Professor Rupert Read (Personal Website link) will be joining us on the 22nd of October from 1-3 PM EDT on Zoom in presenting the introduction from his book, Wittgenstein’s Liberatory Philosophy: Thinking Through His Philosophical Investigations, in which he argues that “the key to understanding Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is to understand its liberatory purport.”
One of the most challenging aspects of the war in Ukraine is the way in which the conflict has been constantly shifting in its form. In the first place, there is a conventional ground war between Russia and Ukraine, in which the identity and will of the two peoples is at stake. Yet Russia has used weapons supplied by Iran, and Ukraine depends on NATO for its own supplies, indicating that this war depends on the maintenance and expansion of alliances. The stability of these alliances in turn depends on a combination of Realpolitik and shared values as the glue that holds them together. This logic of alliances motivates the energy war that Russia is waging with Europe, revealing that, unbeknownst to Europe, Russian energy policy over the last decade was an early form of the war. Similarly, the threat of nuclear war also tests the resolve of NATO, forcing it to consider the values at stake in the conflict. Is the war about Ukraine’s sovereignty or the principle of nation-state sovereignty itself? Is it about human rights for Ukrainians or the entire human rights project? For Russia, is it about self-defense or a pan-Slavic identity? Is it about the protection of Russian minorities in Ukraine or the threat of Western secularization?
The material form of the war—economic, conventional, nuclear—will depend on the way in which the participants on all sides and in all parts of the world come to an understanding about these questions concerning the moral and spiritual stakes in the war. If it is just a matter of giving up Ukraine, then the economic costs for Europe may not be worth the fight, and Russia’s victory in the energy war could lead to a general NATO capitulation. But if the freedom and security of central and western Europe are also at stake, then even a severe economic recession would be a small price to pay for the reestablishment of a NATO-dominated security order. Is freedom worth the risk of annihilation? Is peace worth the indignities and repression of authoritarianism? As the most serious global conflict since World War II, the war in Ukraine risks going beyond the bounds of all other forms of war before it. What are the resources that are necessary for meeting its challenges? How can the shifting forms of the war be contained and channeled toward a future lasting peace?
These types of questions are not specific to the war in Ukraine but arise in any situation of war. Every war forces us to reconsider the character of war and the forms that it can take. In the first place, the insight that leads to a war is one about the nature of a conflict. War only begins once the parties determine that there is an otherwise irresolvable conflict about the basis of order. The course of a war also results in a practical insight into the form of a postwar order. Peace and stability cannot arrive until all come to an agreement about the new understanding of order. This intertwining of practical and theoretical gains means that the time of war is also a time of shifting manifestations of the forms by which war is fought, as well as the forms of order to be established by the outcome of the war. The course of a war will be decided by our understanding of the kind of world we want to live in, the risks we are willing to take to establish such a world, and our belief in its practical possibility. A war will necessarily change in form depending upon where we are in the movement from the conflict of competing ideas to the victory of a particular conception of order. Since the result of the conflict would be an establishment of sovereignty based on some understanding of order, the conflict is not just a material one but also a theoretical and spiritual one about the metaphysical basis of order. In the process of war, insight leads to conflict, and conflict leads to insight.
At the 2023 Telos-Paul Piccone Institute conference on forms of war, we will consider different ways of understanding the relationship between conflict and insight in war as well as examples of how the conceptualization of conflict affects the outbreak, progress, and outcome of wars. On the one hand, we will consider the way in which the experience of war, both on the battlefield and on the home front, affects the outcome of the war. On the other hand, we will look at how this importance of the experience of war in turn affects the strategy of war. Such strategizing begins already at the nascent stages of conflict, before any actual fighting begins, but in which the possibility of conflict can already lead to concessions by one side or the other that lead to a transformation of the basis of order. Similarly, fears and hopes for the future also determine the course of a war, helping the participants to end a war by offering them a mutually acceptable vision of the terms of peace.
Questions include:
- What are the different causes of war in any particular case? How do these causes attain such significance that they become a casus belli? Were there alternatives to war that were not taken?
- In what situations does the refusal of war lead to an outcome that is tantamount to surrender in war? How can the threat of war be used as a political tool?
- To what extent is war a continuation of politics? Or is war the breakdown of politics?
