Calendar

Month
Month
2018 Jan February 2019 Mar 2020
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1
Finding the Way to Truth: Sources, History, and Impact of the Meditative Tradition
Finding the Way to Truth: Sources, History, and Impact of the Meditative Tradition @ Buell Hall, Columbia U
Feb 1 – Feb 2 all-day
Tickets
How is the ancient exhortation to “know thyself” related to consolation, virtue, and the study of nature? How did the commitment to self-knowledge shift over the centuries in writings by Islamic, Jewish, Christian, and early modern natural philosophers? How did medieval women contribute to modern notions of self, self-knowledge, and knowledge of nature? This conference explores the meditative “reflective methodology” from its ancient roots, through medieval Christian, Muslim, and Jewish traditions to the so-called “new”[...]
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Mind and Language Seminar 4:00 pm
Mind and Language Seminar @ NYU Philosophy Dept. rm 202
Feb 6 @ 4:00 pm – 7:00 pm
Tickets
Our topic for Spring 2018 will be Formal Frameworks for Semantics and Pragmatics. We’ll be investigating a range of questions in semantics and/or pragmatics which involve or are relevant to the choice between different kinds of overall structure for theories in these areas. In most sessions, the members of the seminar will receive a week in advance, copies of recent work, or work in progress from a thinker at another university. After reading this work,[...]
The Extended Self: Autonomy and Technology in the Age of Distributed Cognition, Ethan Hallerman (Stony Brook) 7:30 pm
The Extended Self: Autonomy and Technology in the Age of Distributed Cognition, Ethan Hallerman (Stony Brook) @ Brooklyn Public Library
Feb 6 @ 7:30 pm
Tickets
In Philosophy in the Library, philosophers from around the world tackle the big questions. In February, we hear from Ethan Hallerman. None of us today can avoid reflecting on the way our thoughts and habits relate to the tools we use, but interest in how technologies reshape us is both older and broader than contemporary concerns around privacy, distraction, addiction, and isolation. For the past hundred years, scholars have investigated the historical role of everyday[...]
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Reality is Not As It Seems 7:00 pm
Reality is Not As It Seems @ The New York Academy of Sciences
Feb 7 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm
Tickets
Despite remarkable strides across virtually all scientific disciplines, the nature of the relationship between our brain and our conscious experience—the “mind-body problem”—remains perhaps the greatest mystery confronting science today. Most neuroscientists currently believe that neural activity in the brain constitutes the foundation of our reality, and that consciousness emerges from the dynamics of complicated neural networks. Yet no scientific theory to date has been able to explain how the properties of such neurons or neural[...]
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Mind and Language Seminar 4:00 pm
Mind and Language Seminar @ NYU Philosophy Dept. rm 202
Feb 13 @ 4:00 pm – 7:00 pm
Tickets
Our topic for Spring 2018 will be Formal Frameworks for Semantics and Pragmatics. We’ll be investigating a range of questions in semantics and/or pragmatics which involve or are relevant to the choice between different kinds of overall structure for theories in these areas. In most sessions, the members of the seminar will receive a week in advance, copies of recent work, or work in progress from a thinker at another university. After reading this work,[...]
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Carl Sachs: “Avoiding Foundationalism And Idealism: How Sellarsian Picturing Overcomes the Myth of the Given” 6:00 pm
Carl Sachs: “Avoiding Foundationalism And Idealism: How Sellarsian Picturing Overcomes the Myth of the Given” @ Wolff Conference Room, D1103
Feb 14 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Tickets
Wilfrid Sellars (1912-1989) is well-known for his “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (EPM) in which he criticizes empiricist theories of knowledge acquisition. Empiricism, he argues there, relies on what he calls “the Myth of the Given.” The Myth of the Given is often understood as a dilemma for epistemological foundationalism. However, Sellars also remarks that not even Kant and Hegel (“that great foe of immediacy” EPM §1) were entirely free of “the entire framework[...]
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Mind and Language Seminar 4:00 pm
Mind and Language Seminar @ NYU Philosophy Dept. rm 202
Feb 20 @ 4:00 pm – 7:00 pm
Tickets
Our topic for Spring 2018 will be Formal Frameworks for Semantics and Pragmatics. We’ll be investigating a range of questions in semantics and/or pragmatics which involve or are relevant to the choice between different kinds of overall structure for theories in these areas. In most sessions, the members of the seminar will receive a week in advance, copies of recent work, or work in progress from a thinker at another university. After reading this work,[...]
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Buddha versus Popper: Do we live in the present or do we plan for the future? Rohit Parikh (CUNY) 4:10 pm
Buddha versus Popper: Do we live in the present or do we plan for the future? Rohit Parikh (CUNY) @ Faculty House, Columbia U
Feb 22 @ 4:10 pm
Tickets
There are two approaches to life. The first one, which we are identifying with Sir Karl Popper, is to think before we act and to let our hypotheses die in our stead when the overall outcome is likely to be negative. We act now for a better future, and we think now which action will bring the best future. Both decision theory and backward induction are technical versions of this train of thought.  The second[...]
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Mind and Language Seminar 4:00 pm
Mind and Language Seminar @ NYU Philosophy Dept. rm 202
Feb 27 @ 4:00 pm – 7:00 pm
Tickets
Our topic for Spring 2018 will be Formal Frameworks for Semantics and Pragmatics. We’ll be investigating a range of questions in semantics and/or pragmatics which involve or are relevant to the choice between different kinds of overall structure for theories in these areas. In most sessions, the members of the seminar will receive a week in advance, copies of recent work, or work in progress from a thinker at another university. After reading this work,[...]
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Bryce Huebner: “Meditating and hallucinating: A socially situated and neuro-Yogācarin perspective” 6:00 pm
Bryce Huebner: “Meditating and hallucinating: A socially situated and neuro-Yogācarin perspective” @ Wolff Conference Room, D1103
Feb 28 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Tickets
A number of philosophers working on Buddhist traditions have recently explored similarities between the cultivated experience of not-self, and the clinical experience of depersonalization. In this talk, I will offer some reflections on this theme. But my primary aim will be to push a similar kind of exploratory project one step further. Drawing on tools from cognitive and computational neuroscience, as well as insights from Yogācāra Buddhist philosophy, I will explore some of the most[...]
2018 Jan February 2019 Mar 2020