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NEWSROOM

Bard College Junior Lauren Mendoza ’26 Wins Goldwater Scholarship

Bard College is pleased to announce that Bard junior Lauren Mendoza ’26, a double major in physics and philosophy, has been announced as a recipient of the 2025 Barry Goldwater Scholarship. The scholarship supports college sophomores and juniors who intend to pursue research careers in the natural sciences, mathematics, and engineering.

Bard College Junior Lauren Mendoza ’26 Wins Goldwater Scholarship

Bard College is pleased to announce that Bard junior Lauren Mendoza ’26, a double major in physics and philosophy, has been announced as a recipient of the 2025 Barry Goldwater Scholarship. The scholarship supports college sophomores and juniors who intend to pursue research careers in the natural sciences, mathematics, and engineering.

Mendoza currently conducts research in astrophysics with Professor Clara Sousa-Silva and had previously conducted research in nanofabrication with Professor Paul Cadden-Zimansky.  After graduating from Bard, she hopes to pursue a Ph.D. in astronomy with a focus on the solar system and instrumentation, and aims to promote effective scientific communication between academics and the wider public.

The Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation, established by Congress in 1986 in honor of Senator Barry Goldwater, aims to ensure that the U.S. is producing highly-qualified professionals in the natural sciences, mathematics and engineering. Over its 30-year history, Goldwater Scholarships have been awarded to thousands of undergraduates, many of whom have gone on to win other prestigious awards such as the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Fellowship, Rhodes Scholarship, Churchill Scholarship and the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship that support the graduate school work of Goldwater scholars. Learn more at https://goldwaterscholarship.gov/


Post Date: 04-02-2025

Professor Jim Keller Receives ITERATA Fellowship for His Research on Generative AI in the Classroom

Bard professor Jim Keller has been honored with a Small Grant Fellowship from ITERATA, the Institute for Transformational Education and Responsive Action in a Technoscientific Age. The $5,000 award will enable Professor Keller to advance his research and writing for publication, “‘The Technological within Its Own Bounds’: Responding to Generative AI with ‘Speaking Speech’ and Embodied Learning Models for Transformative Pedagogies.” Keller is director of the Learning Commons, visiting associate professor of academic writing, and senior faculty associate for the Institute for Writing and Thinking.

Professor Jim Keller Receives ITERATA Fellowship for His Research on Generative AI in the Classroom

Bard professor Jim Keller has been honored with a Small Grant Fellowship from ITERATA, the Institute for Transformational Education and Responsive Action in a Technoscientific Age. The $5,000 award will enable Professor Keller to advance his research and writing for publication, “‘The Technological within Its Own Bounds’: Responding to Generative AI with ‘Speaking Speech’ and Embodied Learning Models for Transformative Pedagogies.” Keller is director of the Learning Commons, visiting associate professor of academic writing with a faculty affiliation in philosophy, and senior faculty associate for the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College.

This fellowship will support Keller in expanding on insights that he shared in his 2022 American Association of Colleges and Universities presentation, copresented with two Learning Commons tutors and director of the Institute for Writing and Thinking, Erica Kaufman. He plans to explore embodied cognition and literacy education, disseminating the Learning Commons’ innovative best practices, position, and principles across various platforms to faculty and administrators and advocating for learning approaches founded on understandings of language and education founded in enactive, embodied accounts of thinking.
More about the ITERATA Fellowships

Post Date: 02-06-2024

Bard Professor Kathryn Tabb Receives $40,000 NEH Fellowship in Support of Her Book Project Agents and Patients: John Locke’s Ethics of Thinking

Bard College Assistant Professor of Philosophy Kathryn Tabb has been awarded $40,000 by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to fund her book project, Agents and Patients: John Locke’s Ethics of Thinking, that explores Locke’s theory of psychopathology and its implications for his philosophical theories. The NEH grant will support her work over an eight-month term beginning in January.

Bard Professor Kathryn Tabb Receives $40,000 NEH Fellowship in Support of Her Book Project Agents and Patients: John Locke’s Ethics of Thinking

Bard College Assistant Professor of Philosophy Kathryn Tabb has been awarded $40,000 by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to fund her book project, Agents and Patients: John Locke’s Ethics of Thinking, that explores Locke’s theory of psychopathology and its implications for his philosophical theories. Based on her dissertation, which focused on laying out Locke’s theory of madness as caused by the association of ideas, this book will be the first to present Locke’s theory of irrationality, and will invite other scholars to challenge how we think about Locke—and perhaps other historical figures—on key themes such as personal identity, nativism, religious toleration, freedom and enslavement, private property, and empire. The NEH grant will support her work over an 8-month term beginning in January. Previously, Tabb was an investigator for the NEH grant project, “Humanities Connections Curriculum for Medicine, Literature, and Society” (2017–20).

“I’m so grateful to the NEH and to Bard for providing me with the support I need to dedicate this whole academic year to research and writing. It’s an enormous luxury, and will allow me, I hope, to finally finish a project that has been a long time coming,” said Tabb.

John Locke’s wide corpus of writings is generally considered to contribute to three areas of philosophy, namely politics, metaphysics, and epistemology. But Locke was also a doctor. Tabb’s account presents him not primarily as a political theorist, metaphysician, or epistemologist, but rather as a physician concerned with reason and its limits. Tabb sees the normative study of the mind as Locke’s central project, and some of his most celebrated theories as deriving from it. Locke thought that the correct management of our ideas over the course of a lifetime was requisite for discovering truth, living virtuously under a commonwealth, and assuring our salvation. In this sense Locke’s central project, what Tabb terms his ethics of thinking, provides the foundation for his assessments of what sort of lives—and, indeed, which lives—are worth living. Because of Locke’s influence on American colonists, these assessments found their way into the founding documents of the states, justifications for the imperialist project, and, later, the terms in which independence was conceived of and argued for. 

Tabb will present her account of Locke’s ethics of thinking through a series of what he would call archetypes: kinds of people who exemplify the various ways in which we can go right—and more often wrong—in the conduct of our understandings. Taken together, these archetypes will allow the reader to recognize previously unappreciated commitments in Locke’s work that ground Locke’s ethics of thinking. The book’s chapters will work together to present Locke’s ethics of thinking and show how it motivates diverse facets of his philosophy.

Post Date: 01-18-2024

Philosophy Events

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Friday, May 2, 2025
A talk by Jess Feldman, PhD
Hegeman 204A  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Critics of Hannah Arendt accuse her of neglecting working-class politics in what they describe as her attempt to “enforce a separation of politics from socio-economic concerns." This view of Arendt overlooks how the general strike is curiously close to the heart of Arendt’s political theory. Placing Arendt’s examples back into the world which they emerge from, this talk argues that Arendt is one of several 20th-century political thinkers who take up and make new meaning out of the idea of the general strike, using the strike to shape their ideas about power, equality, freedom, and democracy.


Friday, April 18, 2025
Hegeman 204  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
A vast philosophical and scientific literature has grown up around the nature and function of delusions. Professor Justin Garson will argue in this talk that we should abandon the concept of delusion entirely because it involves an unreasonable and harmful stance toward the “delusional patient.” As a case study, this talk considers the plight of targeted individuals (TIs), a global community whose members have the belief that they are the victims of organized stalking or electronic harassment. 


Friday, April 11, 2025
Speakers: Ingrid Becker, Visiting Assistant Professor of Human Rights; Yarran Hominh, Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Hegeman 204A  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
What is agency? To what extent does it manifest as the expression of internal will or as a response to external circumstances? This salon—part talk, part conversation—will explore these questions through two disciplinary contexts that are not often considered together: sociology and poetry, or more specifically, the sociological survey and lyric poetry. While we might think of the lyric as a pre-eminent space of authentic self-expression that issues from something “inside” an individual, and the survey as a technology that constructs selves through questions that impose a set of “outside” constraints on what individuals express, this salon will consider thinkers and poems from the early-mid 20th century that trouble this binary.


Friday, February 28, 2025
  A talk by Emmanuel Ordóñez Angulo, Visiting Fellow, New York University
Hegeman 204A  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5
According to the Humean consensus in philosophy, sense experience provides “no impression from which the idea of the infinite may be derived.” This talk explores the possibility that the consensus is mistaken. Can infinity  in fact exist in the physical world, and if so, can our senses give us epistemic access to it? An affirmative answer would have consequences not just for the philosophy of mathematics but also for epistemology and the philosophy of mind. The discovery that we can, against the odds, experience infinity would compel us to rethink what it means to experience something, and to rethink what our sources of knowledge for distinct realms (abstract and concrete) might be.


Friday, February 21, 2025
  Jordan Pascoe, George A. Miller Visiting Scholar, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Hegeman 204A  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5
When disasters strike, we often imagine them as scenes from an action movie: violent, heroic, and focused on self-preservation. However, 100 years of disaster sociology tells us that, in reality, people tend to come together, care for one another, and find new ways to make life collectively possible. In this talk, I will examine the power of our dominant, violent disaster imaginary and ask: how can we begin to imagine disasters differently? What kinds of new imaginaries can foster collective, coalition-building, and aspirational practices?

Drawing on Black feminist thought, literature and social movements, Indigenous philosophy, and moral frameworks grounded in African and Haitian practices of resistance, I will outline a set of tools that offer possibilities for reimagining our response to the climate crisis. To ensure our survival in the era of climate crisis, we must develop disaster policies and practices that actively support aspirational visions and collective creativity, while helping us resist nostalgic and reactionary narratives. I’ll draw on the work of doulas (those who support others through the crisis of birth) to show how we can practice disaster otherwise, even in the face of a hostile state.


Friday, February 14, 2025
  A Talk by Qianyi Qin, Lecturer of Philosophy, Smith College
Hegeman 204A  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5
When you imagine something, are you yourself present in some way, in that imaginative episode? This talk explores whether imagination necessarily includes a “self”, and what this means for empathy, ethics, and self-transformation. While some argue that some acts of imagination involve, at most, a thin sense of self, others suggest that a thicker self, shaped by personal values and emotions, also permeates imagination. This raises profound questions: Can we ever imagine neutrally, without bias? Can we truly empathize with others, or are we always imagining ourselves in their place? By blending philosophical analysis with insights from psychology, this talk invites us to rethink the nature of imagination, empathy, and the self.


Friday, September 27, 2024
Hegeman 204  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

Tuesday, May 21, 2024
  C. Thi Nguyen in conversation with Johnny Brennan
Online Event  7:00 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
A key vulnerability for cognitively limited beings such as ourselves arises from trust. Much of the current misinformation crisis seems to derive from misplaced trust—trust in antiscience celebrities, trust in conspiracy theory forums and propagandistic media networks sources. Because we are so cognitively small, in order to cope with the world, we must trust each other, and that trust makes us profoundly vulnerable. That trust can be exploited, even when we have done our due diligence. 

In this event, C. Thi Nguyen will discuss his idea of “hostile epistemology” as the study of the ways in which environmental features exploit our cognitive vulnerabilities—especially those vulnerabilities that are unavoidable because they arise from the essential condition of our epistemic lives. We are essentially finite beings, with limited cognitive resources. We are perpetually reasoning in a rush, because there is far too more information than we could ever fully process. Our desperate attempts to cope with a cognitively overwhelming world will inevitably leave holes in our armor. And the world can take advantage of those vulnerabilities. In the face of all this, how can the individual, with their inadequate understanding, select which group to trust?

Register to attend this free online event here: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/thephilosopher/1256716


Saturday, April 20, 2024
Finberg House library  10:00 am – 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The 2024 Social Philosophy Workshop brings together early career scholars from across the humanities and social sciences who examine contemporary social and political issues. Papers are pre-read, with workshop time devoted to commentators introducing and responding to each paper, followed by general discussion.

Registration is required in order to receive the pre-read papers.

The address for Finberg House is 51 Whalesback Road, Red Hook, New York 12571.

Generous support for this workshop has been provided by the Philosophy, Politics, and Interdisciplinary Study of Religions programs at Bard; Bard's Office of the Dean of the College; the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard; and the American Philosophical Association.


Friday, April 19, 2024
Finberg House library  10:00 am – 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The 2024 Social Philosophy Workshop brings together early career scholars from across the humanities and social sciences who examine contemporary social and political issues. Papers are pre-read, with workshop time devoted to commentators introducing and responding to each paper, followed by general discussion.

Registration is required in order to receive the pre-read papers.

The address for Finberg House is 51 Whalesback Road, Red Hook, New York 12571.

Generous support for this workshop has been provided by the Philosophy, Politics, and Interdisciplinary Study of Religions programs at Bard; Bard's Office of the Dean of the College; the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard; and the American Philosophical Association.


Sunday, April 7, 2024
Professor Yitzhak Melamed, Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University
Bard Graduate Center Lecture Hall, NYC  4:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Yitzhak Y. Melamed is the Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. He works on Early Modern Philosophy, German Idealism, Medieval Philosophy, and some issues in contemporary metaphysics, and is the author of Spinoza’s Metaphysics: Substance and Thought (Oxford 2013), and Spinoza’s Labyrinths (Oxford, forthcoming). Currently, he is working on the completion of a book on Spinoza and German Idealism, and on an introduction to Spinoza’s philosophy. His research has been featured in BBC (The World Tonight), LeMond, Ha’aretz, Kan Tarbut (Israeli Cultural Radio).

This paper argues that the most significant Jewish contribution to modern Western philosophy - the notion of acosmism, according to which only God truly and fully exists - originated in early Hassidism. I will show that through the mediation of Salomon Maimon (1753-1800) this bold notion was adopted from the school of the Maggid of Mezhrich and introduced into the systems of German Idealism.

The Bard Graduate Center is located at 38 West 86 street, New York, NY, 10024.


Friday, April 5, 2024
Daniel Berthold, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Bard College
Hegeman 204A  12:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
I argue that not only do Nietzsche and Camus share a sense of the world as fundamentally “strange,” but that each adopts an authorial position as stranger to the reader as well. The various strategies of concealment, evasion, and silence they employ to assure their authorial strangeness are in the service of what Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault would later call “the death of the author,” the disappearance of the author as authority over his or her own text. I argue further, however, that within this largely shared commitment, Nietzsche and Camus finally have quite different conceptions of the goals of their respective authorships and different manners of pursuing their deaths as authors. These contrasts leave us, finally, with distinct constructions of the author as stranger.

Daniel Berthold is an emeritus professor of philosophy at Bard College, where he taught from 1984–2022. He holds a BA and MA from Johns Hopkins University and a PhD from Yale University. He is the author of Hegel’s Grand Synthesis, Hegel’s Theory of Madness, and The Ethics of Authorship: Communication, Seduction, and Death in Hegel and Kierkegaard, as well as articles and reviews in journals including Clio, Environmental Ethics, History and Theory, History of Philosophy Quarterly, Human Ecology Review, Idealistic Studies, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, International Philosophical Quarterly, International Studies in Philosophy, Journal of European Studies, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Ludus Vitalis, Man and World, Nous, Metaphilosophy, Modern Language Notes, Philosophy and Literature, Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, Religious Studies, Review of Metaphysics, Social Theory and Practice, and Southern Journal of Philosophy. 


Thursday, April 4, 2024
Professor Yitzhak Melamed, Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University
Olin 102  5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Yitzhak Y. Melamed is the Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. He works on Early Modern Philosophy, German Idealism, Medieval Philosophy, and some issues in contemporary metaphysics, and is the author of Spinoza’s Metaphysics: Substance and Thought (Oxford 2013), and Spinoza’s Labyrinths (Oxford, forthcoming). Currently, he is working on the completion of a book on Spinoza and German Idealism, and on an introduction to Spinoza’s philosophy. His research has been featured in BBC (The World Tonight), LeMond, Ha’aretz, Kan Tarbut (Israeli Cultural Radio).

