philosophical or sociological questions concerning the analytical/continental divide without exclusionary border-policing. Is such a divide legitimate? What has motivated this divide? What are the advantages and disadvantages of maintaining the divide? How can we bridge or dismantle the divide? Etc.
- broadly engage with the question of “what can philosophy be?” How can philosophy establish fewer borders and more bridges?
- engage with philosophers (i.e. Rorty, Badiou, Williams, etc.), philosophical topics (i.e. race, gender, coloniality, etc.), and/or traditions (i.e. critical race theory, feminist philosophy, queer theory, postcolonial/decolonial theory, etc.) that have always or currently do bridge the analytic/continental divide, again without exclusionary border-policing.
- explore the analytic/continental divide in an interdisciplinary manner drawing from sociology, critical psychology, gender studies, race studies, literature, history, the arts, etc.
The conference is committed to providing a platform for marginalized persons and topics in the discipline. In answering some of the questions presented we highly encourage papers regarding, among other topics: critical race theory, feminist philosophy, queer theory, trans philosophy, and disabilities studies. Speakers from marginalized groups in the discipline are strongly encouraged to submit. Any abstracts that aim to discredit already marginalized philosophers or philosophies are strongly discouraged.
2023 marks the 50th anniversary of the birth of hip-hop, and the beginning of a sonic, cultural and socio-political revolution that changed the U.S. and the world. To commemorate the anniversary, Brooklyn Public Library will present NIGHT IN THE LIBRARY: THE PHILOSOPHY OF HIP-HOP on Saturday, June 17th, from 7 pm – 2 am at Central Library.
Join us for this FREE event that will take over the entire Central Library building to celebrate hip-hop culture past, present and future, with keynote addresses, live DJs, film screenings, discussions, debates and contemplative engagements. BPL invites you to celebrate hip-hop and spend a NIGHT IN THE LIBRARY.
Co-curated by LeBrandon Smith and Kelly Harrison. The Dilemma Series is curated by April R. Silver, founder of AKILA WORKSONGS.
Serving as a response to Aimé Césaire’s call for a universal filled with particularity from his infamous resignation from the French Communist Party in 1956, I focus on the role of culture for a project of universal emancipation. To do so, I follow Sylvia Wynter’s statement that the Négritude movement is an example of a universal and cultural project. Recalling Césaire’s words in “Return to My Native Land,” culture that serves universal emancipation must be “free of the desire to tame but familiar with the play of the world.” To this end, I develop a conception of culture that is both local and universal, that centers on the importance of what it means to be human, as life, as being, and as experience by reading culture as necessarily local, collective, disenchanted, and related to play.
Bio:
Elisabeth Paquette is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Her book, titled Universal Emancipation: Race beyond Badiou (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), engages French political theorist Alain Badiou’s discussion of Négritude and the Haitian Revolution to develop a nuanced critique of his theory of emancipation. Currently, she is working on a monograph on the writings of decolonial theorist Sylvia Wynter. She is also the Founder of the Feminist Decolonial Politics Workshop, which takes place annually during the summer.
What does it mean to be, appear, and act in public? These questions are rarely asked when it comes to the often-diagnosed “structural transformation” (Habermas) of the public sphere. Yet people have a wide variety of “public experiences” every day: from the simple experience of leaving the house and moving on the street to highly networked and technologically mediated public communication and concerted action. In the project I would like to present in its outlines, I try to shed light on the quality and structure of such “public experiences” using a phenomenological approach. In this way, I want to reclaim public space as an experiential space and argue that experiences matter for the constitution of different kinds of public spheres and public spaces.
How, for example, do phenomena like visibility, attention, relevance, reality, trust, or their opposites emerge in public contexts? And how can our individual and collective experiences of the public retain its high democratic ideals while facing the constant threat of superficial entertainment and self-commercialization? In contrast to theories that view the public sphere primarily as a system of information, coordination, or discourse, a phenomenological approach aims to reveal the ways in which experiences constitute spaces of meaning. Such a disclosure of the world-building function of experience is crucial if we are to understand how people can relate to their public existence and a public world, how they can integrate into it or fall away from it, gain or lose trust, and how a shared world is either built or destroyed.
Bio:
Sophie Loidolt is Professor of philosophy and Chair of Practical Philosophy at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. She is a recurrent visiting professor at Center for Subjectivity Research in Copenhagen and the president of the German Society for Phenomenological Research. Most of her education took place at the University of Vienna. Research stays brought her to the Husserl-Archives in Leuven, St. Denis University in Paris, and the New School of Social Research in New York.
Her work centers on issues in the fields of phenomenology, political and legal philosophy, and ethics, as well as transcendental philosophy and philosophy of mind. Her book Phenomenology of Plurality. Hannah Arendt on Political Intersubjectivity (Routledge 2017) won the Edward Goodwin Ballard Book Prize in 2018. Other books include: Anspruch und Rechtfertigung. Eine Theorie des rechtlichen Denkens im Anschluss an die Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls (Springer 2009), Einführung in die Rechtsphänomenologie (Mohr Siebeck 2010; Japanese translation will appear in 2024).