- How have different wars been experienced on the battlefield and on the home front? How have the different experiences of war affected the outcomes?
- How does our understanding of world order affect the turn to war?
- What is the relationship between war and peace in terms of international order?
- How do fictional or historical representations of war affect the conduct of war?
- What is the relationship between war and the collective identity of a people?
- How are wars between nation-states linked to their domestic politics? In what situations does an external enemy create unity or division in domestic politics?
- How is war used as a tool in domestic politics, for instance, as a way to divert attention from domestic political problems?
- What are the characteristics of different types of war, such as limited war, absolute war, civil war, cold war, proxy war, phony war, trade war, guerilla war, war on terror, nuclear war? What factors lead to a war being fought in a particular way?
- To what extent can a representation of war replace a real war, for instance, when single combat is supposed to substitute for the combat of armies, or when war is televised?
- What is the relationship between spiritual concerns and the forms of war? Are all wars in some sense religious wars?
Conference Location
The conference will take place at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute in New York City from Thursday, March 30, to Saturday, April 1, 2023.
Abstract Submissions
Please note: Abstracts for this conference will only be accepted from current Telos-Paul Piccone Institute members. In order to become a member, please visit our membership enrollment page. Telos-Paul Piccone Institute memberships are valid until the end of the annual New York City conference.
If you are interested in making a presentation, please submit a 200-word abstract and 50-word bio by December 15, 2022, to telosnyc2023@telosinstitute.net. Please place “The 2023 Telos Conference” in the email’s subject line.
The NYC Wittgenstein Workshop presents:
March 31st — Sandra Laugier (Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne) will be presenting on Wittgenstein and Care Ethics
April 14th — Camila Lobo (PhD candidate in Philosophy at Nova University of Lisbon and visiting scholar) will be presenting on Wittgenstein and hermeneutical justice in connection with the so-called “problem of the new.”
April 21st — Harmut von Sass (Humboldt University Berlin and a visiting scholar) will be presenting on gratitude.
April 28th — Janna van Grunsven (Delft University of Technology) will be presenting on How Social Media Platforms Disrupt the Field of Social Affordances and Threaten Human Flourishing.
With the exception of our last talk (which will take place over Zoom), workshops will be in person from 4 to 6 pm EST, followed by a reception. As always, snacks and drinks will be provided.
Look out for an email closer to each event with more details regarding the location and materials the speaker would like to circulate.
The NYC Wittgenstein Workshop presents:
March 31st — Sandra Laugier (Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne) will be presenting on Wittgenstein and Care Ethics
April 14th — Camila Lobo (PhD candidate in Philosophy at Nova University of Lisbon and visiting scholar) will be presenting on Wittgenstein and hermeneutical justice in connection with the so-called “problem of the new.” (11am-1pm EDT)
April 21st — Harmut von Sass (Humboldt University Berlin and a visiting scholar) will be presenting on gratitude.
April 28th — Janna van Grunsven (Delft University of Technology) will be presenting on How Social Media Platforms Disrupt the Field of Social Affordances and Threaten Human Flourishing.
With the exception of our last talk (which will take place over Zoom), workshops will be in person from 4 to 6 pm EST, followed by a reception. As always, snacks and drinks will be provided.
Look out for an email closer to each event with more details regarding the location and materials the speaker would like to circulate.
The NYC Wittgenstein Workshop presents:
March 31st — Sandra Laugier (Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne) will be presenting on Wittgenstein and Care Ethics
April 14th — Camila Lobo (PhD candidate in Philosophy at Nova University of Lisbon and visiting scholar) will be presenting on Wittgenstein and hermeneutical justice in connection with the so-called “problem of the new.”
April 21st — Harmut von Sass (Humboldt University Berlin and a visiting scholar) will be presenting on gratitude.
April 28th — Janna van Grunsven (Delft University of Technology) will be presenting on How Social Media Platforms Disrupt the Field of Social Affordances and Threaten Human Flourishing.
With the exception of our last talk (which will take place over Zoom), workshops will be in person from 4 to 6 pm EST, followed by a reception. As always, snacks and drinks will be provided.
Look out for an email closer to each event with more details regarding the location and materials the speaker would like to circulate.