This talk traces the influence of Spinoza’s early Rabbinic schooling on his writing from the period after he left the Jewish community. It argues that Spinoza is frequently unaware of the formative role of his early Rabbinic education, and that he commonly reads the Bible through Rabbinic eyes without the least being conscious of this fact. If this argument is cogent, it would seem that much more attention should be paid to Spinoza’s early education.

 Acosmism: Hassidism’s Gift to the Jews… and the World
Sunday, April 7th, 2024 | 4:00 pm
Bard Graduate Center Lecture Hall, 38 West 86 street, New York, NY, 10024
This paper argues that the most significant Jewish contribution to modern Western philosophy - the notion of acosmism, according to which only God truly and fully exists - originated in early Hassidism. I will show that through the mediation of Salomon Maimon (1753-1800) this bold notion was adopted from the school of the Maggid of Mezhrich and introduced into the systems of German Idealism.
Free and open to the public.

Register for event here: https://forms.gle/P2qJ6vkciD74e8du6


Friday, March 29, 2024
Campus Center, Weis Cinema  12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Carol Gilligan's landmark book In a Different Voice (1982)—the “little book that started a revolution” brought women's voices to the fore in work on the self and moral development, enabling women to be heard in their own right, and with their own integrity, for the first time. Forty years later, Gilligan returns to the subject matter of her classic book, re-examining its central arguments and concerns from the vantage point of the present. Thanks to the work that she and others have done in recent decades, it is now possible to clarify and articulate what couldn't quite be seen or said at the time of the original publication: that the “different voice” (of care ethics), although initially heard as a “feminine” voice, is in fact a human voice—and that the voice it differs from is a patriarchal voice (bound to gender binaries and hierarchies). While gender is central to the story Gilligan tells, this is not a story about gender: it is a human story. 

Copies of the book will be signed and sold.

This event is sponsored by the Gender Equity Initiative, the Hannah Arendt Center, the Office of the Dean of Inclusive Excellence, the Open Society University Network, the Master of Arts in Teaching Program, and the Programs in Gender and Sexuality Studies, Philosophy, Psychology, and Sociology 


Friday, March 1, 2024
Julia Jorati, Professor of Philosophy, UMass Amherst
Hegeman 204A  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5
This talk examines the association between the notions “slavery” and “Blackness” in the 17th and 18th centuries—an association that plays a crucial role in the development of modern racist thought. Several philosophers in this period commented on the ways in which these notions started to be linked; some criticized this linkage while others embraced or accepted it. Among White Europeans, a new conception of slavery—according to which slavery is appropriate exclusively or almost exclusively for Black people—emerged in the early modern period, side by side with a new conception of Blackness. This new conception of Blackness served European colonial interests by making a suitability for slavery a distinctive feature of all Black people.


Tuesday, December 5, 2023
  Olin Humanities, Room 307  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Professor Ungvary will be speaking about the ancient Christian Saint St. Anthony and the birth of hegiography as a literary genre.


Friday, November 3, 2023
Christopher Moore (Penn State)
Hegeman 204A  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Some intellectual traditions take the four cardinal virtues – wisdom, justice, courage, and self-discipline – to constitute the virtuous (moral and successful) life. This list of canonical virtues, and an account of its sufficiency, is ascribed to Plato. In this presentation, I argue against doing so. Rather than asserting how things stand with virtues, Plato depicts many conversations about an already emerging (fifth-century) view of human goodness as articulable as a cluster of virtues. Throughout his dialogues, his Socrates criticizes the explanatory value of such clusters. A clinched tetrad of virtues sometimes proves dialectically helpful for him but, at the end of his writing career, Plato says that we need to keep investigating the number and nature of the virtues. I argue that Plato is depicting – and is advancing in the very process – perhaps the prime step in the development of ethics as a field of philosophical reflection: debating which virtues matter to the well-lived life.


Friday, October 20, 2023
Susan Buck-Morss (CUNY Graduate Center)
Hegeman 204A  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
My book Year 1 (2021) is a philosophical recounting of historical time inspired by Walter Benjamin. Its thematic converges with the humanitarian border crises that now include the Hamas-Israeli war. The task is to address the destructive convergence of history and myth, nation-state and human rights, sovereignty and ecological survival, not by taking sides, but by addressing our shared state of emergency with every intellectual resource that we have.


Friday, September 22, 2023
  Hegeman 204  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Interested in learning more about the Philosophy Program at Bard? Come to our Philosophy Program Information Session to meet faculty and current majors and to learn more about courses, requirements for moderation and graduation, senior projects, etc.! There will be light refreshments!


Friday, April 21, 2023
Yarran Hominh, Philosophy
Aspinwall 302  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
What role is there for hope in hopeless times? The present is, if any, a time where to respond objectively to the state of the world is to despair. The systems of oppression and domination that comprise the basic structure of society are rampant; the political democratic means available of changing those systems are powerless, sunk in institutional deadlock and political polarization. The world continues to suffer from an ongoing pandemic, and to top it all off, we seem incapable of even so much as slowing our rush towards an uninhabitable future. The predominant forms of hope that are culturally available have been co-opted. At best, they are politically inert. At worst, they act as ideological figleaves by which existing systems and destructive ways of being are maintained and reproduced. Yet, I argue, drawing on a 1983 conversation between Audre Lorde and James Baldwin, even in such hopeless conditions there is still a place for hope. It is a hope not for a future way the world could be, but a hope in others, tied to the present possibilities of collective agency.


Friday, March 10, 2023
Marina van Zuylen (Literature) and Garry Hagberg (Philosophy)
Olin 205  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Join the Philosophy & Literature Programs for a conversation between Marina van Zuylen and Garry Hagberg on the connections between philosophy and literature. What might it mean to read philosophy as literature? Does literature count as philosophy? In what ways can literature and philosophy together help people live a good life, or one that is good enough?


Thursday, March 2, 2023
  Inaugural De Gruyter–Arendt Center Lecture in Political Thinking
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  5:15 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Part of “Judgment, Pluralism, & Democracy: On the Desirability of Speaking with Others” conference.Stream the Keynote Lecture on YouTube


Download: De-Gruyter-HAC-Lecture-posterFinal.pdf

Friday, February 17, 2023
Speakers: Clara Sousa-Silva, Assistant Professor of Physics, and Kathryn Tabb, Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Olin 204  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Physics Phriday and Philosophy Salon will be cohosting a conversation on the intersections between science and philosophy. How might philosophers help scientists in their work? How and when does the practice of science give rise to philosophical questions? What is the nature of life? Does the scientific attitude give rise to humility or to hubris? 


Thursday, December 8, 2022
Chapel of the Holy Innocents  6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EST/GMT-5
PASOLINI AND THE SACRED

Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) was an Italian filmmaker, poet, journalist, and public intellectual. Contradiction defined his life and work: he was a communist who rejected and was rejected by the Italian communist party, a gay man who refused to be a spokesperson for the gay community, a bourgeois intellectual who idealized the subproletariat. He was also an avowed atheist whose gaze was turned obsessively toward representations of the sacred. He sought out the sacred in lands far removed from his own—places like Yemen and Tanzania—while still hoping to find traces of it in the fast-paced world of his native Italy during the post-War economic boom. The figure of Christ was omnipresent in his works, as was the ambiguous specter of the Catholic Church. He invested in the sacred as a language, an aesthetic, a currency, a lost past, and a fading present. In this discussion, we will explore Pasolini’s complex, often contradictory views on the sacred. 

Email: [email protected] with questions.


Friday, November 18, 2022
Nicholas Dunn, Klemens von Klemperer Postdoctoral Fellow in the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, and Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Politics
Barringer House Global Classroom  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5
My aim in this paper is to consider the relationship between two capacities of the mind: imagination and judgment. I do so by way of considering Kant’s account of the ‘power of imagination’ [Einbildungskraft] and the ‘power of judgment’ [Urteilskraft]. There are a number of striking similarities between these two faculties, which have been almost entirely overlooked. As a result, the question of how they bear on each other in their respective operations has yet to be taken up. I argue for the following claim: insofar as the power of judgment is the faculty of thinking particulars under universals, the power of imagination is the faculty of producing and providing particulars for judgment (either to reflect on or to subsume under universals). Consequently, without the activity of imagination, we could not make judgments at all.


Monday, November 14, 2022
Cars and Jails: Freedom Dreams, Debt, and Carcerality
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Bard’s new Carceral Studies speaker series launches with a visit from the NYU Prison Education Project. Their recently published book Cars and Jails: Freedom Dreams, Debt, and Carcerality explores how the car, despite its association with American freedom and mobility, functions at the crossroads of two great systems of entrapment and immobility– the American debt economy and the carceral state. We will be joined by four of the Lab members, a group representing formerly incarcerated scholars and non-formerly incarcerated NYU faculty. 


Friday, November 11, 2022
Speaker: César Cabezas, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Temple University
Barringer House Global Classroom  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Moral condemnation is a key feature of contemporary public discourse on race. Folk racism talk tends to focus on assigning and evading blame for individual wrongs in the domain of race. Similarly, philosophers tend to conceive of racism as a moral concept whose primary function is to signal moral condemnation for race-based wrongs. While moral condemnation is widespread in folk racism talk, I argue that we must also recognize racism as an explanatory concept. According to the explanatory account I put forth, the point of having a concept of racism is to shed light on social problems afflicting non-white communities, such as police violence, mass incarceration, and racial disparities in education, employment, health care, and so on. I also argue that this explanatory conception of racism is central to the discourse of contemporary anti-racist movements, as well as the tradition of black political thought from which they hail. A proper understanding of the discourse of anti-racist movements will require us to interpret their ascriptions of racism as both moral (although not restricted to moral condemnation) and explanatory claims—with an emphasis on the latter. This is especially important for making sense of their claims regarding the systemic nature of racism.


Friday, October 28, 2022
Andrew Gregory, University College London
Hegeman 204  12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Plato's use of number in his music theory, theory of matter, and cosmology raises some interesting questions in metaphysics and philosophy of science. What is the relation between mathematics, physics, and the world? Is there a beauty and simplicity to some mathematics and does that capture the nature of the world? What is the distinction (historical, philosophical) between mathematical physics and numerology? This paper looks at the nature and influence of Plato's views.


Friday, October 28, 2022
Francey Russell, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Barnard College and Columbia University
Barringer House Global Classroom  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Throughout his lectures on anthropology and in the published work, Kant describes an unruly form of thinking that he calls fantasy and an usual kind of mental state that he calls "obscure representations." Fantasy, for Kant, is imaginative activity that is "unreined and unruled" by the understanding, that is not object-directed, that is only "dimly conscious," and that is essentially private. What is most striking in these discussions is first, Kant's ethical-aesthetic-pragmatic claim that we human beings “have an interest” in obscurity and enjoy "walking in the dark;" this means we need to clarify the relationship between the pleasure of fantasy and the pleasure of aesthetic judgment. Second, Kant suggests that sexual attraction exemplifies and is constituted by this pleasurably obscure kind of thinking. In this paper I'll give an account of fantasy and obscure representation, clarify its relationship with aesthetic judgment, and argue that it facilitates an alternative interpretation of why Kant thinks sex is morally and psychologically risky. I'll close by raising an important evaluative question. If we want to resist Kant's condemnation of this kind of thinking and this kind of pleasure, we must ask ourselves: what is the good of it?


Friday, October 21, 2022
Speaker: Shivani Radhakrishnan, Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow, Department of Philosophy, Williams College
Barringer House Global Classroom  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
How should we go about criticizing society? According to Hegel, Marx, and philosophers in the Frankfurt School tradition, critiques of ideology are best if they are immanent. Unlike other forms of social criticism, they argue, immanent critique judges institutions and practices against standards contained within their objects of analysis. This enables critique to be both convincing and self-reflexive. Psychoanalysis is meant to be a helpful analogue. Therapists enter their patients’ conceptual frames in an attempt to figure out how their patients’ ways of perceiving and feeling prevent them from living a good life. The same is true for the ideology critic, who is supposed to come to social practices and judge it using norms that are already present in our ways of behaving and acting. In this paper, however, I argue that immanent critics have insufficiently reckoned with the insights of feminist, postcolonial, and decolonial philosophers. More specifically, I argue that in measuring social life against standards contained within our form of life, immanent critics replay a mechanism of domination articulated by Sandra Harding, Enrique Dussel, and Ashis Nandy. The ruled are supposed to oppose their rulers within the psychological limits set by the latter. After diagnosing the problem, I argue that feminist, postcolonial, and decolonial philosophers offer us resources for envisioning a more situated and emancipatory version of critique.


Wednesday, September 28, 2022
Professor Susan Neiman
Director of the Einstein Forum (Potsdam)

Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
This lecture will discuss the ways in which contemporary voices who consider themselves leftist have abandoned philosophical ideas which are crucial to any left-wing standpoint: a commitment to universalism, a firm distinction between power and justice, and a belief in the possibility of progress. These ideas are connected and have their roots in the much-maligned Enlightenment. Most critiques of contemporary positions on the so-called woke left have been made from liberal, centrist, or rightwing perspectives. Neiman, by contrast, situates her work squarely on the left, and argues that today’s left has deprived itself of concepts which are crucial for resisting the right-wing lurch.


Thursday, March 31, 2022 – Friday, April 1, 2022
with keynote sessions by Dr. Lara Harb
Online Event  “Forms and Functions of Islamic Philosophy” seeks to highlight how Islamic philosophy (falsafa/ḥikma) was practiced “in conversation”—between scholars, with various audiences, and with different disciplines,  approaches, and rhetoric. Islamic philosophy was composed not only in traditional forms of treatises and commentaries but also through narratives written in poetry and prose. For example, Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī penned a panegyric poem written in Persian in praise of logic, physics, and metaphysics, alongside his many philosophical prose treatises. Ibn al-ʿArabī’s philosophical mysticism includes prose that reads as Aristotelian commentary alongside succinct poems highlighting his key philosophical concepts through mystical metaphors. In reference to Ibn Sīnā’s allegorical treatise, Ibn Tufayl’s famous Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān provides an intriguing narrative and philosophical thought experiment. What do story-telling, poetry, narrative, metaphor, and allegory reveal about the nature and purpose of philosophy? The conference is organized in conjunction with the “Islamic Philosophy in Conversation” working group. The conference aligns itself with the goals of the working group, and therefore seeks to highlight the work of a diverse group of scholars, including emerging scholars of Islamic philosophy, as well as those who identify as female, non-binary, or as belonging to a historically-marginalized group.

On Thursday, March 31, from 5-6:30 pm, Dr. Lara Harb will lead a discussion of a primary source text (sections 38 and 39 from Averroes' commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics). If you would like to join the discussion, please contact Nora Jacobsen Ben Hammed ([email protected]) for the meeting link.
 
For the full program and details on how to attend see our website.


Friday, March 11, 2022
  Getty L. Lustila
Northeastern University

Barringer House Classroom  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5
In this talk I put forward an account of Indigenous environmental justice that is both substantive and inclusive of other marginalized populations. This account is substantive insofar as its concerns extend beyond considerations of procedural fairness (or, ensuring a fair distribution of environmental goods and ills). An Indigenous account of environmental justice aims to reestablish our distinct relationship to the Land as “place” and not “space.” Reestablishing this relationship requires that we see ourselves as accountable to our human and nonhuman relations and take agency over the writing of our shared stories. I also argue that an account of Indigenous environmental justice must be inclusive, or sensitive to the history of state violence against other marginalized groups, which complicates the “colonizer” and “colonized” dynamic. I claim that members of these groups can also become “people of place.”


