Calendar

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.”

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.

We are excited to announce the upcoming MAPS Symposium on the Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics, taking place at NYU on April 25th from 3pm-7pm. The event will feature talks from Eddy Chen, Emily Adlam, and Tim Maudlin. Further details can be found below.

Talks:

• Eddy Chen (UCSD): “The Wentaculus”
• Emily Adlam (Rotman Institute UWO): “The Temporal Asymmetry of Influence is Not Statistical.”
• Tim Maudlin (NYU): “Nonlocality”

Please note that while all are welcome to attend, non-NYU attendees must RSVP by emailing Diego Arana (da689@rutgers.edu) and Barry Loewer (loewer@philosophy.rutgers.edu) to ensure their names are added to the entry list for the NYU building. For any further information, please contact us through the emails just provided.

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.

Presented by Metro Area Philosophers of Science

Directions: Enter the Philosophy building at 5 Washington Place, and have a university ID and vaccination card ready. For any questions, please contact Diego Arana (da689@rutgers.edu), Barry Loewer (loewer@philosophy.rutgers.edu) and Jack Mikuszewski (jhm378@nyu.edu).

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).