What can science teach us about how we perceive and understand art? How can art help us understand ourselves and each other? In this event, the Zuckerman Institute explores the interactions between our brains and the artistic world, finding connections and parallels between art and science.
Event Speakers
Please visit the event webpage to view the speaker list.
Event Information
Free and open to the public, registration is required by January 28, 2022. This event will also be live-streamed. Please email zuckermaninstitute@columbia.edu with any questions.
This talk is part of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Brain Insight Lecture series hosted by Columbia’s Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute and supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.
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.
This conference aims to initiate dialogues between philosophy and the arts. Philosophers and thinkers/ scholars across disciplines of humanities and social sciences will meet with artists and scholars from a wide variety of visual and visual artistic disciplines, including painting, photography, and literature, as well as travel, dance, and fashion. Rather than taking art as a mere object of philosophical study, this conference will explore the manifold confluences and intersections of philosophy and art, exploring how each can become the object of the other and how the boundary between the philosophical and the artistic can be sharpened or blurred. The motive is specifically to explore the “visual” and “movement” element in art of, and in everyday life and theorize it – both philosophically and critically.
Co-sponsored by: Office of Deans: New School for Social Research and School of Art & Design History & Theory; University Student Senate and Graduate Faculty Student Senate
Schedule and Location
The conference will meet on The New School campus in New York City.
On March 24th, we will meet in room B500 at 65 W 11 Street.
On March 25th, we will meet in Starr Foundation Hall UL105 at University Center (63 Fifth Avenue).
Following is the schedule for both days, (please see the website for details on panels and speakers):
11:00 am Panel 1 Speaker presentations.
12:00 pm Panel 1 roundtable and audience Q&A.
1:15 pm Lunch break.
2:15 pm Panel 2 Speaker presentations.
3:15 pm Panel 2 roundtable and audience Q&A.
4:30 pm Evening reception with free food and drinks for attendees!
This conference aims to initiate dialogues between philosophy and the arts. Philosophers and thinkers/ scholars across disciplines of humanities and social sciences will meet with artists and scholars from a wide variety of visual and visual artistic disciplines, including painting, photography, and literature, as well as travel, dance, and fashion. Rather than taking art as a mere object of philosophical study, this conference will explore the manifold confluences and intersections of philosophy and art, exploring how each can become the object of the other and how the boundary between the philosophical and the artistic can be sharpened or blurred. The motive is specifically to explore the “visual” and “movement” element in art of, and in everyday life and theorize it – both philosophically and critically.
Co-sponsored by: Office of Deans: New School for Social Research and School of Art & Design History & Theory; University Student Senate and Graduate Faculty Student Senate
Schedule and Location
The conference will meet on The New School campus in New York City.
On March 24th, we will meet in room B500 at 65 W 11 Street.
On March 25th, we will meet in Starr Foundation Hall UL105 at University Center (63 Fifth Avenue).
Following is the schedule for both days, (please see the website for details on panels and speakers):
11:00 am Panel 1 Speaker presentations.
12:00 pm Panel 1 roundtable and audience Q&A.
1:15 pm Lunch break.
2:15 pm Panel 2 Speaker presentations.
3:15 pm Panel 2 roundtable and audience Q&A.
4:30 pm Evening reception with free food and drinks for attendees!
Our friends from Université de Paris Panthéon-Sorbonne return for a third installment of their symposium Arts & Pragmatism: From Ordinary Aesthetics to Post Creation.
This day-long symposium will be chaired by Yann Toma and Sandra Laugier. From the organizers:
We have noticed it during the two previous symposia of our program: the pragmatist philosophy and in particular Dewey defends the idea that aesthetics must not only be considered as the search for truths about art and its creations but also as what concerns the experience of the persons with an artwork (a sensitive and active experience). The reception would thus be the dynamic experience of an incarnated observer, acting, feeling in his senses and his affects what is the work and what it makes him feel.
The political stake of the pragmatist aesthetics is to make sure that the strong aesthetic experiences remain open and accessible to the largest public and become even a «matter of ordinary conversation». It is then a matter of thinking about shared experience as a transmission of values, an important phenomenon for the moral, political, “educational” reflection of adults» (Cavell 1979, 1981, Shusterman, Laugier 2019, 2023, Gerrits 2020). Thus, this question of pragmatism addresses societal issues that concern all audiences, not just from a broadcast/transmission perspective. By focusing on experience and agency, this way of approaching pragmatism involves the cultural audience in a broad way to the point where it engages mediums such as television and in general digital cultures.
The concept of Post-Creation, insofar as it plays a form of exteriority to an original Creation, has all its place in a world where the strong aesthetic experiences remain open and accessible to a wider public. It is a question of placing the creation beyond what is biased, in the heart of a form of Third State of the artistic act in charge of a heuristic and critical potential, towards a form extracted from the zone of influence of the world of the art as such. The idea of Post-Creation tends towards the universal that would be the fact of conceiving the creation beyond any not institutionalized academism. We will see how a possible emulation between the ordinary aesthetic and the shared experience of the Post-Creation is articulated and played, where the experience of the creation produces knowledge and transforms what is out of the specific field of perception of the art in so many new acting and reflexive spaces. In that, the influence of the artistic creation on whole sections of the society, domains of perception until now inaccessible, becomes a stake of opening which results from the transformation of a form of ordinary aesthetics in a Post-Creation freed from the aesthetic channels of the contemporary art.
Program:
10:30AM : Opening Yann Toma, Sandra Laugier and François Noudelmann
11:00AM – 1:00PM : Panel I Pragmatism and the Project of an Ordinary Aesthetics
Chair : Yann Toma
Andrew Brandel (Penn State University) From the Aesthetics of the Everyday Life to Ordinary Aesthetics.