Friday, November 5, 2021
The Philosophy Salon: Speaker Series
RKC 103  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Scott Pratt, Professor of Philosophy, University of Oregon The settlement of the Americas by European peoples has long been recognized as a process of colonization. In North America, the process is most often called "settler colonialism" because the aim was not extraction of raw materials and labor, but the conquest and settlement of land and the elimination of indigenous peoples. Decolonization as a project is often predicated upon developing so-called "critical thinking skills." The problem is that critical thinking operates according to the very "law of thought" that helped establish the colonial system in the first place. This short discussion will pose the problem, summarize key elements of the inherited system, and suggest the alternative starting place proposed by indigenous thinkers at the border of European thought in America. 

Please visit the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion website for a full list of events marking National Native American Heritage Month at Bard College.


Friday, November 5, 2021
  Panel I: Arts of Resistance, 10:00am - 12:00pm
Panel II: Systems and Power, 2:00pm - 3:30pm

Finberg House  Panel I: Arts of Resistance, 10:00am - 12:00pm

Mie Inouye, “W.E.B. Du Bois on ‘The Art of Organization’”

Rohma Khan, "Tipping Point: Immigrant Workers' Activism in the Taxi and Restaurant Industries"
 
Jomaira Salas-Pujols, “Black Girl Refusal: "Acting Out" Against Discipline & Scarcity in Schools”
 
Pınar Kemerli, “Muslim Nonviolence in an Age of Islamism: War-resistance and Decolonization in Turkey”

Panel II: Systems and Power, 2:00pm - 3:30pm

Rupali Warke, “The Zenana that incited war: Maharajpur, 1843”
 
Lucas Pinheiro, “Data Factories: The Politics of Digital Work at Google and MTurk” Yarran Hominh, “The Problem of Unfreedom”
 


Tuesday, September 14, 2021
A Virtual Panel and Discussion with Cynthia Miller-Idriss and Kathleen Blee
Online Event  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Although white supremacist movements have received renewed public attention since the 2017 violence in Charlottesville and the attack on the U.S. Capitol, they need to be placed in deeper historical context if they are to be understood and combated. In particular, the rise of these movements must be linked to the global war on terror after 9/11, which blinded counterextremism authorities to the increasing threat they posed. In this panel, two prominent sociologists, Cynthia Miller-Idriss and Kathleen Blee, trace the growth of white supremacist extremism and its expanding reach into cultural and commercial spaces in the U.S. and beyond. They also examine these movements from the perspective of their members’ lived experience. How are people recruited into white supremacist extremism? How do they make sense of their active involvement? And how, in some instances, do they seek to leave? The answers to these questions, Miller-Idriss and Blee suggest, are shaped in part by the gendered and generational relationships that define these movements.
 Cynthia Miller-Idriss is Professor in the School of Public Affairs and the School of Education at American University, where she directs the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL).  
Kathleen Blee is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh.  If you would like to attend, please register here.  Zoom link and code will be emailed the day of the event. 

 


Friday, September 10, 2021
14 Faculty Circle  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Join members of the philosophy program faculty as well as current majors for an open house and picnic. This will be an opportunity to meet fellow philosophers as well as to learn about the major, ask questions, and enjoy food and drinks together!


Friday, February 26, 2021
  Alejandro Naranjo Sandoval, PhD Candidate, Princeton University
Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Membership in a racial group is often precarious. Someone can be embraced as a member by some people and in some contexts yet be excluded by others or in other contexts. Instead of shying away from this fact, as do most philosophical accounts of race, I build a metaphysics of race around it. I argue that racial membership depends on relations of mutual recognition between individuals. Recognition is mutual, joint, and socially valuable. For two individuals to recognize each other is for both to hold that they are subject to the same social and moral values and disvalues, as concerns their distinctive, shared lot in life.

Join Zoom Meeting
Meeting ID: 853 2753 3763 / Passcode: 175957


Friday, February 19, 2021
  Aminah Hasan-Birdwell
Alva and Beatrice Bradley Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Furman University/Associate Research Scholar in Philosophy, Columbia University

Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5
This paper examines the metaphorical and literal senses of Mary Astell’s feminist equation of marriage to slavery in Some Reflections upon Marriage (1700). I argue that Astell’s use of the concept of the slave to describe the inequality between men and women suggests an important intersection between the history of slavery, race, and gender. I will conclude with larger reflections on Astell’s Cartesian emphasis on the disembodied mind as the philosophical ground for equality between the sexes. This account of equality is a noteworthy contrast with twentieth-century thinkers on race and gender, who tend to emphasize embodiment.

Join Zoom Meeting
Meeting ID: 886 7102 7421 / Passcode: 829359


Friday, February 12, 2021
  Yarran Hominh, PhD Candidate, Columbia University
Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5
What does it mean to “blame the system”? Blame in its paradigm case is second-personal. Persons blame other persons for wronging them. But, many argue, large-scale social and political systems and the structural injustices that are part of such systems are not reducible to individual persons and their actions. What does it mean for the system to be the object of blame?

Beginning from activists’ calls to “blame the system”, I argue that blaming the system is second-personal in the following sense. It involves the activist second-personally calling another to a particular kind of self-knowledge through blame. Blame is the mode by which the blamer comes to know how the system has formed them. It can thus motivate them to change themselves and the system. This call evinces a humanist response to structural injustice that resists common technocratic and objectivising cultural tendencies.

Join Zoom Meeting
Meeting ID: 829 7086 9747 / Passcode: 050296


Friday, February 12, 2021
  Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Join via Zoom: https://bard.zoom.us/j/82970869747?pwd=elp0TnN5a2wvT002VkFlalBxUVhOdz09

What does it mean to “blame the system”? Blame in its paradigm case is second-personal. Persons blame other persons for wronging them. But, many argue, large-scale social and political systems and the structural injustices that are part of such systems are not reducible to individual persons and their actions. What does it mean for the system to be the object of blame?

Beginning from activists’ calls to “blame the system,” I argue that blaming the system is second-personal in the following sense. It involves the activist second-personally calling another to a particular kind of self-knowledge through blame. Blame is the mode by which the blamer comes to know how the system has formed them. It can thus motivate them to change themselves and the system. This call evinces a humanist response to structural injustice that resists common technocratic and objectivizing cultural tendencies.

Zoom Meeting ID: 829 7086 9747 / Passcode: 050296


Friday, December 4, 2020
  Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Zoom link: https://bard.zoom.us/j/94775040518?pwd=SzJlZDNPcXZKY0tjS21YZlEzRUNzdz09

The Philosophy Salon—a new initiative to promote community among students, faculty, and staff interested in philosophy—takes place every Friday from noon to 1:30pm on Zoom. Salon events include: faculty speakers from inside and outside Bard, information sessions, conversations with alumni/ae, and informal philosophical discussions. To be added to the Salon email list, contact Kathryn Tabb at [email protected] or Ruth Zisman at [email protected].

Salon schedule:

September 11: Welcome and Introductions

September 18: Club of Philosophy: Jay Elliott, “Could It Be Worth Thinking About Aristotle on Slavery?”

September 25: Alumni Speaker Event: Ian Olasov

October 2: Speaker Series: Dana Miranda, "The Riot of Disorder"

October 9: Moderation Info Session

October 16: Work in Progress with Marina Van Zuylen

October 23: Work in Progress with Nora Ben Hammed

October 30: Halloween with Thomas Bartscherer: “All That Is Deep Loves the Mask"

November 6: Politics and Change with Chiara Ricciardone

November 13: Speaker Series: Krisanna Scheiter

November 20: Speaker Series: Rosemarie Garland Thompson

December 4: Friendly Philosopher’s Club: A workshop on giving and receiving feedback

December 11: What Is Philosophy? A discussion for the curious


Friday, November 27, 2020
  Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Zoom link: https://bard.zoom.us/j/94775040518?pwd=SzJlZDNPcXZKY0tjS21YZlEzRUNzdz09

The Philosophy Salon—a new initiative to promote community among students, faculty, and staff interested in philosophy—takes place every Friday from noon to 1:30pm on Zoom. Salon events include: faculty speakers from inside and outside Bard, information sessions, conversations with alumni/ae, and informal philosophical discussions. To be added to the Salon email list, contact Kathryn Tabb at [email protected] or Ruth Zisman at [email protected].

Salon schedule:

September 11: Welcome and Introductions

September 18: Club of Philosophy: Jay Elliott, “Could It Be Worth Thinking About Aristotle on Slavery?”

September 25: Alumni Speaker Event: Ian Olasov

October 2: Speaker Series: Dana Miranda, "The Riot of Disorder"

October 9: Moderation Info Session

October 16: Work in Progress with Marina Van Zuylen

October 23: Work in Progress with Nora Ben Hammed

October 30: Halloween with Thomas Bartscherer: “All That Is Deep Loves the Mask"

November 6: Politics and Change with Chiara Ricciardone

November 13: Speaker Series: Krisanna Scheiter

November 20: Speaker Series: Rosemarie Garland Thompson

December 4: Friendly Philosopher’s Club: A workshop on giving and receiving feedback

December 11: What Is Philosophy? A discussion for the curious


Friday, November 20, 2020
  Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Zoom link: https://bard.zoom.us/j/94775040518?pwd=SzJlZDNPcXZKY0tjS21YZlEzRUNzdz09

The Philosophy Salon—a new initiative to promote community among students, faculty, and staff interested in philosophy—takes place every Friday from noon to 1:30pm on Zoom. Salon events include: faculty speakers from inside and outside Bard, information sessions, conversations with alumni/ae, and informal philosophical discussions. To be added to the Salon email list, contact Kathryn Tabb at [email protected] or Ruth Zisman at [email protected].

Salon schedule:

September 11: Welcome and Introductions

September 18: Club of Philosophy: Jay Elliott, “Could It Be Worth Thinking About Aristotle on Slavery?”

September 25: Alumni Speaker Event: Ian Olasov

October 2: Speaker Series: Dana Miranda, "The Riot of Disorder"

October 9: Moderation Info Session

October 16: Work in Progress with Marina Van Zuylen

October 23: Work in Progress with Nora Ben Hammed

October 30: Halloween with Thomas Bartscherer: “All That Is Deep Loves the Mask"

November 6: Politics and Change with Chiara Ricciardone

November 13: Speaker Series: Krisanna Scheiter

November 20: Speaker Series: Rosemarie Garland Thompson

December 4: Friendly Philosopher’s Club: A workshop on giving and receiving feedback

December 11: What Is Philosophy? A discussion for the curious


Friday, November 20, 2020
A Talk by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5
What would a world be like if it fully welcomed and included people with disabilities?  How could we build that world to share and live in together?  Why would that be a better world for all of us? This presentation shows how the new field of disability studies addresses these questions by bringing forward the history, culture, politics, aesthetics, and ethics of disability and people living with disabilities.

The disabilities scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson will be giving a talk for the Philosophy Salon entitled “Building a World that Includes Disability.” This talk will be a broad reflection on the need for a field of Disabilities Studies, including in the context of the arts as well as the humanities.

We will have live captioning for the event, but if there are other accessibility needs we should be aware of, please let us know.

Topic: Philosophy Salon
Time: This is a recurring meeting Meet anytime

Join Zoom Meeting
https://bard.zoom.us/j/94775040518?pwd=SzJlZDNPcXZKY0tjS21YZlEzRUNzdz09

Meeting ID: 947 7504 0518
Passcode: 102730
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Tuesday, November 17, 2020
Online Event  7:00 pm – 8:30 pm EST/GMT-5
All of us work and study on a large campus and live in a thinly populated rural area. We tend to inhabit virtual bubbles where we are surrounded by people who see things the way we do. And whether we are newcomers to the Mid-Hudson Valley or longtime residents, we do not always understand the “signs” we encounter. What do yard signs in election season or “thin blue line” flags tell us about the landscape in which we live? What do colonial estates-turned-museums reveal about enduring inequalities? What murals and monuments “hide” in plain sight because they do not match our pre-set ideas about the place we may (or may not) feel we belong to? Who harvests the local crops but cannot afford to shop at the farmers’ market?
 
In an effort to shine some light on systemic racism and anti-racist alternatives in our everyday surroundings, the Division of Social Studies is organizing a “Reading the Signs” roundtable over Zoom as well as an accompanying online archive. The roundtable will also offer Bard community members an opportunity to reflect on the implications of the election on November 3rd, whatever the outcome happens to be.

Call for Contributions!
What signs do you think need reading? What is an image, flag, space, mural, monument, memorial, item of clothing, word/phrase, etc. that points to instances of systemic racism in the past or present? What is a sign that points to anti-racist precedents in the past and/or emancipatory possibilities for the future?
 
In the days leading up to the roundtable, the Social Studies Division invites all Bard community members (students, staff, and faculty) to send photos, videos, audio recordings, and other documents of systemic racism and anti-racism to [email protected].
 
All contributions must be accompanied by a brief written statement (anything from a few sentences to a substantial paragraph) that provides initial context, explanation, and interpretation.
 
The roundtable will feature many of these contributions, which can be made anonymous upon request. The Division of Social Studies will also maintain an online archive of signs that will be available to Bard community members before and after the event.

Join via Zoom 
Meeting ID: 863 8920 3500
Passcode: 583480


Friday, November 13, 2020
  Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Zoom link: https://bard.zoom.us/j/94775040518?pwd=SzJlZDNPcXZKY0tjS21YZlEzRUNzdz09

The Philosophy Salon—a new initiative to promote community among students, faculty, and staff interested in philosophy—takes place every Friday from noon to 1:30pm on Zoom. Salon events include: faculty speakers from inside and outside Bard, information sessions, conversations with alumni/ae, and informal philosophical discussions. To be added to the Salon email list, contact Kathryn Tabb at [email protected] or Ruth Zisman at [email protected].

Salon schedule:

September 11: Welcome and Introductions

September 18: Club of Philosophy: Jay Elliott, “Could It Be Worth Thinking About Aristotle on Slavery?”

September 25: Alumni Speaker Event: Ian Olasov

October 2: Speaker Series: Dana Miranda, "The Riot of Disorder"

October 9: Moderation Info Session

October 16: Work in Progress with Marina Van Zuylen

October 23: Work in Progress with Nora Ben Hammed

October 30: Halloween with Thomas Bartscherer: “All That Is Deep Loves the Mask"

November 6: Politics and Change with Chiara Ricciardone

November 13: Speaker Series: Krisanna Scheiter

November 20: Speaker Series: Rosemarie Garland Thompson

December 4: Friendly Philosopher’s Club: A workshop on giving and receiving feedback

December 11: What Is Philosophy? A discussion for the curious


Friday, November 13, 2020
  Krisanna Scheiter, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Union College
 

Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Join via Zoom: https://bard.zoom.us/j/8468103878?pwd=SE1wbGd3MGxubnEvNkp5Qng1aTRaUT09

Plato and Aristotle appear to be the first ancient Greek thinkers who recognize anger, pity, fear, and other things we call emotions as belonging to a special category of psychic pleasures and pains. Neither Plato or Aristotle present a theory of emotion and so we are left to piece one together for them from what they do say about emotions. In this paper, I will argue that Plato and Aristotle have different answers to the question "What is an emotion?" For Plato, psychic pleasures and pains occur when we imagine a certain scenario and are convinced that what we imagine will in fact turn out to be the case. For Aristotle, however, we do not have to take what we imagine to be a true representation of the world. Take for example, the emotion "hope". For Plato, hope is a kind of psychic pleasure that occurs when we imagine ourselves experiencing great pleasure in the future and we believe that we really will experience that pleasure. For Aristotle, however, we can experience pleasure just by imagining ourselves enjoying future pleasures even if we do not think that what we are imagining will really come to pass.
 


