News and Events

  Peter Anstey, Director, Western Civilisation Program
Australian Catholic University
Hegeman 204A  12:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733) argued both that private vice leads to public benefits and that an absence of private vice leads to an impoverished society. For Mandeville, it is imperative that some people in society behave badly, though they should do this in private. This paper analyses Mandeville’s arguments for these two seemingly outrageous claims and explores their relevance for today.

A talk by Aaron Schuster
Hegeman 204A  12:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Aaron Schuster is presenting his new book How to Research Like a Dog: Kafka's New Science (MIT Press, 2024).

Dr Schuster is a writer and philosopher, who lives in Amsterdam. He works at the intersection of continental philosophy and psychoanalysis, and engages with modernist literature, film, theater, and contemporary art. He has written on a wide range of topics, including the history of levitation, the philosophy of tickling, the psychopathology of AI, the comedy of Ernst Lubitsch, Jean Genet’s political theater, Andrei Platonov’s Anti-Sexus, the Bolshevik feminism of Alexandra Kollontai, the theory of the breakup, and complaining. He is the author of The Trouble with Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis (MIT Press, 2016), co-author of Sovereignty, Inc.: Three Essays in Politics and Enjoyment (University of Chicago Press, 2020), and he is the editor of E-flux Notes.

  Sarale Ben-Asher
Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of New Mexico
Olin Humanities, Room 203  3:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Socrates’ defense of recollection in the Phaedo (72e–77a) turns on the claim that sensible reality falls short of the corresponding form. Socrates illustrates the point with sticks, which he argues “strive” (oregetai) to be like the form of equality but “fall short” (endeesterōs echein, 74d–75a). On the traditional reading, material objects cannot be exactly equal—e.g., no stick is exactly equal to any other. Contemporary scholars tend to reject this reading, arguing instead that sensible items fall short by admitting equality as well as inequality. I show that both readings fail.

To understand the inferiority claim, we must bring in the pedagogical context in which it occurs, rather than treating it in strict metaphysical terms. I argue that the inferiority of sensibles is an evaluative stance that permeates the pedagogical situation on the side of learners and teachers. Since learning aims at the form of each thing, the material examples from which teaching and learning proceed have conditional value relative to the forms they communicate. Equal sticks, for example, enter a mathematical context as symbols of equality, never in themselves, i.e., as the material objects they are. This interpretation explains the striving—and inevitable depreciation—of sensible reality relative to the forms, shedding new light on the overall argument.

  Tiina Rosenqvist
Postdoctoral Fellow, Society of Fellows, Dartmouth College
Hegeman 204  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Conceptual engineering is often understood as the practice of assessing and improving our representational tools with specific aims in mind. In this paper, I contribute to the engineering of the concept of pain with a particular focus on clinical utility. My engineering efforts center on the International Association for the Study of Pain’s (IASP) “official” definition of pain, first introduced in 1979 and revised in 2020. I discuss the general process of conceptual engineering and the original IASP definition of pain and identify three desiderata for a definition suitable for clinical practice: it should be accurate, cognitively tractable, and promote justice in patient care. Evaluating the revised IASP definition against these desiderata, I argue that it is vague and fails to fully address persistent misconceptions about pain, and that additional revisions are therefore needed. I then propose an alternative definition designed to better meet the demands of effective and just clinical practice.

  Tez Clark, PhD Student, Department of Philosophy, New York University
Hegeman 204  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5
We often seem to care that our attitudes match the way things are. At the same time, we also seem to care about our attitudes cohering or fitting together. Many philosophers accept that "failing by one’s own lights" in this way is incoherent and in some sense irrational. But what does it mean for attitudes to be incoherent in this way, and what unifies the various examples of incoherence? In this talk, Clark argues that existing theories of incoherence rest on the mistaken assumption that certain attitudes are incoherent no matter what, regardless of who has them or of contextual features, then sketches an alternative way of thinking about incoherence, in terms of intelligibility.