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We have a fun (and free, as always) event tonight at 7:00 PM at Black Spring Books in Williamsburg! It’s a discussion of the life of the mind in fiction and philosophy with the philosopher Skye Cleary (How to Be Authentic), the novelist Christine Smallwood (The Life of the Mind), and the novelist-physician-neurologist Melodie Winawer (Anticipation). If you’re interested in what intellectual life means, the drama of ideas, and the relationship between philosophy and literature, this one’s for you. If you can’t make it in person, it will also be livestreamed here.

In better times, this talk may have been given as a detailed account of the practices and side stories that had been part of the just published anthology titled Tolstoy as Philosopher (2022), a result of a quarter-century work on Tolstoy’s manuscripts and research at international archives. The finished book can be abstracted as follows.

Beginning with Tolstoy’s first extant records of his written œuvre, the anthology assembles seventy-seven unabridged texts that cover more than seven decades of his life, from 1835 to 1910.  It constitutes the most complete single-volume edition to date of the rich variety of Tolstoy’s philosophical output: apothegmatic sayings, visions, intimate sketchbook and day notes, book reviews, open letters, dialogues, pedagogic talks, public lectures, programs and rules for personal behavior, fictions, and reminiscences.

It was the insolvable, the “scandalous,” problems of philosophy that never gave Tolstoy any rest: freedom of the will, religious tolerance, gender inequality, the tonal shape of music, the value of healthy life habits, the responsibilities of teaching, forms of social protest, cognitive development, science in society, the relation between body and mind, charity and labor, human dignity and public service, sexual psychology, national war doctrines, suicide, individual sacrifice, the purposes of making art.  And always: What are the sources of violence? Why should we engage in politics? Why do we need governments? How can one practice non-violence? What is the meaning of our irrepressible desire to seek and find meaning? Why can’t we live without loving? The typeset proofs of his final insights were brought to Tolstoy for approval when he was already on his deathbed. No matter their brevity or the occasion on which they were written, these works exemplify Tolstoy as an artistically inventive and intellectually absorbing thinker.

Most of the newly translated and thoroughly annotated texts have never been available in English.  Among the notable archival restorations is the text titled “Tolstoy on Venezuela,” an authentic first publication in English of “Patriotism, or Peace?” (1896) that had been personally checked by Tolstoy and deemed lost. In the inaugural piece, a seven-year-old Tolstoy describes violent but natural animal life in contrast with the lazy life of a peaceful barnyard in the countryside. The last entry in the anthology written by an eighty-year-old Tolstoy for his grandchildren provides a lesson on vegetarianism and non-violence that a hungry wolf teaches a hungry boy during their conversation when both are on their way to lunch.

The anthology was being copyedited when Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022. After having provided the necessary grounding for Tolstoy’s place within the Russian philosophical tradition and explaining his overall reception and standing, the speaker will comment on the implications of this unfolding historic tragedy for the current moment and the future, in order to then open the floor for general discussion.

About the speaker:

Inessa Medzhibovskaya has taught at The New School since 2004.  She is an intellectual historian, philologist, specialist in international education, and a literary scholar by training and is currently Professor of Liberal Studies and Literature at The New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College. Her publications include numerous essays and chapters that focus on Russia, Central and Eastern Europe, as well as nine previously published books: Tolstoy’s On Life (from the Archival History of Russian Philosophy), 2019 and Tolstoy and the Religious Culture of His Time (paperback 2009); and an online bibliography of Tolstoy’s publications and Tolstoy criticism in the Oxford University Press Bibliographies series (2021). She is the editor of the critical edition of Tolstoy’s On Life, co-translated with Michael Denner (2018), and editor of two more volumes: Tolstoy and His Problems: Views from the Twenty-First Century (2018), and A Critical Guide to Tolstoy’s On Life: Interpretive Essays (2019). She also served as the academic advisor for volumes 267 and 289AC of Short Story Criticism from Gale/Cengage (2019, 2020). Her Tolstoy as Philosopher was released on October 25, 2022.  She is currently completing a long book project solicited by Princeton University Press.

For further information, see this link.

The COVID-19 pandemic is said to be a once-in-a-century incident, and it brought to us a sense of crisis at various levels. What is a crisis, though? Can any unnerving moment or period be called a crisis, or are there different dimensions of a crisis to which we need to be attentive? Is solidarity possible after experiencing a crisis like Covid-19? Can Buddhism make any contribution to facilitating solidarity? This presentation explores the meaning and nature of a crisis and our responses to it by drawing on modern Korean political thinker Pak Ch’iu’s (1909–1949) analysis of crisis and feminist-Buddhist thinker Kim Iryŏp’s (1896–1971) Buddhist philosophy. By doing so, this presentation considers what social, political, existential, and even religious meaning we can draw from our experience of crises, and what questions these insights present to us.

With responses from Karsten Struhl (John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY)

Presented by THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY

RSVP is required for dinner. If you would like to participate in our dinner, a $30 fee is required. Please contact Lucilla at lm3335@columbia.edu for further information.

The violence already systematically inflicted on other earth beings (animals and the environment), and intensifying today intensified through ecological collapse and climate change, is ‘in plain sight’. Yet entrenched epistemic and institutional barriers impede its being registered in ways proportionate to its gravity. While in recent years, philosophers and social theorists have done a good job at explaining why, to use two familiar example, glass walls to abattoirs don’t stop people eating meat, and data on climate change does not catalyse mass mobilization, we have been less adept at delivering our analysis in ways that both illuminate and transform the many sites of dangerous inertia.

Through the experience of living through the Black Summer wildfires, Danielle Celermajer decided to philosophize the impact of climate catastrophe on animals and the environment through the genre of creative non-fiction. The result was Summertime; Reflections on a Vanishing Future, a book that grounds arguments about what ethics and responsibility to other earth beings means in the era of climate catastrophe in the immediate experiences of the members of the multispecies community with whom she lives. In this conversation, Celermajer and Professor Alice Crary will take Summertime as their starting point to reflect on questions of ethics, language, and the responsibility of theorists in the midst of ecological collapse.

Bios:

Danielle Celermajer is Professor of Sociology at the University of Sydney, Deputy Director of the Sydney Environment Institute and leads the Multispecies Justice project. Her books include Sins of the Nation and the Ritual of Apology and The Prevention of Torture, A Cultural History of Law in the Modern Age, The Subject of Human Rights, and Institutional Transformations. Through the experience of living through the black summer bushfires with a multispecies community, she began writing about a new crime of our age, Omnicide. Her book Summertime; Reflections on a Vanishing Future (Penguin Random House, 2021) considers the more-than-human experience of climate catastrophe.