Friday, November 6, 2020
  Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Zoom link: https://bard.zoom.us/j/94775040518?pwd=SzJlZDNPcXZKY0tjS21YZlEzRUNzdz09

The Philosophy Salon—a new initiative to promote community among students, faculty, and staff interested in philosophy—takes place every Friday from noon to 1:30pm on Zoom. Salon events include: faculty speakers from inside and outside Bard, information sessions, conversations with alumni/ae, and informal philosophical discussions. To be added to the Salon email list, contact Kathryn Tabb at [email protected] or Ruth Zisman at [email protected].

Salon schedule:

September 11: Welcome and Introductions

September 18: Club of Philosophy: Jay Elliott, “Could It Be Worth Thinking About Aristotle on Slavery?”

September 25: Alumni Speaker Event: Ian Olasov

October 2: Speaker Series: Dana Miranda, "The Riot of Disorder"

October 9: Moderation Info Session

October 16: Work in Progress with Marina Van Zuylen

October 23: Work in Progress with Nora Ben Hammed

October 30: Halloween with Thomas Bartscherer: “All That Is Deep Loves the Mask"

November 6: Politics and Change with Chiara Ricciardone

November 13: Speaker Series: Krisanna Scheiter

November 20: Speaker Series: Rosemarie Garland Thompson

December 4: Friendly Philosopher’s Club: A workshop on giving and receiving feedback

December 11: What Is Philosophy? A discussion for the curious


Friday, October 30, 2020
  Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Zoom link: https://bard.zoom.us/j/94775040518?pwd=SzJlZDNPcXZKY0tjS21YZlEzRUNzdz09

The Philosophy Salon—a new initiative to promote community among students, faculty, and staff interested in philosophy—takes place every Friday from noon to 1:30pm on Zoom. Salon events include: faculty speakers from inside and outside Bard, information sessions, conversations with alumni/ae, and informal philosophical discussions. To be added to the Salon email list, contact Kathryn Tabb at [email protected] or Ruth Zisman at [email protected].

Salon schedule:

September 11: Welcome and Introductions

September 18: Club of Philosophy: Jay Elliott, “Could It Be Worth Thinking About Aristotle on Slavery?”

September 25: Alumni Speaker Event: Ian Olasov

October 2: Speaker Series: Dana Miranda, "The Riot of Disorder"

October 9: Moderation Info Session

October 16: Work in Progress with Marina Van Zuylen

October 23: Work in Progress with Nora Ben Hammed

October 30: Halloween with Thomas Bartscherer: “All That Is Deep Loves the Mask"

November 6: Politics and Change with Chiara Ricciardone

November 13: Speaker Series: Krisanna Scheiter

November 20: Speaker Series: Rosemarie Garland Thompson

December 4: Friendly Philosopher’s Club: A workshop on giving and receiving feedback

December 11: What Is Philosophy? A discussion for the curious


Friday, October 23, 2020
  Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Zoom link: https://bard.zoom.us/j/94775040518?pwd=SzJlZDNPcXZKY0tjS21YZlEzRUNzdz09

The Philosophy Salon—a new initiative to promote community among students, faculty, and staff interested in philosophy—takes place every Friday from noon to 1:30pm on Zoom. Salon events include: faculty speakers from inside and outside Bard, information sessions, conversations with alumni/ae, and informal philosophical discussions. To be added to the Salon email list, contact Kathryn Tabb at [email protected] or Ruth Zisman at [email protected].

Salon schedule:

September 11: Welcome and Introductions

September 18: Club of Philosophy: Jay Elliott, “Could It Be Worth Thinking About Aristotle on Slavery?”

September 25: Alumni Speaker Event: Ian Olasov

October 2: Speaker Series: Dana Miranda, "The Riot of Disorder"

October 9: Moderation Info Session

October 16: Work in Progress with Marina Van Zuylen

October 23: Work in Progress with Nora Ben Hammed

October 30: Halloween with Thomas Bartscherer: “All That Is Deep Loves the Mask"

November 6: Politics and Change with Chiara Ricciardone

November 13: Speaker Series: Krisanna Scheiter

November 20: Speaker Series: Rosemarie Garland Thompson

December 4: Friendly Philosopher’s Club: A workshop on giving and receiving feedback

December 11: What Is Philosophy? A discussion for the curious


Friday, October 16, 2020
  Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Zoom link: https://bard.zoom.us/j/94775040518?pwd=SzJlZDNPcXZKY0tjS21YZlEzRUNzdz09

The Philosophy Salon—a new initiative to promote community among students, faculty, and staff interested in philosophy—takes place every Friday from noon to 1:30pm on Zoom. Salon events include: faculty speakers from inside and outside Bard, information sessions, conversations with alumni/ae, and informal philosophical discussions. To be added to the Salon email list, contact Kathryn Tabb at [email protected] or Ruth Zisman at [email protected].

Salon schedule:

September 11: Welcome and Introductions

September 18: Club of Philosophy: Jay Elliott, “Could It Be Worth Thinking About Aristotle on Slavery?”

September 25: Alumni Speaker Event: Ian Olasov

October 2: Speaker Series: Dana Miranda, "The Riot of Disorder"

October 9: Moderation Info Session

October 16: Work in Progress with Marina Van Zuylen

October 23: Work in Progress with Nora Ben Hammed

October 30: Halloween with Thomas Bartscherer: “All That Is Deep Loves the Mask"

November 6: Politics and Change with Chiara Ricciardone

November 13: Speaker Series: Krisanna Scheiter

November 20: Speaker Series: Rosemarie Garland Thompson

December 4: Friendly Philosopher’s Club: A workshop on giving and receiving feedback

December 11: What Is Philosophy? A discussion for the curious


Friday, October 9, 2020
  Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Zoom link: https://bard.zoom.us/j/94775040518?pwd=SzJlZDNPcXZKY0tjS21YZlEzRUNzdz09

The Philosophy Salon—a new initiative to promote community among students, faculty, and staff interested in philosophy—takes place every Friday from noon to 1:30pm on Zoom. Salon events include: faculty speakers from inside and outside Bard, information sessions, conversations with alumni/ae, and informal philosophical discussions. To be added to the Salon email list, contact Kathryn Tabb at [email protected] or Ruth Zisman at [email protected].

Salon schedule:

September 11: Welcome and Introductions

September 18: Club of Philosophy: Jay Elliott, “Could It Be Worth Thinking About Aristotle on Slavery?”

September 25: Alumni Speaker Event: Ian Olasov

October 2: Speaker Series: Dana Miranda, "The Riot of Disorder"

October 9: Moderation Info Session

October 16: Work in Progress with Marina Van Zuylen

October 23: Work in Progress with Nora Ben Hammed

October 30: Halloween with Thomas Bartscherer: “All That Is Deep Loves the Mask"

November 6: Politics and Change with Chiara Ricciardone

November 13: Speaker Series: Krisanna Scheiter

November 20: Speaker Series: Rosemarie Garland Thompson

December 4: Friendly Philosopher’s Club: A workshop on giving and receiving feedback

December 11: What Is Philosophy? A discussion for the curious


Friday, October 2, 2020
  Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Zoom link: https://bard.zoom.us/j/94775040518?pwd=SzJlZDNPcXZKY0tjS21YZlEzRUNzdz09

The Philosophy Salon—a new initiative to promote community among students, faculty, and staff interested in philosophy—takes place every Friday from noon to 1:30pm on Zoom. Salon events include: faculty speakers from inside and outside Bard, information sessions, conversations with alumni/ae, and informal philosophical discussions. To be added to the Salon email list, contact Kathryn Tabb at [email protected] or Ruth Zisman at [email protected].

Salon schedule:

September 11: Welcome and Introductions

September 18: Club of Philosophy: Jay Elliott, “Could It Be Worth Thinking About Aristotle on Slavery?”

September 25: Alumni Speaker Event: Ian Olasov

October 2: Speaker Series: Dana Miranda, "The Riot of Disorder"

October 9: Moderation Info Session

October 16: Work in Progress with Marina Van Zuylen

October 23: Work in Progress with Nora Ben Hammed

October 30: Halloween with Thomas Bartscherer: “All That Is Deep Loves the Mask"

November 6: Politics and Change with Chiara Ricciardone

November 13: Speaker Series: Krisanna Scheiter

November 20: Speaker Series: Rosemarie Garland Thompson

December 4: Friendly Philosopher’s Club: A workshop on giving and receiving feedback

December 11: What Is Philosophy? A discussion for the curious


Friday, October 2, 2020
  Dana Francisco Miranda ’14, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Massachusetts Boston
Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Reflecting on this hot summer of political unrest, where many took to the streets to protest against police brutality and antiblack violence, it is typical for many people to review past racial uprisings in order to understand the current Black Lives Matter movement. For instance, the civil disorders of the 1960s are a favorite of many scholars and journalists. In these discussions, the social movements of today are compared directly against popular perceptions of (non)violence. What is less discussed or analyzed is the state of “peace” that defines or frames the political order we live under. Yet, I would argue that it is ordinary to view political orders as nonviolent. This attitude is also why it is typical to portray uprisings as disturbances or outbreaks of violence. However, inherent in this attitude is an assumption that everyday life and the politics which frame it is actually peaceful. Drawing on the works of Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Cedric Robinson and Frantz Fanon, this work will first examine how political orders come to be thought of as peaceful even if they enact state violence or condone interpersonal violence on oppressed people. It will also interrogate how this status quo is said to positively represent “law and order” in direct contrast to social movements led by Black people, which are classified as “riots” or “disorders.” Lastly, through the writings of Avia Pasternak, Martin Luther King Jr., and Vicky Osterweil, I will end with discussing the utility of political rioting.

Join via Zoomhttps://bard.zoom.us/j/94775040518?pwd=SzJlZDNPcXZKY0tjS21YZlEzRUNzdz09


Friday, September 25, 2020
  Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Zoom link: https://bard.zoom.us/j/94775040518?pwd=SzJlZDNPcXZKY0tjS21YZlEzRUNzdz09

The Philosophy Salon—a new initiative to promote community among students, faculty, and staff interested in philosophy—takes place every Friday from noon to 1:30pm on Zoom. Salon events include: faculty speakers from inside and outside Bard, information sessions, conversations with alumni/ae, and informal philosophical discussions. To be added to the Salon email list, contact Kathryn Tabb at [email protected] or Ruth Zisman at [email protected].

Salon schedule:

September 11: Welcome and Introductions

September 18: Club of Philosophy: Jay Elliott, “Could It Be Worth Thinking About Aristotle on Slavery?”

September 25: Alumni Speaker Event: Ian Olasov

October 2: Speaker Series: Dana Miranda, "The Riot of Disorder"

October 9: Moderation Info Session

October 16: Work in Progress with Marina Van Zuylen

October 23: Work in Progress with Nora Ben Hammed

October 30: Halloween with Thomas Bartscherer: “All That Is Deep Loves the Mask"

November 6: Politics and Change with Chiara Ricciardone

November 13: Speaker Series: Krisanna Scheiter

November 20: Speaker Series: Rosemarie Garland Thompson

December 4: Friendly Philosopher’s Club: A workshop on giving and receiving feedback

December 11: What Is Philosophy? A discussion for the curious


Thursday, March 12, 2020
  Michael Menser, CUNY Brooklyn College
Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm – 6:15 pm EDT/GMT-4
The Green New Deal changed the contemporary political debate. But what kind of philosophy grounds it? Never before has a mainstream policy framework treated the climate crisis as a global and even existential threat requiring a national commitment not seen since the Great Depression and WWII. Promoted by the Sunrise Movement and officially formulated by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Markey, the GND has since evolved, with many candidates having their own versions, including Senators Sanders and Warren. While both have game-changing and justice-enhancing elements in their proposals, the differences are striking and illuminate a major debate about the role of the public in this time of system change. In this presentation, I will look at their proposals from the normative frameworks of economic democracy and climate justice, and argue that one of these views has a much better chance of promoting climate justice than the other.


Friday, February 28, 2020
  Justin E. H. Smith, Professor of Philosophy, University of Paris
Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm – 6:15 pm EST/GMT-5
In a classic paper, the philosopher of biology John Dupré argued that the reclassification of whales in the 19th century, from fishes to mammals, was not so much a correction of a scientific error as it was a reshuffling of largely arbitrary folk categories, since until the 19th century there was nothing in nature preventing the class of fish from including warm-blooded, milk-producing, live-birth-giving animals. More recently we have been encouraged, or perhaps pressured, to correct our previous “error” of believing that the dinosaurs went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous. They are still among us, we are told, chirping and flying about. Yet whatever phylogenetic discoveries reveal, so far the folk category of “dinosaur” has resisted most efforts to stretch it far enough to include, e.g., sparrows. That is not what a dinosaur looks like, the person in the street will reliably insist. Unlike the case of whales and fish, no one has ever seen an actual dinosaur, and a priori we might expect the folk category that contains them to be more, not less, flexible than the one from which whales were lately expelled. What can this example show us about the relationship between scientific taxonomy and the semantics of natural-kind terms? Is there any sense at all in saying that birds are really dinosaurs in spite of the way we talk about them? In this talk—in which I range broadly to explore a number of basic conceptual problems of the philosophy of taxonomy—I willl argue that there is not. 


Thursday, February 6, 2020
Charles Stang, Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School
Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm – 6:15 pm EST/GMT-5
How did the ancient Greeks and Romans conceive of the nature of the human subject and its relationship to the divine?

The Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus (203-270 CE) famously insisted that every human is doubled: our intellect “here” in the material world has an archetype “there” in a transcendent reality, where it eternally feasts on the intelligible Forms. This lecture will explore how Plotinus’s model of doubled selfhood fared in the generation that followed immediately upon his death, particularly in a debate between two of his most important Neoplatonic successors, Porphyry of Tyre (c. 234 – c. 305) and Iamblichus of Chalcis (c. 245 – c. 325). Specifically, it will explore the implications of this model of selfhood for ritual practice, that is, for the traditional worship of the gods.
 


Friday, December 6, 2019
Olin Humanities, Room 102  3:00 pm – 5:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Dr. Ashley Oliver, a medical resident and social justice advocate, will give a talk entitled “Medicine from Without and Within: A Series of Arguments about the Role of the Liberal Arts Education in Diversifying Modes of Analysis and Knowledge and in Advancing Social Justice.”

Abstract
What is a “healing imperative”?  Dr. Oliver will use her autobiography to trace an arc of striving for social justice in medicine. She will begin by describing the ways that medicine has been studied from without, as part of liberal arts curricula, and argue that institutions like Bard are well equipped to help students and their faculty open new frontiers to our understanding of what medicine is, as  practiced, and to imagine what it could be. She will then consider a particularly alarming challenge to the health-care landscape coming from within: the rapidly growing integration of bioinformation collected from private companies into the traditional methods by which medicine predicts and even molds future behavior. Because of the drive to improve diagnosis and efficacy of treatment, including the prerogatives of “precision medicine,” we risk reinforcing or possibly even worsening inequities of power and health care domestically and internationally. Dr. Oliver will close with a plea for us to continue to nurture minds both within and without medicine in order to better analyze the complex landscape of the healing imperative.
 


Wednesday, November 13, 2019
A Lecture by Benedetta Zavatta 
and a conversation with 
Daniel Berthold 
and
Ann Lauterbach

Olin Humanities, Room 201  6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Benedetta Zavatta will be presenting Individuality and Beyond: Nietzsche Reads Emerson, her groundbreaking study of the influence of the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson on the German Friedrich Nietzsche, recently published by Oxford University Press. Nietzsche read Emerson intensely from a young age and through to the end of his writing career. Referring to Emerson’s Essays, Nietzsche wrote that he had never “felt so at home in a book; felt so much, indeed, as if the home were my own.” In her study, Zavatta surveys all the evidence in Nietzsche’s published writing and in his archive—including correspondence, notes, and Nietzsche’s heavily annotated copies of Emerson—to develop a rich portrait of Nietzsche’s complex relationship to the American writer he once called his “twin soul.” Zavatta's book explores the profound influence that Emerson had on Nietzsche’s thinking about a wide range of topics, including individualism, perfectionism, morality, and freedom. It also provides a fresh reading of Emerson, who, seen from a Nietzschean perspective, comes to light as an incisive cultural critic and a decisive figure in the history of philosophy. 

