Since Plato, western philosophy has been set down a path paved by a disavowal of the sensuous, bracketed material bodies, and delimited aesthetic conceptions, leaving human beings and their built environments separated from the natural world. Such exclusions have left philosophy ill-equipped to deal with the various environmental crises we currently face, as economic rationality and utilitarian logic further de-animate the world and sharpen the human/nature distinction. Even the concept “environment” often, and ironically, brings with it implicit anthropocentric assumptions, conceptualizing, and thereby separating, the human as independent from the surrounding world and reinforcing the human/nature divide. As a result, our (mis)understandings of “nature” and “environment” may make us insensitive to and perpetuate, rather than address, climate change and other environmental catastrophes. To avoid ambiguities and clarify our understanding, we must ask: what role does Nature play within our theories and practices concerning so-called Environmental Philosophy? Furthermore, what spaces, practices, and questions are made possible when we broaden our understanding of “environment” to include a more robust conceptualization of the natural world and how the human being ought to be contextualized within it?
This conference asks how we might reorient the language and practices of philosophy in a way that can enable us to adequately respond to ongoing environmental crises. As a starting point, we propose a need to reimagine the concepts “human,” “nature,” and “environment,” as well as the reciprocal relations that constitute them. To recognize humans as natural organisms, we must reevaluate the sensuous, the material, and the aesthetic and the roles they play in our attempts to construct, understand, and preserve our environment(s). How should we make sense of our practices and our relations to those with whom we share our surroundings? How can we re-situate the human with/in the environment? Do we have the right tools to guide these investigations? How might philosophy look beyond itself—to literature, architecture, music, film, design—to better bring Environment, and thus the world, into view? In the spirit of this, we invite paper as well as project submissions from current graduate students in any discipline.
Possible Topics:
● Environmental Aesthetics: Re-Considering Beauty + the Sublime
● Environmental Justice + Restorative Justice + Transformative Justice
● Environmental Ethics + Sustainable Practices
● Diversity + Biodiversity
● Capitalism and Climate
● Eco-phenomenology
● Eco-deconstruction
● Environmental Racism/Racist Environments
● Ecofeminist conceptions of nature
● Land Rights and Property Relations
● Posthumanism + Object Ontologies
● Afrofuturism + Technological Utopias
● Environmental Ethics In Narratives
● Mastery of Nature in Philosophy
● Anarcho-primitivism
● Queer and Trans Ecologies
● Local and Global Ecologies
● Regionalisms and Globalisms in the Ecological Imagination
Confirmed Conference Keynotes:
Sandra Shapshay, CUNY Graduate Center, New York
Emanuele Coccia, École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris
Dates and Location:
This conference will be held at the New School for Social Research in New York City from Thursday, April 14, to Saturday, April 16. While we (tentatively) plan to hold the conference primarily in-person we would also like to provide a hybrid option for those who would prefer to participate remotely. Following the conference, on Sunday, April 17, all participants and attendees are invited to participate in a conference hike in Cold Spring, NY (about an hour and a half north of NYC and accessible by the Metro North commuter train).
Call for Papers: Submission Procedure:
Please submit complete papers (Word Limit: 3500) and an abstract of 250 words or less by January 1st in the form of a Word attachment (.docx) or PDF to WithInEnvironments@gmail.com. Please prepare your submission for blind review by removing any identifying information from the body of the paper. In your email please include your name, affiliation, and paper title. Notification of acceptance will be sent by January 15.
Call for Projects: Submission Procedure:
Please submit a project description (Word Limit: 1000) by December 1st in the form of a Word attachment (.docx) to WithInEnvironments@gmail.com, as well as:
For Visual Arts projects: submit 5 images of your work as .jpeg.
For Performing Arts projects: submit video/ audio of your work in .mp4 format
Please prepare your submission for blind review by removing any identifying information. In your email please include your name, affiliation, and project title. Notification of acceptance will be sent by January 15.