The NYC Wittgenstein Workshop presents:
March 31st — Sandra Laugier (Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne) will be presenting on Wittgenstein and Care Ethics
April 14th — Camila Lobo (PhD candidate in Philosophy at Nova University of Lisbon and visiting scholar) will be presenting on Wittgenstein and hermeneutical justice in connection with the so-called “problem of the new.”
April 21st — Harmut von Sass (Humboldt University Berlin and a visiting scholar) will be presenting on gratitude.
April 28th — Janna van Grunsven (Delft University of Technology) will be presenting on How Social Media Platforms Disrupt the Field of Social Affordances and Threaten Human Flourishing.
With the exception of our last talk (which will take place over Zoom), workshops will be in person from 4 to 6 pm EST, followed by a reception. As always, snacks and drinks will be provided.
Look out for an email closer to each event with more details regarding the location and materials the speaker would like to circulate.
still scheduled, but zoom link for those who can’t travel: https://NewSchool.zoom.us/j/8479688193
Throughout the 21st century, philosophers of language have increasingly concerned themselves with the hateful, coercive, dehumanizing, and deadly. In particular, ‘non-ideal’ philosophers of language question whether received conceptual toolkits from philosophy of language manage to make contact with our non-ideal world at all. This paper takes up that methodological interest from a Wittgensteinian perspective. Drawing on critical interventions by Nancy Bauer, Avner Baz, Alice Crary, Cora Diamond, and Toril Moi, I argue that non-ideal philosophers of language neutralize their ideology-critical bite when they presume an authoritative force for their words by virtue of a normatively neutral conception of reason. This neutralization is driven and sustained by an idle picture of language that isolates our words from the activities into which they are woven. To make discursive phenomena available in their political import, we philosophers of language must acknowledge our own non-neutral involvement in the very discursive practices we’re theorizing – and this will require us to relinquish the entitlement to impose authoritative requirements on language through theories of meaning.
To illustrate the need for normatively non-neutral methods in philosophical practice, I focus on cases where philosophers’ curious gaze treats trans people
as fascinating objects of knowledge, as opposed to acknowledging us as interlocutors and recognizing the political stakes of our discursive practices. What inhibits the cultivation of acknowledgement, of normatively resonant modes of attention, is a picture of philosophical theorizing that forbids us from articulating our political solidarities through our work (and thus obfuscates what we ourselves are doing with words when theorizing). The non-ideal philosopher’s critical concept of idealization, seen aright in a normatively non-neutral light, exemplifies the sort of theoretical resource that is mobilized by members of marginalized groups to invite such modes of attention – to shape not only our epistemic resources, but also our senses of what matters.
The virtually ubiquitous view of seeing-as experiences in Wittgenstein scholarship interprets them as conceptually-laden (with some exceptions, e.g. Travis 2016). The claim is that we can see the same image differently due to switching the conceptual filters, as it were, through which we experience the image (e.g. Schroeder 2010; Mulhall 2001). In this paper I focus on a specific kind of a seeing-as experience for which Wittgenstein’s example of suddenly noticing the similarity between faces is the paradigm. I argue that it is possible to have no concepts involved in this experience, and propose an understanding of what I call “the imagistic seeing-as” as a similarity association, of the kind that grounds poetic means of expression, such as metaphors. The associative nature of this imagistic seeing-as experience may also contribute to the understanding of biases – both personal (e.g. displaced offence) and social (e.g. sexism).
The importance of incorporating value pluralism into a theory of justice is recognized in many conceptualizations of justice. This pluralism is often seen as a reason to attend to a range of perspectives, perspectives which can function as a source of information in determining which principles should guide justice. However, philosophy’s ability to properly attend to different perspectives has received extensive attention in the criticisms of various non-ideal theorists, who argue that ideal-theoretical philosophy runs the risk of excluding important aspects of actual social problems. Taking these criticisms on board, this paper builds on non-ideal theory by arguing for a Wittgensteinian family resemblance approach to justice. I will explain how this linguistic practice-embedded understanding of justice can be a helpful tool for non-ideal theory, as it can give us insight into why, in various similar but different cases, the notion of justice is seen as applicable. In light of this approach, I will suggest a reorientation of the pluralist demand towards an empirical starting point.
Presented by the NYC Wittgenstein Workshop
If you will be visiting from outside the New School, email the workshop to inform the security desk.
Room 1101, 6 E 16th St, New York, NY 10003