After the talk, poet Ann Lauterbach and philosopher Daniel Berthold will begin the discussion, responding to Benedetta Zavatta’s presentation and drawing on their own long-term engagements with Emerson and Nietzsche, respectively. 

Benedetta Zavatta is Marie Curie Researcher at the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes (CNRS/ENS) in Paris. Daniel Berthold is Professor of Philosophy at Bard College. Ann Lauterbach is the David and Ruth Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College.


Monday, October 28, 2019
  Laura Franklin-Hall
Associate Professor of Philosophy, NYU

Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
This lecture explores why scientists sometimes classify entities in terms of their histories, and other times based exclusively on their non-historical or ‘synchronic’ properties. After reviewing examples of these two approaches, I formulate a principle designed to both describe and explain this aspect of our scientific classificatory practice. According to this proposal, a domain is apt for historical classifications just when the probability of the independent emergence of similar entities (PIES) in that domain is very low. In addition to rationalizing this principle and showing its ability to correctly account for classification practices across the natural and social sciences, I consider whether the kinds so circumscribed will be objective or real.


Monday, September 23, 2019
  Demetra Kasimis
Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago

Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Does Plato’s Republic enact a conspiracy? Ostensibly, the impetus for imagining a political regime radically different from the democracy of the discussion is a desire to illustrate a concept (justice), not to overthrow a real political order. On second glance, the Republic takes place during the Peloponnesian War, when conspiratorial zeal consumed Athens. Fears of secret power and political instability erupt into and shape the stylistics of the narrative, provoking doubt about what the dialogue claims it is doing and proposing. Whether we are made privy to a conversation about a political world that may never exist or exposed to a strategy for discussing revolution undetected remains unresolved. The Republic invites a hermeneutics of suspicion, drawing us into a democratic culture of mistrust and the seductions of conspiratorial thinking. As it tropes conspiracy, the Republic provides a searching, immanent, and still-relevant critique of a democracy undergoing what we might today call authoritarian drift. 


Friday, May 3, 2019
  Campus Center, Weis Cinema  10:00 am – 3:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Join us as graduating seniors in the Philosophy Program present their Senior Project research. Seniors presenting are Marion Adams, Luciana Alonso, Nanda Fogle, Carmen Hatchell, Sofia Koukia, Theresa Mendez, Edgar Najera, Nat Tereshchenko, Matteo Waldinger-White, Emma Washburn, Alliyah Williams, and Chase Williams. 

Schedule:

Panel 1 (10:00–11:00am) – Social and Political Philosophy: Carmen, Edgar, Alliyah

Panel 2 (11:00am–12:00pm) – Philosophy, Language, and Literature: Marion, Luciana, Sofia

Lunch (12:00–1:00pm)

Panel 3 (1:00–2:00pm) – Animal Ethics, Environmental Philosophy, and Carribean Philosophy: Nanda, Nat, Chase

Panel 4 (2:00–3:00pm) – Existentialism, Marx, Freud, and Wittgenstein: Theresa, Matteo, Emma

Reception (3:00–3:30pm)
 


Friday, May 3, 2019
  Campus Center, Weis Cinema  10:00 am – 3:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Join us as graduating seniors in the Philosophy Program present their Senior Project research. Seniors presenting are Marion Adams, Luciana Alonso, Nanda Fogle, Carmen Hatchell, Sofia Koukia, Theresa Mendez, Edgar Najera, Nat Tereshchenko, Matteo Waldinger-White, Emma Washburn, Alliyah Williams, and Chase Williams. 

Schedule:

Panel 1 (10:00–11:00am) – Social and Political Philosophy: Carmen, Edgar, Alliyah

Panel 2 (11:00am–12:00pm) – Philosophy, Language, and Literature: Marion, Luciana, Sofia

Lunch (12:00–1:00pm)

Panel 3 (1:00–2:00pm) – Animal Ethics, Environmental Philosophy, and Carribean Philosophy: Nanda, Nat, Chase

Panel 4 (2:00–3:00pm) – Existentialism, Marx, Freud, and Wittgenstein: Theresa, Matteo, Emma

Reception (3:00–3:30pm)
 


Monday, April 8, 2019
  Kari Theurer
Trinity College

Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm – 6:15 pm EDT/GMT-4
The concept of dysfunction plays a central role in psychiatry, and particularly in analyses of psychiatric disorder. Psychiatric disorders are defined in the DSM-5, in part, as syndromes characterized by clinically significant symptoms that reflect “a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or developmental processes underlying mental functioning.” Curiously absent from psychiatric manuals is an account of what constitutes function and dysfunction. I investigate whether philosophical accounts of function and dysfunction can do the work that psychiatry implicitly demands. I argue that one popular account cannot, and that it imports into psychiatry a problematic strain of adaptationism, which falls well short of the requisite standards of evidence in evolutionary biology.


Wednesday, March 13, 2019
  Roger T. Ames
Peking University
Berggruen Research Center

Olin Humanities, Room 205  3:00 pm – 4:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
In the introduction of Chinese philosophy and culture into the Western academy, we have tended to theorize and conceptualize this antique tradition by appeal to familiar categories. Confucian role ethics is an attempt to articulate a sui generis moral philosophy that allows this tradition to have its own voice. This holistic philosophy is grounded in the primacy of relationality, and is a challenge to a foundational liberal individualism that has defined persons as discrete, autonomous, rational, free, and often self-interested agents. Confucian role ethics begins from a relationally constituted conception of person, takes family roles and relations as the entry point for developing moral competence, invokes moral imagination and the growth in relations that it can inspire as the substance of human morality, and entails a human-centered, a-theistic religiousness that stands in sharp contrast to the Abrahamic religions.

Roger T. Ames is humanities chair professor at Peking University, cochair of the academic advisory committee of the Peking University Berggruen Research Center, and professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Hawai’i. He is former editor of Philosophy East and West and founding editor of China Review International. Ames has authored several interpretative studies of Chinese philosophy and culture: Thinking Through Confucius (1987), Anticipating China (1995), Thinking from the Han (1998), and Democracy of the Dead (1999) (all with D. L. Hall); Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary (2011); and, most recently, “Human Becomings: Theorizing ‘Persons’ for Confucian Role Ethics” (forthcoming). His publications also include translations of Chinese classics: Sun-tzu: The Art of Warfare (1993); Sun Pin: The Art of Warfare (1996) (with D. C. Lau); the Confucian Analects (1998) and the Classic of Family Reverence: The “Xiaojing” (2009) (both with H. Rosemont), Focusing the Familiar: The “Zhongyong” (2001), and The “Daodejing” (with D. L. Hall) (2003). Almost all of his publications are now available in Chinese translation, including his philosophical translations of Chinese canonical texts. He has most recently been engaged in compiling the new Sourcebook of Classical Confucian Philosophy, and in writing articles promoting a conversation between American pragmatism and Confucianism.


Tuesday, March 5, 2019
  Wiebke Deimling
Clark University

Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm – 6:15 pm EST/GMT-5
How does Kant evaluate sympathy? Does he take it to be supportive of morality or does he view it as an obstacle for moral action? Sympathetic feelings generally have a good reputation. We praise those who show them and we call for them as a solution to moral problems. The recent debate about moral emotions both in philosophy and psychology has introduced some push-back against a positive evaluation of sympathy. This paper shows that Kant, like the contemporary critics of sympathetic feelings and like many of his colleagues in the 18th century, shares the view that sympathy is a problematic emotion. We have gained a much better understanding of Kant’s moral philosophy through recent scholarship showing that moral emotions, and sympathy in particular, can and do play a role in his deontological framework. But disregarding Kant’s criticisms of moral emotions also leaves us with a lacking interpretation. Kant’s moral psychology of sympathy is more complex than has been appreciated. And it makes more interesting and more plausible recommendations about how we should respond to sympathetic feeling.


Thursday, February 21, 2019
  Kari Weil
University Professor of Letters, Wesleyan University

Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm – 6:15 pm EST/GMT-5
The terms “creature” and “creaturely” have newly received  attention in the field of animal studies, bringing awareness to the shared status of human and non-human animals as vulnerable beings whose lives may be shed of historical agency and abandoned, in Eric Santner’s words, to the “mute thingness” of matter.  But is the creaturely necessarily mute? In this paper I turn to recent collaborations between the taxidermy artist, Berlinde de Bruyckere and the writer, J.M. Coetzee, to consider how and whether  creaturely memory and history might speak otherwise and what it might mean, in the words of Walter Benjamin, “to pick up the forgotten” from animals.


Thursday, December 20, 2018
  Elizabeth Schechter, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Washington University in St. Louis
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:15 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Consciousness has sometimes been said to be dual, or divided, after split-brain surgery. But what about self-consciousness? In this paper, I argue that after split-brain surgery, the two hemispheres of the brain are associated with distinct self-conscious thinkers. On the other hand, there is something about the way their self-consciousness operates that makes them unlike other pairs of self-conscious thinkers and rather more like a single self-conscious human being.


Tuesday, December 18, 2018
  Kathryn Tabb
Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University

Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:00 pm – 6:15 pm EST/GMT-5
In 2015, President Obama introduced an exciting new approach to medical research: the Precision Medicine Initiative. By using massive data sets and cutting-edge methods from genetics, neuroscience, and other fields, this $1.5 billion effort promises scientific breakthroughs that will yield better options for treatment and care. But is precision always a good thing for medicine? In this talk, I will draw on a tradition in the history of science, that of medical skepticism, to suggest that maybe precision isn’t always as valuable as it might appear to be at first glance. Galen, an influential Greek physician in the Roman Empire, described a popular approach to medicine that rejected the search for underlying causes of disease, and instead focused on alleviating symptoms and bringing comfort. Centuries later, John Locke, a physician as well as a philosopher, argued that knowledge of medical causes would always be out of human reach, no matter how far science advanced. In the current milieu, the celebration of precision amounts to a preference for clinical interventions that can be understood at the molecular level. But as skeptical physicians have long argued, the pursuit of this sort of explanation risks tempting the medical establishment away from its proper task, that of healing the sick. Drawing on this history, I build an ethical case for the revival of medical skepticism, in a form appropriate for the 21st century.


Friday, December 14, 2018
  Sara Aronowitz, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Cognitive Science of Values, Princeton University
Olin Humanities, Room 204  5:00 pm – 6:15 pm EST/GMT-5
Sometimes, we face choices between actions most likely to lead to valuable outcomes, and actions that put us in a better position to learn. These choices exemplify what is called the exploration/exploitation trade-off. In computer science and statistics, this trade-off has fruitfully been applied to modulating the way agents make choices over time. In this talk, I argue that the trade-off also extends to belief. We can be torn between two ways of believing, one of which is expected to be more accurate, whereas the other looks like it will lead to more learning opportunity. Further, it is sometimes rationally permissible to choose the latter. I break down the features of action that give rise to the trade-off, and then argue that each feature applies equally well to belief. This result hangs on the connection between what we believe and how we imagine. I end by presenting some preliminary experimental work testing whether humans actually do believe in an exploratory way.


Friday, December 7, 2018
  Katie Stockdale, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Sam Houston State University
Olin Humanities, Room 204  5:00 pm – 6:15 pm EST/GMT-5
A few years ago, it was common for philosophers to begin inquiry into hope by noting that the subject has received little attention in the philosophical literature. But our ability to make this claim is quickly coming to an end; hope has been earning increasing recognition in the discipline, with philosophers exploring important questions related to the nature of hope, what makes hope rational, and how hope is connected to human well-being and motivation. Despite this recent interest, however, there remains very little discussion of the social and political dimensions of hope. My aim in this paper is to demonstrate the importance of a feminist perspective in bringing these dimensions into fuller view. I argue that a feminist approach to hope, one which attends explicitly to who is hoping, and the relative powers people have in their capacities to affect the world, both enables a richer understanding of the nature of hope and opens up space for exploring the value and risks of hope in an unjust social world.


Monday, November 5, 2018
  Dhananjay Jagannathan, Columbia University
Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
The Aristotelian account of the relationships between desire, reason, and happiness or the well-lived life is highly attractive. My first aim will be to work through some worries about the part of the account concerning ethical reflection and desire in order to refine it. My further aim will be to show that even this version cannot fully explain the rationality that desires and emotions have, as the case of loving relationships makes vivid. Insofar as we see this case as central, I argue, we should take seriously the Platonist alternative for thinking about value and its manifestations in our lives.


Thursday, October 4, 2018
  Olin Humanities Building; Room 301  4:45 pm – 5:45 pm EDT/GMT-4
Considering majoring in Philosophy? Planning to moderate in Philosophy this year or next? Join us for the Philosophy Program Moderation Info Session. Professors Jay Elliott and Ruth Zisman will review the requirements for the major and go over the moderation process step by step. 


Tuesday, September 25, 2018
  Alexus McLeod, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Asian/Asian-American Studies, University of Connecticut
Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The Han period (206 BCE – 220 CE) of early China has been relatively neglected by philosophers (in comparison to the pre-Han "Warring States" period), but it is nonetheless present in our interpretation of Pre-Han texts. I argue here that common interpretations by philosophers of concepts such as tian (heaven, nature) and dao (way) in Pre-Han texts owe much more to Han understandings than to those of Pre-Han thinkers. Some have argued for the dominance of a kind of naturalist worldview in early China. I argue that insofar as there is such a dominant view, it is found primarily in the Han rather than before the Han. The “classical” Pre-Han texts for the most part offer various non-naturalist understandings of the core concepts in question. We can take at least two lessons from this: 1) those interested in locating naturalist thought in early China should look to Han and post-Han rather than to Pre-Han texts; and 2) we should reconsider the dominant philosophical interpretations of the Pre-Han Chinese tradition.


Friday, May 11, 2018
  Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  10:00 am – 4:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Join faculty members and students of the Philosophy program as we celebrate the achievements of our graduating seniors. All graduating seniors will present their senior project research. 


Tuesday, April 24, 2018
  Andrei Buckareff
Marist College

Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm EDT/GMT-4
Some philosophers argue that if exercising intentional agency is understood in terms of settling truths, then the power required for the exercise of agency is an ontologically irreducible two-way power to either make it true that p or make it true that not-p. In this paper, I motivate rejecting two-way powers by, first, arguing that accepting irreducible two-way powers into one’s metaphysic of agency implies an ontological commitment to substance dualism. I then offer an ontologically less costly alternative to irreducible two-way powers. I argue that an ontologically reductive account of two-way powers should be accepted. The reductive account can provide us with the truth makers for talk about two-way powers.    
 


Monday, April 9, 2018
  Alice Crary, Professor of Philosophy
New School/Oxford

Olin Humanities, Room 203  5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Many animal activists have, over the past four decades, compared the utterly callous treatment of animals in modern industrial societies to the treatment of the Nazis’ human victims in the Holocaust. The activists who avail themselves of these comparisons do so with an eye to impressing on us that the utterly callous “processing” of billions of animals in settings such as, e.g., confined feeding operations, industrial slaughterhouses, aquafarms, and laboratories resembles the Holocaust in its momentousness and horror. This lecture contains a nuanced discussion of this strategy, starting with a criticism of animal activists’ use of Holocaust likenesses that is grounded in an account of ways in which invidious comparisons to animals have historically figured in specific methods of racist domination. The lecture’s main negative claim is that, in light of the relevant histories and their contemporary aftereffects, the strategy of referring to the Holocaust to expose wrongs to animals is objectionable. The positive emphasis of the lecture is on showing that it doesn’t follow that we need to abandon the concerns that originally led some animal activists to invoke the idea of the Holocaust and, further, that we can understand the impulse driving these individuals (even if we don’t agree with them) if we follow up on the work of authors who try to impart a sense of the kinds of challenges we face in trying to bring the worldly lives of animals, as well as the wrongs inflicted on them by human beings, into focus in a manner relevant to ethics. 


Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Eva Boodman
Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy
at William Paterson University

Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm EST/GMT-5
White ignorance is a pervasive, insidious form of structural racism linked to knowledge-production that operates in habits, norms, laws and institutional practices. Some attempts to address it, however, reproduce it. This is because an inappropriate framework of responsibility tends to be used: a "liability" framework that emphasizes the preservation of innocence through disavowal, with the effect of essentializing racial identity. In this talk I’ll offer an alternative model of responsibility inspired by Iris Young’s social connection model by which dominant identities can be deflated and de-supremicized without disavowal: a model of complicit responsibility.

Eva Boodman is a One-Year Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at William Paterson University. Her work focuses on questions of political responsibility, complicity, and the institutional reproduction of structural racism through prisons, schools, nursing homes, and the non-profit sector. Her most recent publications are on the impact of mass incarceration on women, and for the last 5 years she has taught political philosophy, feminist philosophy, and the philosophy of race in universities and jails.


Tuesday, November 7, 2017
  Marc Silverman
Olin Humanities, Room 202  6:15 pm EST/GMT-5
Janusz Korczak (1878, Warsaw; 1942, Treblinka) is known for the heroic stand of non-violent opposition he took in response to the Nazis’ decision to liquidate the Jewish ghetto of Warsaw (July-August, 1942) and to deport everybody there, including all children, to the death camp of Treblinka. Korczak refused numerous offers to escape into safety from the ghetto. He stayed with the children (over a hundred) and staff of the Jewish orphanage he had long headed, accompanying them through to death.

However, the exclusive focus on Korczak’s dramatic end is a disservice. He was one of the twentieth century's outstanding moral educators. This talk focuses on his child-centered humanism as well as his identification with Poles and Jews in the expression of this humanism.
 
American born and raised,  Marc Silverman received his BA, MA and doctorate at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and served for over 30 years as Senior Lecturer in the Hebrew University School of Education.  He has published in the fields of educational philosophy and Jewish culture and education.   He is the author of A Pedagogy of Humanist Moral Education: The Educational Thought of Janusz Korczak (2017), published by Palgrave Macmillan Press.    


Monday, November 6, 2017
  Artemy Magun
Smolny/European University at St Petersburg

Arendt Center  6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
The task of this talk is to briefly outline why dialectics is important, and what it can add to the methods of rational analysis we otherwise use. Dialectics does not contradict formal logic or
exclude it. Instead, it contradicts its usage, because what had appeared to you as a continuation of an object you had subsumed under a rule, turns out to be a new object which «knows» about a previous one and therefore follows a contrary rule. Dialectics is a logic of reflective systems. As such it is the only method that can give a rational account of human history and to provide the mind with a discipline that is tolerant and inclusive of negative facts and contrary views.


Tuesday, October 3, 2017
  Stephen Angle
Wesleyan University

Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm EDT/GMT-4
This lecture analyzes the key Confucian idea of “human relationship (renlun)” and then explores both conservative and progressive Confucian arguments concerning the meaning of human relationships today, especially in the context of marriage.


Wednesday, May 17, 2017
Kline, Faculty Dining Room  5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Come celebrate the end of the year with fellow MESers. Meet faculty, hear about exciting new courses, study abroad programs, senior projects, and a number of incredible iniatives MES students are working on. Snacks will be served. All are welcome.


Friday, May 12, 2017
  Campus Center, Weis Cinema  10:00 am – 3:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Join members of the philosophy prorgam as we celebrate the work of our graduating seniors. Seniors will present their senior project research on panels of 3-4 students. Q&A will follow each panel. Presenting seniors include: Eric Bleys, Walker Bockley, Alex Breindel, Miles Cree, Ying Huang, Tyuki Imamura, Piyush Kuthethoor, David Mamukelashvili, Sean Popermhem, Sam Rotter, Nick Shannon, Justin Shin, Jason Toney, and Isabella Wilcher. 


Friday, May 12, 2017
  Campus Center, Weis Cinema  10:00 am – 3:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Please join members of the philosophy program to celebrate the work of our graduating seniors. Each senior will present his/her senior project research on panels of 3-4 students.

Presenting seniors include: 
Eric Bloes, Walker Bockley, Alex Breindel, Miles Cree, Ying Huang, Tyuki Imamura, Piyush Kuthethoor, David Mamukelashvili, Sean Popermhem, Sam Rotter, Nick Shannon, Justin Shin, Jason Toney, and Isabella Wilcher.
 Schedule:
Panel 1 (10-11 am): History of Philosophy, Political Philosophy
Panel 2 (11 am-12 pm): Epistemology, Philosophy of Mind, Pragmatism
Lunch (12-1 pm)
Panel 3 (1-2 pm): Philosophy and Society, Economy, Law
Panel 4 (2-3 pm): Continental Philosophy, Aesthetics, Buddhism
Reception (3 pm)


Monday, April 3, 2017
  Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  4:45 pm EDT/GMT-4
Erich Matthes
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Wellesley CollegeMuseums are home to millions of artworks and cultural artifacts, some of which have made their way to these institutions through unjust means. In this talk, I consider a range of arguments in favor of the repatriation of art (the return of artworks to their country of origin), and discuss some of their apparent limitations. In particular, repatriation, even if justified, is often portrayed as contrary to the aims and values of museums. However, I argue that some of the very considerations museums appeal to in order to oppose repatriation claims can be turned on their heads and marshaled in favor of the practice. In addition to defending against objections to repatriation, this argument yields the surprising conclusion that the redistribution of cultural goods should be much more radical than is typically supposed.


Friday, March 31, 2017
  Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm EDT/GMT-4
Susan M. Blake
Indiana University

In this paper, I defend a particular reading of the term fa 法in the Warring States and early Han (approximately 475-140 BCE). Rather than reading the term to mean law, I argue for understanding it as standard.  The use of fa to mean tool of measurement forms the basis of this reading, and provides reason for thinking that the definition of the term given in the Mohist Canons 墨經 captures its meaning across usages. This reading of the term is of philosophical importance because it allows us to understand the Mohists as presenting a theory of reference comparable to the causal theories of reference in contemporary analytic philosophy. I utilize the comparison between such theories to illuminate interesting possibilities for future research.


Monday, March 13, 2017
  Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  4:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
John Spackman
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Middlebury College
In some parts of the Buddhist tradition, meditation and other Buddhist practices are viewed as leading to a state of non-conceptual awareness (nirvikalpajñāna) that is different from our ordinary conceptual mode of awareness. In this presentation I seek to understand the nature of this non-conceptual awareness, draw on several different models of it, and consider several challenges faced by these models. I propose an alternative model of non-conceptual awareness that locates it in a form of non-dual awareness.


Tuesday, February 14, 2017
  Hegeman 106  4:45 pm EST/GMT-5
Umrao Sethi
University of California, Berkeley Most agree that sensible qualities depend, for their instantiation, on substances. But there has been much debate in the history of philosophy over whether these qualities depend on ordinary material substances like tomatoes, tables and chairs, or on conscious minds. I argue that we ought to take a permissive view and allow for sensible qualities to have both material and mind-dependent instances. While sensible qualities depend on material substances in virtue of inhering in such substances, they depend on minds in virtue of being the proper objects of conscious awareness. Having argued for two distinct kinds of sensible instantiation, I consider some striking consequences for accounts of perceptual experience.


Monday, February 13, 2017
  Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm EST/GMT-5
Eric Mandelbaum
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Baruch College, CUNY
 A Bayesian mind is, at its core, an ideally rational mind. Thus the current popularity of Bayesianism should strike us as somewhat curious, since recent events in human history don't much seem like the result of a rational agents cooperating in a reasonable fashion. In this talk, I'll try to reconcile Bayesian findings which purport to display our rationality, with the stark evidence of our current irrationality. I conclude that instead of approximating a Bayesian processor, belief updating functions to maintain a Psychological Immune System. I'll conclude by discussing some ways the Psychological Immune System can illuminate recent and on-going political events.


Friday, February 10, 2017
  Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm EST/GMT-5
Andrea C. Westlund, Ph.D
Associate Professor, Philosophy; Women's & Gender Studies
University of Wisconsin-MilwaukeeAs we hold one another accountable and attempt to answer for ourselves, we often tell stories about our lives (or episodes therein) and call upon others to do the same.  But why?  In this paper I argue that self-narration is an apt response to questioning when the meaning of a choice or action depends on its place in a temporally-extended sequence of events.  In such cases the self-narrator attempts to fix the meaning of her choice or action by placing it within a (sometimes still unfolding) narrative trajectory.  I also argue that awareness of our limitations as self-narrators may modify our propensity to blame those with faulty self-narratives, yielding a form of understanding that is akin to forgiveness.


Friday, February 3, 2017
  Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm EST/GMT-5
Lauren Guilmette, Ph.D.
Florida Atlantic UniversityThis paper stakes out the ethical demand for an affect theory that can address the contemporary paradigm of ‘post-truth’ appeals to personal feeling. The increasing legitimacy of these appeals in politics, corporate and social media has led Oxford Dictionaries to name “post-truth” the 2016 Word of the Year (with a 2000% increase in usage over 2015), defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Oxford’s underscoring of this new term is politically salient and, I would argue, urgent. Yet, this sense of urgency will be fruitless—simply naming a new nihilistic reality—unless we can develop a theoretical means of engaging critically with these appeals to the emotional, understood as distinctly personal. To this end, I offer a brief overview of the recent ‘affective turn’ in continental philosophy, feminist theory and queer theory, and I argue that we might turn to feminist philosopher Teresa Brennan (1952-2003), whose posthumous work on affect transmission has not received the critical attention it deserves due to her untimely death, though her insights are more relevant than ever at this historical juncture.


Tuesday, September 20, 2016
  Interested in tutoring for the Bard Prison Initiative? Come join us for pizza!
Campus Center, Red Room 203  5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The Bard Prison Initiative is looking for tutors for the spring semester, particularly students who are majoring in Math, Science, and Computing and Foreign Languages.  Please join us for pizza and refreshments to learn more about the process of becoming a tutor!


Friday, May 13, 2016
  Campus Center, Weis Cinema  10:00 am – 4:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Please join Philosophy program students and faculty to celebrate the work of our graduating seniors. Each senior will present his/her senior project research on panels of 2-3 students.
 Presenting seniors include:Silas Busch, Antonio Ferraz, Austen Hinkley, JJ Jeworski, Travis Kennedy, Ariella Kust, Ted Laport, Sandy Moore, Eli Segal, Hannah Smith, Sam Smith, Thatcher Snyder, Philip Torphy, Bethany Zulick.
 Schedule:
Panel 1 (10-11am): Philosophy of Literature/Film
Panel 2 (11am-12pm): Classical Philosophy
Panel 3 (12-1pm): Continental Philosophy
Lunch (1-2pm)
Panel 4 (2-3pm): Philosophy of Language/Mind
Panel 5 (3-4pm): Continental Philosophy, Language, and Rhetoric
Reception (4pm)


Thursday, May 5, 2016
  Threats from Below
Olin Humanities, Room 202  6:15 pm EDT/GMT-4
Rachel McKinney, PhD
CUNY Graduate Center
Postdoctoral Associate
Dept. of Linguistics & Philosophy, MIT
 In this paper I discuss the pragmatics of directives embedded in institutions and social structures. I focus in particular on commands and threats, and describe the role such speech acts play in escalation -- that is, in shifting discourse type from deliberation to contention, bargaining, negotiation or parley. I describe "threats from below" as potential motivators for action against background conditions of inequality, domination, and coercion, and highlight the promise and peril of such moves for collective action.


Tuesday, April 26, 2016
Kathleen Coleman, James Loeb Professor of the Classics, Harvard University
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  6:30 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Professor Coleman, James Loeb Professor of the Classics at Harvard University, is a distinguished teacher and scholar of Latin literature, especially Flavian poetry; the history and culture of the early Empire; Roman arena spectacles; and Roman punishment. As well as serving as a former President of the American Philological Association, chair of the Harvard Department of the Classics, and editor of Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Professor Coleman has published widely on topics ranging from Roman graffiti to Hollywood’s presentation of gladiatorial spectacle. Current projects include preparing the manuscript of her 2010 Jerome Lectures for the University of Michigan Press, entitled "Q. Sulpicius Maximus, Poet, Eleven Years Old;” she is also working on book-length projects about Roman public execution and arena spectacles, the topic of her lecture today. 


Monday, April 18, 2016
  The Significance of Ambivalence
Olin Humanities, Room 202  4:45 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Ambivalence has a bad reputation among philosophers. But certain sorts of ambivalence play an important role in both morality and aesthetics. Unlike irony that serves to diffuse tensions, these sorts of ambivalence help to make tensions more productive. 

This talk is the inaugural talk in the "Women in Philosophy" Lecture Series, a series that is being organized by the Philosophy Club, currently co-headed by Bard College seniors Sam Smith and Ariella Kust.


Monday, April 4, 2016
  Olin Humanities, Room 201  7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Paul Katsafanas
Boston UniversityThe essential features of religion, for Nietzsche, are that religion provides an interpretation of existence that renders existence meaningful; that it does so by providing overriding commitments (or “higher values”); and that it preserves these commitments by immunizing them from questioning, by cultivating either ignorance or fanaticism. Nietzsche worries that a collapse of religion would bring about a collapse of overriding commitments and thereby usher in nihilism. Thus, he raises a question: can we preserve overriding commitments without lapsing into dogmatism or fanaticism? In an attempt to do so, Nietzsche distinguishes two types of overriding commitments: perspective-independent commitments and perspective-dependent commitments. I'll explore the prospects for this distinction and ask how it might enable us to avoid nihilism.


Thursday, March 3, 2016
  Aspinwall 302  4:45 pm – 5:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Planning to moderate into philosophy this semester or next year? Come to our moderation info session and learn more about philosophy program requirements, moderation requirements, and the moderation process. Professors Jay Elliott and Ruth Zisman will walk you through the process and answer all of your questions!


Monday, February 22, 2016
  Olin Humanities, Room 201  4:45 pm EST/GMT-5
Daniel Wack
Associate Professor of Philosophy,
Knox CollegeThis talk begins from a central but neglected insight of Stanley Cavell's: that the end of the 1960s marked a fundamental turning point in the history of Hollywood movies, which involved a series of complimentary transformations in their content, production, and consumption. Building on Cavell's work, I seek to illuminate one key aspect of this shift by arguing that, in recent Hollywood movies, the possibility of successful action characteristically appears as a fantasy: either movie protagonists must learn to accept disillusionment and reject the pursuit of meaningful agency as an illusion, or they inhabit a world in which successful action is possible, but this world is explicitly not ours.


Wednesday, February 17, 2016
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  4:45 pm EST/GMT-5
Jacob Howland,
McFarlin Professor of Philosophy
University of TulsaJacob Howland is McFarlin Professor of Philosophy and past Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Tulsa, where he teaches in the Honors Program as well as in philosophy. He also occasionally teaches courses in ancient Greek. He has written and lectured on the work of Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, and Kierkegaard, as well as on the Hebrew Scriptures and the Talmud, and his articles have appeared in leading journals in philosophy, classics, and political science. As of 2011, he had authored four books and one edited book. His research focuses on ancient Greek political philosophy, although he has also published books on Kierkegaard and Socrates and Plato and the Talmud. Professor Howland's talk at Bard is based on a new book he is presently writing.