If you have any questions please email WithInEnvironments@gmail.com
Thursday, September 29th, 2022
Christina Van Dyke (Barnard College)
Title “I feel it in my fingers, I feel it in my toes: Imaginative Meditation and Experience of Love in Medieval Contemplative Philosophy”
4:10-6:00 PM
716 Philosophy Hall
Book panel: Anat Matar, The Poverty of Ethics (Verso books 2022)
Participants:
Anat Matar (Senior Lecturer of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University)
Simon Critchley (Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at NSSR)
Raef Zreik (Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School, and Associate Professor of Jurisprudence at Ono Academic College)
Abstract:
It is a common assumption that ethics must serve as the cornerstone of politics. Yet abstract moral arguments have always been used for justifying all kinds of atrocities; ethical sensitivity and compassion have been expressed towards particular kinds of victims, while totally ignoring others.
The liberal West, in particular, continually manifests such blindness. It is horrified by non-Western oppressive methods, but turns a blind eye to their Western equivalents.
The gratification of holding the moral high ground consistently serves as a political instrument in the hands of those seeking to shore up the existing order.
In The Poverty of Ethics, philosopher and activist Anat Matar argues for the conceptual primacy of political discourse over ethics and claims that only the political force which stands for equality, justice and democracy – the Left – can provide the coordinates for an ethical life under conditions of global injustice.
Appealing to philosophical ideas on the essence of language, Matar shows how the ethos of the Left, as it has evolved over years, underlies and gradually forms the basis for ethics.
Struggles against slavery, racism, colonization and militarization, protests against exploitation and the capitalist order, the feminist movement, global demands for climate action – all these are primarily motivated by a deep understanding of Left heritage rather than by abstract ethical requirements or by airy sensitivities. They, in turn, shape and reshape our notion of moralit
What makes right acts right? A Stoic answer to Ross’s question.
When W.D. Ross poses the question, “what makes right acts right?” (The Right and the Good ch. 2), he is asking a question that is prior to the deliberative question, “how do I determine the right thing to do?” The Stoics recognize this: in De Officiis 1.7, Cicero says that every inquiry about duty has two parts: (1) a theoretical part concerned with the end of goods and evils, which addresses such matters as whether all duties are perfect, whether some are more important than others, and what are the kinds of duties, and (2) a practical part which sets out rules (praecepta) by which our conduct can be made to conform with the end. This paper focuses on (1) and in particular asks Ross’s question about Stoic right actions (kathêkonta).
The endpoint of Stoic deliberation is determining what token action is the right action. The paper begins with the Stoic distinction between a thing’s choiceworthiness, its intrinsic disposition to elicit a choice response in a suitable subject, and its possession being to-be-chosen. The determination of what is to-be-done is made by weighing against each other all the values of the relevant action types specified by their content (the so-called ‘intermediate actions’) that are in accordance with nature, as Stoic value theory says that according with nature is an objective reason to do an action. What constitutes the rightness of the token right action, and is given in its reasonable defense, is the same as what constitutes the rightness of a perfect (katorthôma) action. The Stoic distinction between right and perfect action depends on the action’s moral goodness—not rightness—which is due to its causal origin.
Presented by Professor Rachana Kamtekar (Cornell University)
Artificial intelligence (AI) promises to automate and scale solutions to perennial accessibility challenges (e.g., generating image descriptions for blind users). However, research shows that AI-bias disproportionately impacts people already marginalized based on their race, gender, or disabilities, raising questions about potential impacts in addition to AI’s promise. In this talk, Cynthia Bennett will overview broad concerns at the intersection of AI, disability, and accessibility. She will then share details about one project in this research space that led to guidance on human and AI-generated image descriptions that account for subjective and potentially sensitive descriptors around race, gender, and disability of people in images.
Well-being, also known as prudential value, refers to whatever makes a life non-instrumentally good for the person living it. Well-being is the object of immense practical, philosophical, and scientific concern. Assessments of well-being help to guide our decisions in everyday life, from relationships, to health decisions, to education and career choices. Well-being is increasingly the object of governmental and institutional policy, and even policies that are not aimed directly at promoting it can be evaluated in terms of their impacts on well-being. Colleges and universities routinely offer programs designed to help students maintain their well-being in the face of academic and personal stress. However, debates over the nature of well-being have raged since the beginning of philosophical inquiry, leaving us in a bad position when it comes to making headway on addressing those practical and scientific concerns. The goal of this talk is to show how the application of naturalistic methodology can help us to resolve the philosophical stalemate and thus to make progress in our practical and scientific projects relating to well-being.