Barbara Formis (Panthéon-Sorbonne University) Doings and redoings of the Identical.
Sandra Laugier (Panthéon-Sorbonne) Ordinary Creation and Shared Culture.
Emmanuel Kattan (Columbia University) What happens when nothing happens: Chantal Akerman, Francis Ponge, Marisa Merz and the emergence of time.
1:00PM – 3:00PM : Lunch Break
3:00PM – 6:00PM : Panel II Pragmatism, Post-Creation
Chair : Sandra Laugier
Yann Toma (Artist/Panthéon-Sorbonne University) Post-Creation, a new way of making creation
The example of L’Or bleu.
Jung Hee Choi (artist and author of «Manifest Unmanifest») Dream House.
Dan Thomas (United Nations Global Compact), The importance of Art and Perception in the Diplomatic Way.
Warren Neidich (Artist and Founding Director Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art) The Brain Without Organs and the Ecocene.
This event is organized with the support of Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Politique scientifique program, and La Maison Française at New York University
The New York University Center for Bioethics is pleased to invite submissions of abstracts for the 3rd Annual Philosophical Bioethics Workshop, to be held at NYU on Friday and Saturday, April 28-29, 2023.
We are seeking to showcase new work in philosophical bioethics, broadly understood. This includes (but is not limited to) neuroethics, environmental ethics, animal ethics, reproductive ethics, research ethics, ethics of AI, data ethics, public health ethics, gender and race in bioethics, and clinical ethics.
Our distinguished keynote speaker will be Professor Ruth Chang, University of Oxford. There will be five 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 an award of $500, and may include coverage of travel expenses, depending upon university policies at the time of the award. 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 Eastern Time on Sunday, January 22, 2023. Abstracts should be formatted for blind review, and papers should be suitable for presentation in 30-35 minutes. Email notifications will be sent out by Friday, February 10, 2023.
When submitting your abstract, please also indicate whether you would be interested in serving as a commentator-chair in the event that your abstract is not selected for presentation. We will be inviting five additional participants to serve as commentator-chairs.
This year’s Philosophical Bioethics Workshop is organized by S. Matthew Liao, Daniel Fogal, Claudia Passos-Ferreira, Stephanie Beardman, Dan Khokar, and Jonathan Knutzen of the NYU Center for Bioethics.
Yejin Choi is Wissner-Slivka Professor and a MacArthur Fellow at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. She is also a senior director at AI2 overseeing the project Mosaic and a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford. Her research investigates if (and how) AI systems can learn commonsense knowledge and reasoning, if machines can (and should) learn moral reasoning, and various other problems in NLP, AI, and Vision including neuro-symbolic integration, language grounding with vision and interactions, and AI for social good. She is a co-recipient of 2 Test of Time Awards (at ACL 2021 and ICCV 2021), 7 Best/Outstanding Paper Awards (at ACL 2023, NAACL 2022, ICML 2022, NeurIPS 2021, AAAI 2019, and ICCV 2013), the Borg Early Career Award (BECA) in 2018, the inaugural Alexa Prize Challenge in 2017, and IEEE AI’s 10 to Watch in 2016.
Join us for a special live taping of the Clearer Thinking podcast. Host Spencer Greenberg and guest Jeff Sebo will discuss the moral status of insects and AI systems, as well as other thorny questions in global priorities research.
About the speakers
Jeff Sebo is 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 New York University. He is the 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 NYU Center for Environmental and Animal Protection, a board member at Minding Animals International, an advisory board member at the Insect Welfare Research Society, a senior research fellow at the Legal Priorities Project, and a mentor at Sentient Media.
Spencer Greenberg is an entrepreneur and mathematician with a focus on improving human well-being. He’s the founder of ClearerThinking.org, which provides 70 free, digital tools to help people make better decisions and improve their lives, as well as the host of the Clearer Thinking podcast. Spencer is also the founder of Spark Wave, an organization that conducts psychology research and builds psychology-related products designed to help benefit the world. He has a Ph.D. in applied math from New York University, with a specialty in machine learning, and his work has been featured by numerous major media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, the Independent, the New York Times, Gizmodo, and more.
Thank you to Effective Altruism New York City for their generous support of this event.
The New York University Center for Bioethics is pleased to invite submissions of abstracts for the 4th Annual Philosophical Bioethics Workshop, to be held at NYU on Friday and Saturday, May 3-4, 2024.
We are seeking to showcase new work in philosophical bioethics, broadly understood. This includes (but is not limited to) neuroethics, environmental ethics, animal ethics, reproductive ethics, research ethics, ethics of AI, data ethics, public health ethics, gender and race in bioethics, and clinical ethics.
Our keynote speaker will be Professor Shelly Kagan, Yale University. There will be five 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 an award of $500, and may include coverage of travel expenses, depending upon university policies at the time of the award. 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 Eastern Time on Wednesday, January 31, 2024. Abstracts should be formatted for blind review, and papers should be suitable for presentation in 30-35 minutes. Email notifications of acceptance will be sent out by Friday, February 16, 2024.
When submitting your abstract, please also indicate whether you would be interested in serving as a commentator-chair in the event that your abstract is not selected for presentation. We will be inviting five additional participants to serve as commentator-chairs.
This year’s Philosophical Bioethics Workshop is organized by S. Matthew Liao, Daniel Fogal, Claudia Passos-Ferreira, Dan Khokar, and Jonathan Knutzen of the NYU Center for Bioethics.
The 6th ELSI Congress welcomes all with an interest in the ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) of genetics and genomics. Researchers, scholars, practitioners, trainees, policymakers, journalists, and the general public are invited to share and explore the latest ELSI research at ELSIcon2024.