Sunday, November 1, 2015
Preston  8:00 pm – 10:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Wednesday, October 21, 2015
  Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Peter Godfrey-Smith
Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney

I’ll look at the evolution of cognition and subjective experience (or consciousness), considering the overall history of animal life. Where might we find smooth gradients and where might there be more definite transitions (if not jumps)? What is the likely role of parallel evolution, as opposed to single origins for important traits? Octopuses will provide a case study.


Monday, October 5, 2015
  Olin 305  Planning to moderate into Philosophy this semester, this year, next year? Interested in learning more about the Philosophy Program requirements? Join Professors Jay Elliott and Ruth Zisman for an information session about moderation. We will discuss requirements, moderation papers, and tips for a successful moderation.


Saturday, September 26, 2015
  Vassar College  Vassar College, Keynote speaker: Jay Bernstein, New School, "Torture and the Rule of Law." This is an opportunity for students and faculty of five mid-Hudson valley colleges and universities to gather together, talk, listen and respond to presentations, and generally get to know each other. For details, contact Professor Berthold.



Friday, September 25, 2015
  The language of experience and evaluation: Logical and linguistic investigations into subjective judgment
Reem-Kayden Center Room 101  Abstract: We’re all in the business of evaluation. We evaluate basketball players and beers, movies and motels, students and teachers. Philosophical discussions both contemporary and classical have elevated the notion of a judge or point of view in explaining the central puzzling feature of evaluation — the tug-of-war between the subjective genesis of and objective standards of correctness for evaluative judgments. In recent years there has been a torrent of work at the intersection of philosophy and linguistics on so-called "faultless disagreements" — disputes (e.g. over whether vanilla ice cream is tastier than chocolate ice cream) that seem to concern mere personal preferences. I argue that popular accounts misconstrue the meaning of evaluative expressions and that the claims at issue concern norms of experience. On the way to this conclusion, we’ll touch on a number of issues in logic and linguistics: quantification, genericity, modality, and aspect.

Alex Anthony is a PhD candidate at Rutgers University, Department of Philosophy.  After completing his undergraduate studies at Wesleyan University he participated in Summer Schools in Logic, Language and Information in Ljubljana, Slovenia and in College Park, Maryland before enrolling at Rutgers. At Wesleyan he received the Wise Prize for the best paper in Philosophy. At Rutgers he received the Presidential Fellowship, one of ten awarded annually university-wide to an outstanding doctoral student.

this is the last seminar in the series




Tuesday, September 22, 2015
  by Professor Andy Hamilton, University of Durham, England

All welcome.

Olin Humanities, Room 102  Louis Armstrong was a very great musical artist, who always thought of himself first as an entertainer: "My life has been music, it’s always come first, but the music ain’t worth nothing if you can’t lay it on the public". But he knew that his clowning and crowd-pleasing were compatible with being an artist: "…it’s got to be art because the world has recognised our music from New Orleans, else it would have been dead today". This paper argues that, analogous to the modern Western system of the arts, a modern system of entertainment – music-hall, circuses, professional sport…– assumed definite shape only in the 18th or 19th century, though its ingredients were found in classical, medieval and Renaissance periods. Art can entertain, and entertainment involves art with a small "a"; the concepts are interdefined and arose together. One cannot define the concept of art, without defining that of entertainment and craft; they form a conceptual holism – together with the aesthetic, beauty, and related concepts. Mere entertainment may be defined as an activity involving skill or craft, that aims to please, delight, amuse or excite an audience in a way that calls for no concentrated effort from them of any kind. But the highest humane art seeks a broad audience, in a way often deemed unique to entertainment. The examples of Louis Armstrong, Charles Dickens and Howard Hawks are contrasted with the more hermetic high art of Lennie Tristano, Marcel Proust and Andrei Tarkovsky.



Monday, September 21, 2015
  Olin Humanities, Room 102  Lori Gruen
Professor of Philosophy, Environmental Studies, and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Wesleyan UniversityThere has been very little philosophical attention paid to captivity given the shockingly large numbers of humans and non-humans that are captives. In the United States around 7 million people are, in some form or other, caught in the “correctional” system and roughly 2 million of those are incarcerated; billions of animals are held captive (and then killed) in the food industry every year; hundreds of thousands of animals are kept in laboratories; thousands are in zoos and aquaria; millions of “pets” are captive in our homes. Though conditions of captivity vary widely for humans and for other animals, there are common ethical themes that imprisonment raises, e.g. the value of liberty, the nature of autonomy, the significance of innocence, and the meaning of dignity. In this discussion I will explore these topics and highlight what we can learn from a comparative perspective on human and nonhuman captivity.  


Friday, September 18, 2015
  The language of experience and evaluation: Logical and linguistic investigations into subjective judgment
Reem-Kayden Center Room 101  Abstract: We’re all in the business of evaluation. We evaluate basketball players and beers, movies and motels, students and teachers. Philosophical discussions both contemporary and classical have elevated the notion of a judge or point of view in explaining the central puzzling feature of evaluation — the tug-of-war between the subjective genesis of and objective standards of correctness for evaluative judgments. In recent years there has been a torrent of work at the intersection of philosophy and linguistics on so-called "faultless disagreements" — disputes (e.g. over whether vanilla ice cream is tastier than chocolate ice cream) that seem to concern mere personal preferences. I argue that popular accounts misconstrue the meaning of evaluative expressions and that the claims at issue concern norms of experience. On the way to this conclusion, we’ll touch on a number of issues in logic and linguistics: quantification, genericity, modality, and aspect.

Alex Anthony is a PhD candidate at Rutgers University, Department of Philosophy.  After completing his undergraduate studies at Wesleyan University he participated in Summer Schools in Logic, Language and Information in Ljubljana, Slovenia and in College Park, Maryland before enrolling at Rutgers. At Wesleyan he received the Wise Prize for the best paper in Philosophy. At Rutgers he received the Presidential Fellowship, one of ten awarded annually university-wide to an outstanding doctoral student.

this is the last seminar in the series




Friday, September 18, 2015
Olin Humanities, Room 202  Join a conversation about the Syrian challenge and the European Union facilitated by Nesrin McMeekin and Greg Moynahan.

This event is sponsored by Bard Model United Nations and The Center for Civic Engagement.



Monday, September 14, 2015
  Olin 305  Interested in learning more about applying to graduate school in Philosophy? Join Professors Jay Elliott and Ruth Zisman for an information session about graduate school, the application process, and how to use your time as an undergraduate to prepare, plan, etc. 


Friday, September 11, 2015
  The language of experience and evaluation: Logical and linguistic investigations into subjective judgment
Reem-Kayden Center Room 101  Abstract: We’re all in the business of evaluation. We evaluate basketball players and beers, movies and motels, students and teachers. Philosophical discussions both contemporary and classical have elevated the notion of a judge or point of view in explaining the central puzzling feature of evaluation — the tug-of-war between the subjective genesis of and objective standards of correctness for evaluative judgments. In recent years there has been a torrent of work at the intersection of philosophy and linguistics on so-called "faultless disagreements" — disputes (e.g. over whether vanilla ice cream is tastier than chocolate ice cream) that seem to concern mere personal preferences. I argue that popular accounts misconstrue the meaning of evaluative expressions and that the claims at issue concern norms of experience. On the way to this conclusion, we’ll touch on a number of issues in logic and linguistics: quantification, genericity, modality, and aspect.

Alex Anthony is a PhD candidate at Rutgers University, Department of Philosophy.  After completing his undergraduate studies at Wesleyan University he participated in Summer Schools in Logic, Language and Information in Ljubljana, Slovenia and in College Park, Maryland before enrolling at Rutgers. At Wesleyan he received the Wise Prize for the best paper in Philosophy. At Rutgers he received the Presidential Fellowship, one of ten awarded annually university-wide to an outstanding doctoral student.

this is the last seminar in the series




Friday, September 4, 2015
  Olin 102  Interested in applying for a Fulbright Scholarship, a Watson fellowship, or another postgraduate scholarship or fellowship? This information session will cover application procedures, deadlines, and suggestions for crafting a successful application. Applications will be due later this month, so be sure to attend one of the  two information sessions!


Friday, May 8, 2015
  Campus Center, Weis Cinema  Join Philosophy Program students and faculty to celebrate the work of our graduating seniors! Graduating seniors will present their senior project research in panels of 3. Each panel will be followed by substantive Q&A. During lunch there will be a senior project information session for current juniors in the Philosophy Program. 


Thursday, April 23, 2015
  Reem-Kayden Center, Room 101  Barbara Partee
Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Linguistics and PhilosophyFormal semantics and formal pragmatics as they have developed over the last 50 years have been shaped by fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration among linguists, philosophers, and logicians, among others, affecting and affected by developments in linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science, and computational linguistics. As part of a larger project on the history of formal semantics, in this talk I’ll emphasize aspects of the pre-history and history of formal semantics that concern the relation between language and logic.



Monday, March 23, 2015
  Olin Humanities, Room 201  Christopher C. Raymond
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Vassar College



Monday, March 9, 2015
  Olin Humanities, Room 205  Dilip Ninan
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Tufts UniversityIf I tell you that the lobster rolls at Neptune Oyster are delicious, it would be natural for you to assume that I had tasted them myself. Similarly, if I tell you that St Mark’s Basilica is beautiful, you would normally infer that I had actually seen the place. This phenomenon is puzzling, since assertions about most other matters can be based on testimony rather than on first-hand experience. I consider two explanations of this: one in terms of the linguistic notion of presupposition, and another that involves a combination of pragmatic and epistemological resources. The presuppositional approach has a number of virtues, but runs into trouble because of some asymmetries between this phenomenon and standard presuppositions. The pragmatic-epistemic approach accounts for the main data I consider, but faces challenges of its own.


Wednesday, March 4, 2015
  Campus Center, Weis Cinema  Should there be limits to the freedom of speech? Or should the freedom of speech be defended and protected at all costs, even when speech becomes violent, racist, sexist, homophobic, etc.? Would a limitation on the freedom of speech necessarily be unconstitutional? Should hate speech be criminalized?Please join us for a public debate in response to recent events all over the world that necessitate such a discussion.Resolved: hate speech should be criminalized. 
Sponsored by the Bard Debate Union and the Center for Civic Engagement.



Tuesday, February 24, 2015
  Olin 303  Interested in learning more about majoring Philosophy, Philosophy Program requirements, and moderation requirements? Come to our Philosophy Program Moderation Info Session! Professors Elliott and Zisman will walk you through the process and answer all questions! All students are welcome to attend but students intending to moderate in philosophy this semester, are especially encouraged to attend


Tuesday, November 11, 2014
  Hegeman 102  Zed Adams
New School for Social ResearchHave you ever wondered whether other people’s color experience is the same as your own? Have you ever wondered why you wondered about this? How did the idea that other people might experience colors in a radically different way come to see obvious to us? In this talk, Zed Adams details one aspect of the history of how philosophical questions about the subjectivity of color experience came to be questions in the first place. He will recount the role that 17th and 19th century developments in optics and the physiology of vision played in leading to a fundamental shift in how we think about the mind and its relation to the world. The goal of this history is not only to shed light on philosophical problems about color vision, but also to show how philosophical questions become questions in the first place, and why questions that seem obvious to us today simply would not arise in different times and places.



Tuesday, October 21, 2014
  Hegeman 102  Jake Davis, Ph.D.
CUNY Graduate CenterElsewhere, I have defended an idea that lies at the heart of Buddhist ethics: that certain emotional motivations are praised by the wise and to be developed, that others are criticized by the wise and to be abandoned, and that any human being can come to discern the difference for ourselves. In the present talk I explore whether such moral judgments have application beyond the human realm, drawing on Mark Rowlands’ (2012) recent examination of moral motivation in animals. I argue that neurobiological features of emotional motivation shared among mammals makes plausible that certain experiential features are also shared; if so, these shared experiential features can ground a small set of ethical claims that apply for all mammals, from their own perspective.  

Bio: Jake Davis received his doctorate in Philosophy from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, with an Interdisciplinary Concentration in Cognitive Science. His research focuses on contemporary philosophical debates about mind and value, drawing both from recent psychological research and also from his expertise in Buddhist philosophy. Jake's studies in the early Buddhist texts and Buddhist philosophical psychology were complemented by years of training as a monk in the Theravāda Buddhist tradition of Burma (Myanmar), long periods of intensive meditation practice, and a decade of work interpreting between Burmese and English for meditation masters.


Friday, October 10, 2014
  Olin Hall  3:15 pm EDT/GMT-4
Lawrence Lessig is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School and co-founder of Creative Commons. He is the author of Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—And a Plan to Stop It. Lessig will provide a stimulating presentation on the broken political system, big money dominance, and the corrupt funding that is destroying the American republic.

This event is part of the seventh annual Hannah Arendt Center Conference: "The Unmaking of Americans: Are There Still American Values Worth Fighting For?" Admission is complimentary for Hannah Arendt Center members, Bard College faculty and staff, and students. Regular admission for the two-day conference is $20 per person. To view a full conference schedule, bios of featured speakers, and to register for the conference please visit hac.bard.edu. For more information or any questions about the conference, contact [email protected].


Friday, October 10, 2014
  Olin Hall  10:00 am EDT/GMT-4
Norman Rush is an American author, best known for his novel, Mating, which won the 1991 National Book Award and the 1992 Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize for its exploration of notions such as society, poverty, and heterosexual relationships.

This event is part of the seventh annual Hannah Arendt Center Conference: "The Unmaking of Americans: Are There Still American Values Worth Fighting For?" Admission is complimentary for Hannah Arendt Center members, Bard College faculty and staff, and students. Regular admission for the two-day conference is $20 per person. To view a full conference schedule, bios of featured speakers, and to register for the conference please visit hac.bard.edu. For more information or any questions about the conference, contact [email protected].
 


Thursday, October 9, 2014
The Seventh Annual Hannah Arendt Center Conference
Olin Hall  The two-day conference, “The Unmaking of Americans” will ask what aspirations and which dreams still animate American idealism. Americans today must confront the weakening of a collective vision of freedom and equality. And yet few dare to articulate a collective vision that might hold the country together. The Arendt conference brings together scholars, writers, and educators to ask, “Are there still American values worth fighting for?

America has long imagined itself a “city upon a hill.” Yet, we confront today a weakening of our collective vision. Americans are dismayed at the power of money, the decay of self-governance, and a bureaucracy impervious to popular control. And yet few dare to articulate a collective vision that might hold the country together. As Hannah Arendt argued nearly 50 years ago, “we face the ominous silence that answers us whenever we ask: 'What are we fighting for?'"

In the United States of America, there has long been an assumption that we had an answer to Arendt's question. We fight for freedom and democracy. We fight for equality and difference. Above all we fight for "a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

Not only in America, but around the world, we confront a weakening of such political visions. In America, the ideals of freedom, equality, and a common destiny that have are in decline. On both the left and the right there is fear the country has lost its way. To explore the future of an American idea, we will sponsor "The Unmaking of Americans: Are There Still American Values Worth Fighting For?"

Admission is complimentary for Hannah Arendt Center members, Bard College faculty and staff, and students. Regular admission for the two-day conference is $20 per person. To view a full conference schedule and bios of featured speakers, please click, here.

Join us for the live webcast! Oct. 9 and Oct. 10 at 10am EST.




Press Release: View

Wednesday, October 8, 2014
  Aspinwall 302  Interested in moderating in Philosophy this year? Come to our Philosophy Program Moderation Info Session and Professors Elliott and Zisman will explain the requirements for moderation as well as offer tips for a successful moderation! All questions will be answered! First-year students who hope to moderate in Philosophy next year are also most welcome to attend! It is never too early to start preparing.


Tuesday, October 7, 2014
Campus Center, Multipurpose Room  7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Is America an exceptional nation? If so, of what is it a model? Democratic self-government? Something else? Does America's success or failure even matter for the fate of the world?