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Talk link — Email cruzdavis <at> umass.edu or jrc2266 <at> columbia.edu for the passcode
The pandemic compels us to ask fundamental questions about our place in the world: the many ways humans rely on one another, how we vitally and sometimes fatally breathe the same air, share the surfaces of the earth, and exist in proximity to other porous creatures in order to live in a social world. What we require to live can also imperil our lives. How do we think from, and about, this common bind?
In What World Is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology, Judith Butler shows how COVID-19 and all its consequences—political, social, ecological, economic—have challenged us to reconsider the sense of the world that such disasters bring about. Drawing on the work of Max Scheler, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and critical feminist phenomenology, Butler illuminates the conditions in which we seek to make sense of our disorientation, precarity, and social bonds. What World Is This? offers a new account of interdependency in which touching and breathing, capacities that amid a viral outbreak can threaten life itself, challenge the boundaries of the body and selfhood. Criticizing notions of unlimited personal liberty and the killing forces of racism, sexism, and classism, this book suggests that the pandemic illuminates the potential of shared vulnerabilities as well as the injustice of pervasive inequalities.
Exposing and opposing forms of injustice that deny the essential interrelationship of living creatures, Butler argues for a radical social equality and advocates modes of resistance that seek to establish new conditions of livability and a new sense of a shared world.
Speaker
Judith Butler is a Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. They are the author of several books, most recently The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (2020). Butler’s previous Columbia University Press books include Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012), Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (2000), and Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (1987).
Respondents
Mia Florin-Sefton is a Ph.D. candidate and University Writing Instructor in the English & Comparative Literature Department at Columbia University, where she specializes in 20th and 21st-century transatlantic anglophone literatures and culture. She is also working on a project that looks at the history of sex glands and early history of hormone replacement therapy in the context of theories of racial degeneration and eugenics post-World War I.
Professor Goyal is an Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at the Columbia University Medical Center and founding director of the major in Medical Humanities. Professor Goyal completed his residency in Emergency Medicine as Chief Resident while finishing his PhD in English and Comparative Literature. His research interests include the health humanities, the study of the novel, and medical epistemology. His writing has appeared in The Living Handbook of Narratology, Aktuel Forskning, Litteratur, Kultur og Medier, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other places. He is a Co-Founding Editor of the online journal, Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal
Marianne Hirsch is the William Peterfield Trent Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Professor in the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a former President of the Modern Language Association of America. Along with a group of local scholars, artists and activists, Hirsch is currently co-directing the Zip Code Memory Project, an initiative that seeks to find art and community-based ways to repair the devastating losses resulting from the Coronavirus pandemic while also acknowledging its radically differential effects on Upper New York City neighborhoods.
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.
When is anxiety justified? When does anxiety cease to function as an effective and reasonable signal preventing imminent threats, and when does it become an invasive projection of our own ghosts? My talk is divided into three sections. First, I will emphasize the anthropological relevance of anxiety: in various theoretical frameworks, the difference between free-floating anxiety and fear directed at a specific danger even serves as a criterion for distinguishing human beings from animals. Second, I will conduct a phenomenological analysis of anxiety focusing in particular on the altered relationship between perception and imagination. Third, I will address a specific form of anxiety which is particularly dominant in the context of our post-disciplinary societies: the feeling of being left behind. My talk presents a philosophical inquiry into the affective phenomenon that can both protect us from danger and be a danger in itself.
Bio:
Stefano Micali is a Professor at the KU Leuven and the Coordinator of the Husserl-Archives: Centre for Phenomenology and Continental Philosophy. He has published over 60 articles in different languages (English, German, Italian, French, and Dutch) in various areas of research ranging from psychopathology to religion, from political philosophy to aesthetics. He is the author of four monographic books: Überschüsse der Erfahrung (2008), Esperienze temporali (2008), Tra l’altro e se stessi (2020) and Phenomenology of Anxiety (2022). Together with Thomas Fuchs, he has edited several volumes focusing on the relation between psychopathology and philosophy. He is also co-editor of the DGAP (German Society for a Phenomenological Anthropology) series and the Phaenomenologica series (Springer).