Please join us for an exciting public debate inspired by the topic of this year's Hannah Arendt Center Conference, "The Unmaking of Americans: Are There Still American Values Worth Fighting For?" The debate will feature Bard Debate Union members, Bard College faculty, and cadets and faculty from the United States Military Academy at West Point. Their topic will be, "Resolved: Individualism is an American value worth fighting for." Sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center, Center for Civic Engagement, Bard Debate Union, West Point Military Academy, and the International Debate Education Association.

Tuesday, October 7, 2014 7PM
Location: Bard College, Campus Center Multipurpose Room
Free and open to the public

Campus Center, Multipurpose Room
Sponsored by: Hannah Arendt Center.

For more information, call 845-758-7878, e-mail [email protected], or visit https://hac.bard.edu/conference-fall14/page.php?listing_id=9066950.



Tuesday, September 30, 2014
  Hegeman 102  Lori Gruen
Professor of Philosophy, Environmental Studies, and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Wesleyan University

There has been very little philosophical attention paid to captivity given the shockingly large numbers of humans and non-humans that are captives. In the United States around 7 million people are, in some form or other, caught in the “correctional” system and roughly 2 million of those are incarcerated; billions of animals are held captive (and then killed) in the food industry every year; hundreds of thousands of animals are kept in laboratories; thousands are in zoos and aquaria; millions of “pets” are captive in our homes. Though conditions of captivity vary widely for humans and for other animals, there are common ethical themes that imprisonment raises, e.g. the value of liberty, the nature of autonomy, the significance of innocence, and the meaning of dignity. In this discussion I will explore these topics and highlight what we can learn from a comparative perspective on human and nonhuman captivity.  


Monday, September 29, 2014
  Aspinwall 302  Interested in learning more about graduate school in Philosophy and the process of applying? Please come to our graduate school information session and we will walk you through everything from requirements to letters of recommendation to the life of a graduate student!


Wednesday, September 24, 2014
  "Two Cheers for Corporate Social Responsibility"
A Talk in the Social Studies Divisional Colloquium

Olin Humanities, Room 102  As “corporate social responsibility” enters the mainstream, itsinitials "CSR" have become a dirty word for a broad segment of the
engaged public.  The voluntariness, vagueness, and uncertainty of
enforcement  – not to mention blatant propaganda by companies –
overwhelm any positive value, they argue.  At the other end of the
spectrum, CSR enthusiasts insist that it is leading to a new paradigm,
even challenging traditional forms of corporate governance. Oft
overlooked in the debate over CSR is the way in which public campaigns
have driven change and, even more importantly, shaped the mechanisms
that emerge. CSR continues to be as much the story of savvy activists
leveraging global networks as it is the monitoring mechanisms and
codes of conduct -- maybe more so.  Peter Rosenblum will explore the
current debate, drawing on his recently completed research on Indian
Tea plantations and a soon-to-published chapter addressing advocates
and critics of CSR.


Friday, May 9, 2014
  Campus Center, Weis Cinema  Seventeen Philosophy Program seniors will present their Senior Projects on panels of three to four students. Each panel will be followed by a Q&A. Conference participants and attendees will be served lunch, and a brief reception will follow the conference.

Philosophy Program Seniors: Daniel Perlman, Dana Miranda, Jared Rankin, Rosette Cirillo, Elena Watson, Samuel Pratt, Kyla Mathis-Angress, Kaitlyn Chang, Lucas Opgenorth, Dee Cao, Jeremiah Tillman, Josephine Williams, Joseph Salvo, Defne Gencler, Shana Joseph, Dean Woodhouse-Weil.




Download: Schedule.doc

Tuesday, April 8, 2014
  Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium   LISA TESSMAN
Binghamton University

This talk calls for a reconsideration of the role of reasoning in constructivist accounts of morality, particularly those accounts that rely on the method of reflective equilibrium. Reflective equilibrium (even, or especially, a feminist version of it), requires a critical process of reasoning about, and adjusting, one’s moral judgments (including everything from particular judgments to general principles) until they form a coherent set. However, empirical studies of the cognitive processes through which moral judgments are made suggest that most moral judgments are made intuitively and that there are a plurality of  bases for moral intuitions, often giving rise to conflicting values. I ask what the significance of these findings is for the construction of morality. Furthermore, I suggest that some intuitive moral judgments—those regarding “sacred values”—would be violated by the very act of calling them into question in the way that the method of reflective equilibrium requires; calling them into question would involve thinking the unthinkable. I propose an alternative process of construction—which comes with its own risks.


Tuesday, March 11, 2014
  Olin Humanities, Room 205  Nancy Bauer
Dean of Academic Affairs for Arts and Sciences
Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy
Tufts University
Philosophers have recently become interested in two questions having to do with progress in our field:  (1) What counts as advancing the intellectual enterprise called philosophy?  (2) How do we ameliorate the present sorry state of the profession of philosophy? These questions are usually taken to be independent of one another:  how to construe and measure what counts as progress in the enterprise of philosophy is one thing; how to make the profession more welcoming and inclusive to people who have traditionally been excluded or alienated from the profession quite another.  I will suggest that the two questions are closely linked and that there are reasons to think that expanding our understanding of what counts as progress in philosophy is critical to diversifying our community.



Tuesday, February 18, 2014
RKC 102- Lecture Hall B   In this info session, two students in the Experimental Humanities concentration will share their experiences in the department from a uniquely student-based perspective. They will share WHAT they do, HOW they do it, and WHY they do it.

A brief, informative presentation by Max Wortman '16, and Anna Wheeler '16, will be followed by a discussion and Q&A session facilitated by a panel of students and professors in the concentration.


Tuesday, February 4, 2014
  Olin Humanities, Room 202  "'The Unenlightened Sex': Kant, Feminism, and Moral Imagination."

Erica Holberg
Utah State University
I examine Kant’s conception of the vice of lack of self-respect in light of the feminist assumption that sexist oppression structures everyday life.  I argue that because Kant’s moral psychology depends crucially on our direct relation to the moral law, too much responsibility is put on the individual for her condition of low self-respect. Because moral freedom and responsibility belong to me solely in virtue of my intelligible self, failure to show respect for any agent, whether for other agents or for myself, is a failure in what I will and so a moral failure I am responsible for.  By locating the moral solely within the intelligible self, Kantian moral psychology denies the power of socially constructed and shared fantasies to constrain what one can imagine as one’s own.


Monday, November 25, 2013
  Hopson Cottage, Admission  Interested in majoring in Philosophy or learning more about the program, requirements, moderation, senior project, etc.? Recently moderated in Philosophy and want to celebrate? Writing a Senior Project in Philosophy and want to share writing tips with fellow seniors? Come to our Philosophy Program Fall Reception, learn more about the program from faculty members and current majors, and enjoy dinner with your fellow philosophers! All majors and potential majors are encouaged to attend. Dinner will be served. 


Wednesday, November 6, 2013
 

Laurence Goldstein
University of Kent UK


Hegeman 102  Wittgenstein’s early writings on logic, though of great historical interest, are, for the most part, only of historical interest. He was not much of a formal logician (though he did bequeath us the truth-table method) and, in the philosophy of logic, though he made telling, sometimes devastating, criticisms of distinguished contemporaries, there is no theory of his that continues to animate modern debate in the way that (say) Frege’s theory of sense and reference or Russell’s theory of definite descriptions do. What I wish to argue here is that there is at least one theory proposed by Wittgenstein in the philosophy of logic that ought to be as highly regarded and influential as any contribution made to the field by Frege or Russell. The theory to which I refer concerns the nature of logical so-called propositions. It makes its first appearance in the 1913 Notes on Logic and is further elaborated in the Tractatus, where tautologies and contradictions are accorded a ‘unique status’ (T 6.112).What Wittgenstein claims is that logical propositions are without content; they lack any truth-value and are not propositions (any more than rocking horses are real horses). In this paper, I shall say something about how Wittgenstein arrived at this claim and shall try to show that, contrary to first appearances, it is highly plausible. I’ll go on briefly to explore what a logic that makes exceptions of tautologies and contradictions (hence: an exceptional logic) looks like, and finally, I shall show how powerful this logico-philosophical apparatus is by demonstrating its capacity to solve some long-standing paradoxes.Professor Laurence Goldstein (University of Kent, UK) spends most of his waking hours, and many of his dreams, thinking about paradoxes. He has published extensively on the subject and is currently writing a book, *The Liar, the Bald Man and the Hangman*. He is also a specialist on Wittgenstein about whom he has written a book, *Clear and Queer Thinking: The Development of Wittgenstein's Thought and its Relevance to Modern Philosophy* and also a play re-creating Wittgenstein's Ph.D. defense (he fails). He is the editor of a Monist volume on the philosophy of humor. Most recently, Laurence has edited a collection of essays called Brevity, so expect his presentation to be concise and to the point. 


Friday, August 23, 2013
Olin Language Center, Room 115  Join us for an evening lecture with sustainability expert and Bard MBA Faculty, Hunter Lovins. Lovins will discuss her work with the government of Bhutan and the UN to develop a new roadmap for global economic sustainability. Please join her for a progress report. All are welcome to attend. 


Hunter Lovins, Bard MBA Faculty; President of Natural Capitalism, Inc.
Hunter Lovins J.D., Loyola Law School; B.S. (Sociology, Political Science). L. Hunter Lovins is president and founder of Natural Capitalism Solutions (NCS). NCS educates senior decision makers in business, government, and civil society to restore and enhance natural and human capital while increasing prosperity and quality of life. Lovins is also currently a faculty member at Bainbridge Graduate Institute and the chief insurgent of the Madrone Project. Lovins has consulted for scores of industries, governments, and large and small companies worldwide. Recipient of such honors as the Right Livelihood Award, Lindbergh Award, and Leadership in Business, she was named Time Magazine 2000 Hero of the Planet and in 2009 Newsweek dubbed her a “Green Business Icon.” She has co-authored nine books and hundreds of papers, including the 1999 book Natural Capitalism, 2006 e-book Climate Protection Manual for Cities, and the 2009 book Transforming Industry in Asia. She has served on the boards of governments, nonprofit organizations, and for-profit companies. Lovins’s areas of expertise include natural capitalism, sustainable development, globalization, energy and resource policy, economic development, climate change, land management, fire rescue, and emergency medicine. She developed the Economic Renewal Project and helped write many of its manuals on sustainable community economic development. She was a founding professor of business at Presidio Graduate School, one of the first accredited programs offering an M.B.A. in sustainable management.




Download: Hunter Lovins_EventPoster_WEB.pdf

Friday, May 10, 2013
  Campus Center, Weis Cinema  12:00 pm                         Welcome12:00-12:50 pm        Panel I: 19th and 20th Century Philosophy(Moderator: Dana Miranda)Domenic HutchinsSylvia GorelickSamuel Jaffe GoldsteinTurner Roth1:00-2:00 pm           Senior Project Information Session for Juniors Lunch2:00-2:50 pm             Panel II: Metaphysics/Epistemology(Moderator: Jared Rankin)Samuel ShapiroCyrgue DessauceLangdon Thaxter3:00-3:50 pm             Panel III: Problems in Philosophy: Social, Political, Aesthetic     (Moderator: Jeremiah Tillman)Saim SaeedMarta GaribaldiMichael LuxemburgYvonna Groom4:00-4:50 pm             Panel IV: Philosophy of Mind/Philosophy of Language  (Moderator: Lucas Opgenorth)Erika NordenCaroline StoneJenna GalkaJonah Amster5:00 pm                      Reception



Friday, May 10, 2013
  Campus Center, Weis Cinema  Interested in Philosophy at Bard? Have friends who have recently completed Senior Projects in Philosophy? Come to the Philosophy Program Senior Project Conference and hear 15 of our graduating seniors present their work! Reception to follow. 

Schedule:

12:00 pm Welcome

12:00-12:50 pm Panel I: 19th and 20th Century Philosophy (Moderator: Dana Miranda)
Domenic Hutchins, Sylvia Gorelick, Samuel Jaffe Goldstein, Turner Roth

1:00-2:00 pm Senior Project Information Session for Juniors Lunch

2:00-2:50 pm Panel II: Metaphysics/Epistemology (Moderator: Jared Rankin)
Samuel Shapiro, Cyrgue Dessauce, Langdon Thaxter

3:00-3:50 pm Panel III: Problems in Philosophy: Social, Political, Aesthetic (Moderator: Jeremiah Tillman)
Saim Saeed, Marta Garibaldi, Michael Luxemburg, Yvonna Groom

4:00-4:50 pm Panel IV: Philosophy of Mind/Philosophy of Language (Moderator: Lucas Opgenorth)
Erika Norden, Caroline Stone, Jenna Galka, Jonah Amster

5:00 pm Reception



Thursday, April 11, 2013
  Olin Humanities, Room 201  Jake Beck 
Assistant Professor of Philosophy  
York UniversityThe more we learn about non-human animals, the more we learn how intelligent they are.  Rats and pigeons have the ability to navigate and count.  Chimpanzees can create tools and read minds.  It seems, in short, that non-human animals are capable of sophisticated types of thinking.  Yet our attempts to say what animals think face an embarrassing difficulty: when we try to use words to characterize animal thoughts, our articulations always seem to mischaracterize them.  How can this be?  If animals really have thoughts, why can't anyone say what those thoughts are?  In my talk, I will criticize several familiar answers to this question and then defend an alternative explanation that appeals to differences in the structure of animal thought and human language.  


Thursday, October 25, 2012
  Hegeman 102  Michael Kessler
Lecturer in Philosophy
University of Pittsburgh
will give a talk"A puzzle about the law of obscenity" The law of obscenity relies on the premise that some forms of expression involve a wrong that goes beyond mere offensiveness. Such speech is considered "low value" and on a par with other forms of unprotected speech, like fraud and defamation. However, on closer inspection the badness of obscenity cannot easily be explained in terms of the harms that arise from instances of fraud or defamation. I argue that the usual justifications for the law of obscenity lack adequate philosophical foundations, and suggest a different way of dealing with the concept of obscenity.


Thursday, September 20, 2012
  Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  Ian Olasov
PhD. Candidate
CUNY Graduate Center "Real Moral Talk and Moral Non-Cognitivism"
What are people doing when they talk about morals, or talk morally? Is it more like making an assertion or expressing a belief, or is it somehow different? Most philosophical discussion of this question has centered around the meanings of moral words and sentences. In this talk, I argue that this approach has mired the discussion in irrelevant problems and has hidden the correct answer from sight. I explore a range of interesting non-assertive or "non-cognitive" moral speech acts that philosophers have largely ignored, and address some of the difficulties in saying when a moral utterance is assertive.



Thursday, April 19, 2012
  Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  James Shaw
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
University of Pittsburgh"The Paradox of Blackmail"I can tell your spouse that you're cheating on him/her, or withhold that information. I can also ask you for money. But I can't do both at the same time: ask you for money to withhold the information from your spouse. That seems morally wrong, and it would be illegal. But why? Why do two rights make a moral and legal wrong? I lay out more details of this notorious problem, known as the "paradox of blackmail", and deliver a surprising diagnosis: two rights never do make a wrong and, for that very reason, blackmail should probably be legal after all.



Thursday, March 15, 2012
  Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  Eric Beerbohm
Associate Professor of Government
Harvard UniversityWhen a government in a democracy acts in our name, are we, as citizens, responsible for those acts? What if the government commits a grave injustice? The protestor's slogan – "Not in our name!" – testifies to the need to separate ourselves from the injustices of our state. Yet the idea that individual citizens might bear a special responsibility for political wrongdoing is deeply puzzling for ordinary morality and leading theories of democracy. This talk will discuss how citizens can be morally exposed to the failures of state institutions, and suggest institutional mechanisms for citizens seeking to avoid democratic complicity.



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